Matt Gerlach is the visionary Founder & CEO of Rise to Your Worth, a Strategic Growth Consultancy dedicated to helping executives and high achievers unlock their true potential. With a focus on healing, fulfillment, self-discovery, and releasing what no longer serves them, Matt meets his clients at the intersection of business and life. Having faced trauma and adversity himself, Matt understands the struggles his clients endure and uses his own journey of healing and self-discovery to guide others in breaking free from limiting beliefs and burdens.

Matt believes that true success, both personal and professional, stems from a connection to one’s authentic self. By setting clear boundaries, prioritizing well-being, and creating a vision aligned with their deepest desires, individuals can overcome stress, anxiety, and burnout. This emotional alignment empowers them to lead with authenticity and achieve lasting, meaningful success. In his work, Matt takes a foundational approach, helping clients uncover unresolved emotional wounds that manifest as limiting beliefs, and through compassionate guidance, he assists individuals and organizations in confronting these issues for transformative growth.

As a Strategic Growth Enthusiast & Mentor, Matt’s goal is to create a ripple effect where businesses become not only profitable but also purposeful. He empowers leaders to inspire, mentor, uplift, and generously compensate those around them. By aligning internal values with external actions, Matt helps build a future of abundance, fulfillment, and impactful change. A celebrated entrepreneur, dynamic speaker, and expert in personal transformation, Matt draws from his own journey of overcoming adversity to empower his clients.

Despite his outward success, Matt’s personal life was once marred by anxiety and depression. This struggle led him on a profound journey of self-reflection and healing, during which he invested over $200k and more than 10,000 hours into personal growth. Through rigorous introspection, he overcame childhood trauma and emerged with clarity, purpose, and inner peace, fueling his desire to help others relinquish harmful narratives and live lives of absolute abundance. As a Strategic Growth Enthusiast, Matt works with high performers who, despite doing everything right, feel unfulfilled, overwhelmed, scared, and stuck.

In addition to running his $1M/year growth mentorship firm, Matt hosts the podcast “MATTers of the Mind: Rise to Your Worth,” sharing practical tools for self-discovery, growth, and mastery. He is also writing his first memoir, chronicling his journey from unfulfillment to an abundant life, aiming to help millions. As a dynamic and engaging speaker, Matt covers topics such as personal transformation, overcoming adversity, and achieving true fulfillment. His mission is to help high performers find clarity, balance, and inner peace.

Currently residing in Los Angeles, Matt has achieved a harmonious work-life balance and is joyfully starting a family with his partner of twelve years. Driven by a desire to give back, he is dedicated to sharing his story and guiding others in overcoming trauma and limiting beliefs to realize their dreams. Matt firmly believes in the profound wisdom within each person and is committed to helping his clients access that wisdom for personal transformation, creating lives of alignment, fulfillment, and spiritual abundance.

www.mattgerlach.com

My name is Marina A. Smirnova. I was born on Sakhalin Island (the Far East of Russia), and, well over twenty years ago, I made the U.S.A. my home. My journey has been enriched by earning a Bachelor degree in Music Education (Minsk State Pedagogical University, 1996), a Master of Arts degree in Counseling (Central Michigan University, 2003), and a PhD degree in Psychology, with Transpersonal Psychology Concentration (Sofia University, formerly Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, 2013).

I started my teaching path at the age of 18 as a K-12 music teacher. In 2013, I began my contribution to Saybrook University. In 2016, I became an Assistant Program Director for the Department of Humanistic and Clinical Psychology; in 2017-an Interim Psychology Chair. Currently, as a core faculty member of the Department of Humanistic Psychology at Saybrook, I serve as a Full Professor of Psychology and Consciousness, Spirituality, and Integrative Health (CSIH) Specialization Director. I am a recipient of two recent Saybrook University awards: Presidential Award for Excellence (November 2021) and Exemplary Humanistic Educator Award (August 2024). My interests are deeply humanistic and transpersonal in nature. Outside of the halls of academia, I support adults' inner development by helping them to integrate fully their deeply evocative, Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs). Such experiences often arise within and out of dreams, visions, visitations, spiritual practices, breathwork, visionary journeys, and reality-shattering UFO /ET /Alien /Non-Human Intelligences encounters. I support experiencers transpersonally in their quests for spiritual vitality, fulfillment, vibrant longevity, soulful sovereignty, wholeness, and ascension.

I have a deep sense of appreciation for contemplative spirituality, mystical and esoteric traditions, and contemplative practices, and my current overarching focus is on exploring, potentiating, and integrating Exceptional Experiences (EEs) and Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs), in general, and reality-shattering UFO /ET /Alien / Non-Human Intelligences encounters, in particular. My heart-centered art and interests include: (1) intuitive spiritual support and guidance; (2) transpersonal ways of knowing, embodiment, ascension mentoring, and spiritual consultation; (3) extreme, deeply evocative, and visionary transpersonal/holotropic states; (4) John E. Mack's transpersonal research on UFO / ET /Alien encounters and human transformation; (5) Stan Grof's expanded cartography of the psyche, holotropic states of consciousness, and GROF® Breathwork / Holotropic Breathwork®; (6) C.G. Jung's transpersonal legacy, Joe Campbell's heroic journey, and James Hillman's acorn theory; (7) psionics, remote viewing, mythology and personal mythology, dreamwork, guided imagery, clinical hypnosis, and alchemy of ascension; (8) consciousness calibration work by David R. Hawkins, (9) the biology of personal empowerment by Bruce H. Lipton; (10) Enneagram; (11) Gene Keys and Dream Arc (by Richard Rudd); (12) indigenous traditions and heart-centered spirituality; and (13) other embodied spiritual approaches that engage inner resources to optimize soulful sovereignty, fulfillment, vibrant longevity, joy, and ascension.

My son is a decorated U.S. Army Veteran. I live and create in Sedona, Arizona.

With Many Blessings and Joy of Joys,

Marina

Marina A. Smirnova, PhD

https://earthsideacademy.substack.com/

My name is Marina A. Smirnova. I was born on Sakhalin Island (the Far East of Russia), and, well over twenty years ago, I made the U.S.A. my home. My journey has been enriched by earning a Bachelor degree in Music Education (Minsk State Pedagogical University, 1996), a Master of Arts degree in Counseling (Central Michigan University, 2003), and a PhD degree in Psychology, with Transpersonal Psychology Concentration (Sofia University, formerly Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, 2013).

I started my teaching path at the age of 18 as a K-12 music teacher. In 2013, I began my contribution to Saybrook University. In 2016, I became an Assistant Program Director for the Department of Humanistic and Clinical Psychology; in 2017-an Interim Psychology Chair. Currently, as a core faculty member of the Department of Humanistic Psychology at Saybrook, I serve as a Full Professor of Psychology and Consciousness, Spirituality, and Integrative Health (CSIH) Specialization Director. I am a recipient of two recent Saybrook University awards: Presidential Award for Excellence (November 2021) and Exemplary Humanistic Educator Award (August 2024). My interests are deeply humanistic and transpersonal in nature. Outside of the halls of academia, I support adults' inner development by helping them to integrate fully their deeply evocative, Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs). Such experiences often arise within and out of dreams, visions, visitations, spiritual practices, breathwork, visionary journeys, and reality-shattering UFO /ET /Alien /Non-Human Intelligences encounters. I support experiencers transpersonally in their quests for spiritual vitality, fulfillment, vibrant longevity, soulful sovereignty, wholeness, and ascension.

I have a deep sense of appreciation for contemplative spirituality, mystical and esoteric traditions, and contemplative practices, and my current overarching focus is on exploring, potentiating, and integrating Exceptional Experiences (EEs) and Exceptional Human Experiences (EHEs), in general, and reality-shattering UFO /ET /Alien / Non-Human Intelligences encounters, in particular. My heart-centered art and interests include: (1) intuitive spiritual support and guidance; (2) transpersonal ways of knowing, embodiment, ascension mentoring, and spiritual consultation; (3) extreme, deeply evocative, and visionary transpersonal/holotropic states; (4) John E. Mack's transpersonal research on UFO / ET /Alien encounters and human transformation; (5) Stan Grof's expanded cartography of the psyche, holotropic states of consciousness, and GROF® Breathwork / Holotropic Breathwork®; (6) C.G. Jung's transpersonal legacy, Joe Campbell's heroic journey, and James Hillman's acorn theory; (7) psionics, remote viewing, mythology and personal mythology, dreamwork, guided imagery, clinical hypnosis, and alchemy of ascension; (8) consciousness calibration work by David R. Hawkins, (9) the biology of personal empowerment by Bruce H. Lipton; (10) Enneagram; (11) Gene Keys and Dream Arc (by Richard Rudd); (12) indigenous traditions and heart-centered spirituality; and (13) other embodied spiritual approaches that engage inner resources to optimize soulful sovereignty, fulfillment, vibrant longevity, joy, and ascension.

My son is a decorated U.S. Army Veteran. I live and create in Sedona, Arizona.

With Many Blessings and Joy of Joys,

Marina

Marina A. Smirnova, PhD

https://earthsideacademy.substack.com/