• Finding Balance and Emotional Well-Being with Vanessa Shippy
    Mar 26 2025
    We all experience moments when emotions overwhelm us, especially if we have trapped emotions that build up over time. In today's fast-paced world, it’s easy to feel overloaded with anxiety, stress, and negative news. How can we find balance and set boundaries to protect our well-being? In this episode, I sit down with Vanessa Shippy, an expert in energy work and emotional healing. Vanessa is dedicated to helping individuals release trapped emotions, cultivate self-awareness, and create a more balanced life. Through her work at Dawning Hope, she guides clients on their healing journeys by integrating energy healing, mindset shifts, and self-care practices. We discuss how emotional buildup affects our nervous system, why setting energetic boundaries is essential, and how self-compassion plays a key role in emotional well-being. Vanessa shares real-life experiences from her clients, practical tips on processing emotions, and ways to stay grounded despite life’s challenges. Whether you're dealing with stress, anxiety, or emotional overload, this conversation will provide actionable insights to help you regain balance. Tune in for an enlightening discussion! --- Listen to the podcast here: Finding Balance and Emotional Well-Being with Vanessa Shippy Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a common situation where we have some trapped emotions, and what I mean by that is you want to get some stuff done, you have an important meeting maybe or even just a list of tasks that you would really like to accomplish and do well, yet something someone said or something someone did just kind of stays tracked in your mind, like it triggered you in a way, and you don’t even oftentimes know why do I keep thinking about that but you just can’t stop thinking about it. Why was her tone of voice like that? Why did he slam the door? Etc. So, today, I want to talk to you about how we can possibly get past some of these and other energetic and balanced situations by introducing to you my guest, Vanessa Shippy, and she is the founder of Dawning Hope. --- Vanessa, welcome to the program. Hi, thank you for having me. Thank you and welcome to Action’s Antidotes. First of all, tell us a little bit about Dawning Hope. Yeah, so Dawning Hope is my business. I’m honored to serve in a way. I get to offer intuitive energy reading, clearing, balancing, and channeling sessions, and I’m actually also currently putting together resources and a guide to help people come into touch with their own energy and body. I typically will encourage this through like nervous system regulation and emotional processing, like through gaining knowledge and restoring balance to the mind, body, and spirit as a whole. I myself went from bedridden to feeling better than I ever have. My vision for my business is to let others know that even after the darkest night, the sun always rises and the dawn brings new hope. With my initial statement, am I even thinking about it properly? Because I guess I was thinking about a situation where, okay, this person said something like this, this person was in a bad mood and it’s weighing in my mind, but is that even the situation or is it about something way more than what happened yesterday, what happened this morning that I just can’t stop ruminating on? Yeah, so that can be more of the effects of what maybe actually happened. Typically, some of our deepest, you could say, traumas or trapped energies will occur in childhood. I personally have a theory that children are so open and, in openness, it’s a gift but it can also be a vulnerability, and so, oftentimes, the way that they perceive the world is rather deep and they can internalize it more than adults might just because they don’t have the same understanding or experience as adults. Say, if someone said something to you this morning and you’re ...
    Show more Show less
    40 mins
  • Navigating Life Beyond Screens with Dr. Joan Savage
    Mar 13 2025
    In a world that’s increasingly dominated by screens, how does reducing screen time impact our mental health and our connection to the world around us? In this episode, I’m joined by Dr. Joan Savage, a multifaceted author and former professor, who transitioned from academia to pursue her passion for writing. She best known for her gripping murder mystery novel Red Fever, which she published after overcoming a challenging journey, supported by her community. With a background in business management and a deep commitment to mental wellness, Dr. Savage spent years researching the significant impact of virtual reality on mental health, particularly for vulnerable populations like young boys and military personnel. Together, we explore the pervasive issue of screen time and its effects on our lives. Dr. Savage shares her insights on how social media and technology can lead to feelings of isolation, and the importance of community in overcoming these challenges. She also discusses the balance between seeking validation online and forming genuine connections in a digital world. This conversation is full of meaningful insights and tips for fostering authentic relationships while reducing screen time—so you won’t want to miss it! --- Listen to the podcast here: Navigating Life Beyond Screens with Dr. Joan Savage Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of my initiatives here in 2025 and something I’m trying to showcase is helping people cut down on their screen time. We’ve been seeing a lot more people take notice on how much of the excess time that we’re spending in front of what’s often referred to as attention grabbing or addictive technology is really impacting the lives we live as well as the mindsets that we adapt, so I’m going to be bringing on some guests from time to time that have their own really unique stories about how cutting down on screen time has changed their lives. Today, I would like to introduce you to Dr. Joan Savage. --- Dr. Joan Savage, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s wonderful. So, Dr Savage, like myself, has a lot of different initiatives in life. I think, traditionally, we’ve always thought of people as their job title, or at least for maybe about 100 years in the 20th century mostly where it’s like, okay, you are a broker, you are a data analyst, but we also know that, in life, people are way more than that so I want to start out by introducing you to my audience as all the different things that you’re a part of right now that you have done recently and are doing. Great. Too many things, I think. Well, as long as it make you happy, right? And it does, yes, you’re right. So, yeah, so you start by telling us about all the different things that you’re –- yeah, all your different things. So my –- I’ll try to do things backwards chronologically. I feel like that makes a little more sense. So, right now, my full-time job, I guess, is I’m an author. So, a year ago, I released a murder mystery. It’s got a little bit of eroticism in it but mostly it’s a murder mystery. It’s called Red Fever and it’s my first attempt at fiction so that was a nightmare getting it published. I was really blessed to have just so many beautiful people in my life to speak into that and help me get that done and give me the courage to resign from my job as a professor. I was an adjunct teacher for about three years at Florida Tech and I was so, oh my gosh, that job came at such a time when everybody was looking for a remote position when COVID had hit so I have no complaints about that. Although I never wanted to be a teacher, that’s just –- it fell into my lap. I knew it was what the universe was guiding me and, in COVID, everyone wanted to be home so I loved it. I took it, again, it wasn’t anything that I’ve studied for,
    Show more Show less
    1 hr
  • Healing Trauma Through the Body with Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk
    Mar 4 2025
    Did you know that trauma and stress don’t just affect your emotions but can also be stored in your body—especially in your spine? How can we release this tension and improve our overall well-being? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Lauren Stefanik, a chiropractor at Wellness Rhythms, to explore the powerful connection between stored trauma and physical health. Drawing inspiration from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, Dr. Stefanik explains how everyday stressors and past trauma manifest physically, leading to discomfort and emotional imbalances. We dive into Network Spinal chiropractic, a gentle technique that helps release tension in the spinal cord, promoting higher energy states and better health. Dr. Stefanik also shares her journey into this integrative healing approach and emphasizes the importance of self-compassion, body awareness, and open communication for overall well-being. If you're looking for ways to release stored tension, enhance your health, and embrace a holistic approach to healing, this conversation is one you won’t want to miss! --- Listen to the podcast here: Healing Trauma Through the Body with Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Recently, I read a book called The Body Keeps Score, which talks a lot about the idea of all of our traumas, everything happening in our past, regardless of what it is, kind of being stored in our body, this is oftentimes things that we sometimes tend to forget about, forget about how it’s continuing to impact our lives, such as continued patterns in our childhood that we kind of lived through or even other kind of more acute lived experiences that could be one car accident when you’re 16 and now you’re 35 so it doesn’t really become something you think about in a lot of your minds. Now, there’s been some study about how some of these subconscious patterns continue to emerge through some subconscious programming, but here today, I’m here to talk to you a little bit more about how the body itself keeps score, how certain parts of the body kind of retain the memories of these traumas and how it can still be impacting what we’re doing today and how we’re showing up in everything around. And to facilitate this conversation, I’d like to invite on my guest, Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk with Wellness Rhythms. She is a doctor of chiropractic services. --- Dr. Lauren Stefaniuk, welcome to the program. Hi, Stephen. Thank you so much for having me. I’m really grateful that you have this awesome podcast and that you’ve given me the opportunity to be on it. And, yeah, I do network spinal as a doctor of chiropractor. We’re talking about how the body keeps score, and your focus specifically is on how the spine has kind of kept score of some of these traumas or other items from our past. Yeah. So, what we like to say is that what goes to the back of the mind tends to go to the spine and so what Network Spinal is specifically helping people realize is that there’s events that happen in our life, whether you call them stressors or traumas or just stressful events, your body actually doesn’t really know the difference between a massive stressor like something that we usually, quote-unquote, call “trauma,” or the small kind of everyday stressors, where we’re stressing to get to work on time or we have a deadline or our dog is barking at us and we don’t know why. Your nervous system actually doesn’t know the difference between a massive stressor and a small stressor. It really responds in the exact same way and, sometimes, that is responding by going into fight or flight. So, when we go into fight or flight, there’s a lot of things that people realize happens. So, your eyes, your pupils are going to dilate, your breath becomes a little bit more shallow and more rapid, your heart rate becomes more rapid, your muscles tense, all of those things people recognize,
    Show more Show less
    49 mins
  • How to Break Free from Screen Time Overload with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu
    Feb 4 2025
    We spend a lot of time on screens these days, whether it's for work, social media, or just relaxing with a show. It's easy to lose track of time, and hours can pass before we know it. But how much is too much? What exactly is the impact on our health and daily lives? In this episode, I talk with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu, Founder of Embedded Consulting. We discuss the impacts of excessive screen time and social media on mental health and the importance of connecting with people around us. Sumayyah shares her struggles with social media and how she observed its impact on her friends and family. Tune in to hear her insights! --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Break Free from Screen Time Overload with Sumayyah Emeh-Edu Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. And, today, I want to talk to you about a topic that’s really near and dear to my heart, as in I know I have my own initiative around this, which is cutting down on people’s screen time. I think you’ve probably seen in the news that we do have a lot of problems associated with the excessive amount of time in front of screens and people come up with different numbers depending on which particular study you’re using or if you’re considering phones, TVs, computers, and everything as well, but, regardless, it seems out of control and anyone that’s old enough to remember the world before smartphones and everything took it over can remember a world where we spent a lot more time relating to each other in person as well as doing things not in front of some form of digital technology and it’s hard not to make a clear connection between that and a lot of the mental health and loneliness issues that we’re experiencing today. So, today, I’d like to bring on someone who is kind of taking on an initiative in the same vein, in the same realm, Sumayyah Emeh-Edu, the founder of Embedded Consulting LLC. --- Sumayyah, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen. Nice to be here. Yeah, thank you so much, and thank you so much for connecting because it’s always great to meet and connect with anyone else who’s kind of observed the same issue. So why don’t you start by telling me your story about kind of when you first started observing this whole issue, I think it was roughly maybe 15 years ago-ish that we all started in mass adopting these smartphones and excessive social media and the changes started to be visible in everyday life, regardless of whether or not you saw it as a problem. Yeah. So, I was on Myspace back in the day, 2008 I got onto Facebook, and I didn’t really see it as a problem. I was just like, “Wow, this is awesome.” There was a couple documentaries that came out around like 2014, 2015 that I had watched. There was also a lot of ethical folks and whistleblowers that were coming out of all of the big tech companies. And it was just information I digested but, like most people, I’m like, “Well, that does affect me,” and I would say a majority of my time was spent on Facebook. Twitter was always too fast and I wasn’t even on Instagram at that point, and I had already been a person who didn’t have, for instance, social media notifications in my email and on my phone because it just takes up space and I just hate my inbox just filled with a bunch of junk, but I had been in higher education most of my early career and then I made the transition into diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2015-ish, and it was just interesting because the election was going on, the first election with Trump, and it was a lot of negativity, a lot of just ridiculousness going on from a political perspective. And then, on top of it, I was doing diversity, equity, and inclusion work and I was deeply impacted when I would see injustices go viral or, unfortunately, the murder of a black man go viral, and so when I heard all of this thing about how social media is addictive, how it can impact your mood, and again,
    Show more Show less
    44 mins
  • Navigating the Job Search in a Changing World of Work with Wyatt Carr
    Jan 21 2025
    Today's job search is considerably different from the busy, fast-paced job hunts of the past. Nowadays, it goes beyond having the ideal CV or applying as soon as possible. Finding a career that aligns with your values, demonstrating your abilities, and establishing genuine relationships are now important. In light of significant shifts like remote work and new hiring practices, how are you preparing to thrive? In this episode, I chat with Wyatt Carr, a partner at The Page Group and a seasoned recruiter. Wyatt talks about the struggles of finding a job and hiring the right people in today’s fast-changing world. We discuss simple ways to stand out when job hunting, how automation is changing the workplace, and what businesses are doing differently when hiring. Tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Navigating the Job Search in a Changing World of Work with Wyatt Carr Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic, something that I find one of the most frustrating aspects of the world we’re in today, and that is the process of finding a job or the process of connecting people with jobs. I know a lot of people and I also personally have been in situations where it just seems to just take a long time to find a job and there’s all these things about getting noticed, getting your resume out there, when all it is that you really want is to just find a job that fits what you studied in school, what your background is, what you think you’d be good at and also be interested in, do a good job at it. The process does not seem to be that much better, per se, from the employer side too because they’re just looking for talent and I know that there’s mismatches all around. So, to talk about where we are in the process of job finding, talent acquisition, all that, I would like to introduce my guest today, Wyatt Carr, who is a partner with The Page Group and an experienced recruiter. --- Wyatt, welcome to the program. Thank you so much, Stephen. Happy to be here. Happy to have you. I just see the frustration so many people express to me, whether it be in person or even over LinkedIn, about people really looking for jobs. If anyone out there listening is in that situation where they’re looking for a job, they just need to find something, what do you think people need to be doing? So I think the number one thing to understand when you’re looking for a job is to realize that you are an investment if someone offers you a job. They expect to make more money than you cost to employ and that’s the current challenge with the current market is companies are seeming to do more with less and that is a huge concern about AI and how it will impact the workforce and how it will target or potentially take opportunity from a lot of white collar professions. Everyone thought automation would come for blue collar and it’s come to white collar, everyone’s probably heard that already. You need to understand what value you bring to a business and then find the businesses that need your services, find the businesses that would value from what you can bring to the table.Share on X I think we were very spoiled the last 10 years, literally, in my career, I’ve been in staffing and talent management, the economy has just continued to boom. I think during COVID, white collar workers did better. Blue collar and essential workers, they absolutely were devastated. So much money shifted to the laptop class and the billionaire class. Corporations weren’t hurt. Very few corporations were hurt from the pandemic. The small person was, the blue collar worker, the essential worker, and a lot of people did lose their jobs, but it was somewhat short lived on the white collar side, the skilled labor, laptop class, they call it or college degree educated class, and for the last 10 years with that exception where some people were impacted by...
    Show more Show less
    Less than 1 minute
  • Finding Meaning and Happiness in Your Career with Debbie Morris
    Jan 14 2025
    Finding meaning and happiness in your career boils down to how you align your work with your values and passions. When we work on something that feels purposeful, it gives a sense of fulfillment that goes beyond a paycheck. How can we find a career that resonates with who we are? In this episode, I chat with Debbie Morris, the founder of Live, Learn, Serve, a career transition coaching service. We talk about how to create a happier, more meaningful work life by focusing on things like employee engagement, career growth, and aligning your values with your work. Debbie breaks down why so many people feel disconnected at work and shares tips on finding purpose, practicing self-reflection, and adopting a positive mindset. Don’t miss this conversation—it’s packed with insight! --- Listen to the podcast here: Finding Meaning and Happiness in Your Career with Debbie Morris Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic that’s really new to me as I’ve experienced it myself, I know a lot of other people have experienced it, which is how do we make work a better place to be, a happier place to be, a place that you really want to be? And I often comment that hating work is kind of built into our culture, if you think about Sunday scaries, Wednesday hump day, thank God it’s Friday, and I’ve often said to people that it doesn’t have to be that way. We can live a life where work is just one of the things we do along with weekends and you enjoy your weekend, you go, you dance, you party, and then you come to work on Monday and you also get to do something you love doing. To talk about how we can maybe help make that world a little bit more of a reality for more people, I would like to bring to you my guest today, Debbie Morris, the founder of Live Learn Serve career transition coaching service. --- Debbie, welcome to the program. Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Thank you. I’m excited, Well, I’m excited to talk to you about this because you’ve brought up the Gallup surveys that seem to be pretty consistently stuck with only about a third of the people in this country actually being engaged in their work, and then, globally, that number is even worse than the United States. So let’s start there. What leads to this result and this kind of stagnant result that, despite the fact that we’ve understood for so long that results in our organizations would be better if more people enjoy their job, why is it still that only a third of Americans are actually engaged in and what keeps it stagnant? Well, I think first we have to sort of deconstruct the word and the intent of engagement. So, as organizations grow and they bring folks in, they want people to be committed to their work and to find alignment with the organization’s values. So, intrinsically, they want that level of commitment and they know that if you are intrinsically motivated, that you are more likely to stay and be high performing. So, the goal is to have that level of engagement. In order to do that, though, there has to be some level of alignment so there has to be alignment to what I believe in, what that organization believes in, and I think, first and foremost, what we’ve seen lately is that, oftentimes, there is a misalignment. So, people don’t necessarily feel like they are connected and believe in the same things their organization does. So, number one, there’s misalignment. Number two, I think people have said over and over again, we hear this all the time, is that they want opportunities to grow. So, career growth, that is a type of growth, but then as we look across generations, we see growth as meaning different things. So, growth could be vertical movement within an organization, but it could just also mean I want to expand as an individual or I want to expand as a global citizen or I want to contribute to something larger. So,
    Show more Show less
    Less than 1 minute
  • Collaborative Solutions for Group Financial Management with Joshua Lee
    Dec 24 2024
    Managing group finances can be tricky, but it’s all about clear communication and setting shared goals. Whether it’s splitting bills or budgeting for a project, transparency keeps things running smoothly. Have you ever had a financial disagreement that taught you something valuable? In this special episode, I’m joined by Joshua Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools. We talk about struggles of managing group finances, from tracking contributions to avoiding awkward money conversations. To deal with these, Joshua introduces his app, designed to streamline group financial management, making it easier to collaborate, stay organized, and maintain trust within the group. Tune in, and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Collaborative Solutions for Group Financial Management with Joshua Lee Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today is an important day for Action’s Antidotes because it is my 150th episode, that’s kind of a milestone and, usually, I don’t make these episodes or any of these episodes about myself. Usually, it’s about the guest I’m interviewing, but this particular interview actually pertains to an area of my life personally because I’m the treasurer of an organization called Toastmasters, not the organization International, if you’re familiar, but of a local chapter, I’m a treasurer, and as a treasurer of the group, I oftentimes go to the bank, facilitate transactions with a bank account, because groups like Toastmasters or any other group oftentimes require having a budget, and a lot of people have clubs like that or perhaps you’re out there thinking about what kind of club or organization you want to start. Well, when I go to the bank, I never know what to say to the banker about whether it is a personal or a business account, because it kind of treads that line kind of between the two. It’s not a business, we’re not trying to make a profit or anything like that, we’re just trying to organize all the Toastmasters activities and expenses under this account so that we can fund our operations with our dues and what we owe the international organization and stuff like that. Given that a lot of our pursuits and a lot of us are going to find ourselves in a situation like this, I want to introduce to you today’s guest, Joshua Lee, who is the co-founder and CEO of Tribe Money Pools. --- Joshua, welcome to the program. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me today. Yeah, thank you for hopping on. And so I want to start a little bit about what Tribe Money Pools does about these situations where, okay, you’re not a business but you’re also not a personal account, you’re kind of operating something together in a group. Yeah, absolutely, and I think it would be a little helpful for me to provide a little context as to what Tribe Money is just very quickly. Tribe Money is a digital platform that helps groups share and manage their finances. What we’ve taken are the fragmented processes that occur in group financial management today, such as communication, facilitation, execution, and, most importantly, governance, which is all done with different applications or through different means and different channels. We’ve taken all that and consolidated it all into one platform so the actual financial management, the process of sharing and collecting finances with members of your group, whatever it might be, is much more streamlined, way easier and easier to track, and it’s much more secure than all traditional methods that really exist out there in the market today. So. Really pertaining to what you were talking about earlier, what we’ve brought to this space to really help groups such as yours is provide these quick, virtual, shared bank accounts that people can put together with the click of a few taps. Most importantly, set rules and access controls to ensure that people can monitor who can spend,
    Show more Show less
    46 mins
  • Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs with Taylor Lehn
    Dec 17 2024
    Have you ever been in a situation where, if something doesn’t work, it feels like going back to square one? This might make you question where and what you should pursue in life. One thing that prevents us from reaching our potential is limiting beliefs. What’s holding you back, and how can you begin shifting your mindset? In this episode, I’m joined by Taylor Lehn, the founder of Black Raven Coaching. Taylor shares her story, starting as an aspiring coffee shop owner and eventually finding her true calling as a wellness and spiritual coach. We dive into the importance of building community and the value of in-person connections. Along the way, Taylor talks about the power of following your passions, breaking free from limiting beliefs, and creating a life that truly aligns with who you are. --- Listen to the podcast here: Breaking Free from Limiting Beliefs with Taylor Lehn Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One thing that’s really important to me, in case you haven’t heard it in some of my other episodes, is bringing community together, bringing people together actually in person more and more. We have a lot of online platforms where people are connecting with one another and that’s great and that’s beautiful, but one of my goals going forward is going to be, and has been for years, is how do we reestablish on this community feel, someone to feel like you’re a part of something and that you’re actually interacting with the other people in your community. My guest today, Taylor Lehn, is a life coach and a local wellness event coordinator and the founder of Black Raven Coaching here in Denver, Colorado. --- Taylor, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. Well, thank you for joining and I want to start a little bit by going into your story. Obviously, when you started this whole journey, you had a very different idea about what you were going to be doing. Oh, definitely. Ever since I was young, I always knew that, as far as my career was concerned, that I just needed to be my own boss. So, entrepreneurship was always where I assumed I would go. However, when I was younger, I had almost no clue what I was passionate about and finding something that I could pursue that would actually fulfill me for my entire life seemed like a very daunting task. So, when I went to college, of course, and I studied entrepreneurship and economics and the only thing I really knew I was passionate about per se was, funnily enough, coffee. I’d always been a coffee snob throughout high school, into college, while going through college, when it came time to find a job, coffee shop barista was the number one. So I dove into that and loved it, absolutely loved it. Knowing that eventually I wanted to own my own business once I got out of college, I really pursued that path of becoming a barista, really thinking that opening and owning my own coffee shop someday was what I was going to do. So I spent about the next six years or so after college really pursuing that. However, as I learned the trade, met some amazing baristas, worked my way up to becoming a coffee shop manager, really learning the ins and outs of what it takes to get a coffee shop started and to keep it running, it is a lot of work. I would say owning a coffee shop is one of the most difficult businesses you could pursue. It usually takes a coffee shop about five years to even break even. Really seeing the inside of it, seeing the people who are at the top of their game and what they had to go through and struggle through just to keep their business and their dream alive, I started realizing that that might not actually be what I wanted to do for my entire life, and that left me feeling very confused and really just not knowing what step to take. I didn’t know what else I wanted to do. Yeah, that’s a tough spot to be in, to be honest.
    Show more Show less
    Less than 1 minute