Stacey Chillemi's Blog: The Cards I Was Dealt — Life, Healing and Everything In Between

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In December 2025, researchers identified something the hydrogen science community had been searching for: a specific molecular target for hydrogen inside the mitochondria.

Not a theory. Not a testimonial. A molecular target.

George Wiseman, founder of Eagle Research and one of the world’s foremost independent researchers on Brown’s Gas technology, has been watching this field develop for nearly forty years. He has a longstanding research relationship with Dr. Tyler LeBaron, one of the scientists behind the discovery. When this finding landed, it confirmed what Wiseman’s work had been pointing toward all along.

The body is 62% hydrogen by volume. Every vitamin, mineral, and supplement you have ever taken lives in the remaining 2%. And most people are chronically deficient in the most important thing.

Calm & Grounded with Stacey Chillemi is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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What Happens When Your Body Runs Low on Hydrogen

Hydrogen is involved in every chemical process in the body, directly or indirectly. When it runs short, the body does not fail all at once. It triages.

Regeneration and stem cells shut down first. Aging accelerates. Then immune function degrades. Then, if the deficiency continues long enough, organs begin to fail.

Most people get their hydrogen from the specialized bacteria in the colon that break the carbon-hydrogen bond in digested food. Those bacteria have been decimated by antibiotics, glyphosate, artificial sweeteners, herbicides, and pesticides. “Most people, including myself, are hydrogen deficient,” Wiseman says.

You can be doing everything right and still be running on empty at the cellular level.

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Why Brown’s Gas Is Not the Same as a Hydrogen Water Bottle

Standard hydrogen products produce oxyhydrogen: hydrogen and oxygen. Brown’s Gas contains a third component — something Wiseman calls Electrically Expanded Water, or ExW.

ExW is water that has absorbed electrons until it enters a fourth phase of matter: a negatively charged cold plasma that is not steam, not vapor, and does not condense back into liquid when cooled. When you inhale Brown’s Gas, you receive hydrogen, oxygen, and ExW simultaneously.

“Brown’s Gas is about thirty percent more therapeutically efficacious over just the straight hydrogen,” Wiseman says, “because it has electrons, bioavailable electrons in the electrically expanded water.” Those electrons stop what he calls the oxidative cascade: the chain reaction where electron-deficient molecules steal from surrounding molecules, producing the inflammation and damage most people associate with aging and disease.

This is also why ORP matters. Oxygen reduction potential measures electron activity in water. A negative ORP reading means the water is electron-rich and donates energy to the body. A positive ORP means it draws energy from the body when consumed. Brown’s Gas-bubbled distilled water consistently produces a strongly negative ORP. That is why it feels smooth when you drink it.

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The Blood Flow Discovery Most Doctors Have Never Heard Of

Professor Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington discovered that when water contacts any hydrophilic surface, it forms a gel called EZ Gel, with the formula H3O2 and a negative charge.

This gel is present everywhere inside the body: on capillary walls, on red blood cell surfaces, and inside every cell. It solves three medical mysteries that most physicians cannot explain. Why the heart cannot generate enough pressure to push blood through thousands of miles of capillaries. Why red blood cells, twice the width of a capillary, do not cause blockages. And why blood reaches every extremity of the body evenly.

The answer: EZ Gel’s negative charge causes red blood cells to compress and flow with minimal resistance. And a capillary lined with EZ Gel spontaneously moves fluid without any pump. The capillaries do the circulatory work themselves.

In 2019, Pollack asked Wiseman at a conference in Germany: What does Brown’s Gas do to EZ Gel? The subsequent research with the University of Washington found that Brown’s Gas expands EZ Gel by a minimum of 300%. Hydrogen alone did nothing significant. Oxygen alone did nothing significant. Brown’s Gas changed everything.

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2%. Not More.

The optimal therapeutic concentration for hydrogen inhalation is 2%. Not three. Not five. Two.

Blood saturates at approximately 1.6 parts per million. After ten to fifteen minutes, any excess hydrogen is simply exhaled. Going higher produces no benefit. Going above 4.7% creates a combustion risk.

Wiseman describes a customer who was convinced by a competitor’s device to inhale at a higher volume. The man leaned over a candle while exhaling and triggered an explosion into his sinus cavities. He ended up in the hospital.

“When you see anybody saying more is better, run,” Wiseman says. Any device that cannot be adjusted to the precise concentration appropriate for your body weight is not built around what the science actually shows.

“We’re not saying just believe me or just believe the testimonials. We say believe the studies, believe the actual research. They correlate perfectly.”

George Wiseman, founder, Eagle Research

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What To Take With You

🔑 Hydrogen is the body’s most important macronutrient — 62% by volume.

🔑 Brown’s Gas contains ExW — bioavailable electrons that stop oxidative cascade.

🔑 EZ Gel expands 300% with Brown’s Gas — not hydrogen alone, not oxygen alone.

🔑 Two percent inhalation is the therapeutic ceiling — more is dangerous, not better.

🔑 Healing is not linear — your body decides what gets addressed first.

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🎙️ Listen & Watch the full episode:

📺 YouTube:

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/breathe-different-the-brown-s-gas-revolution--7060704

── ✦ ──

About George Wiseman

George Wiseman is the founder of Eagle Research, an inventor, certified automotive technician specializing in fuel systems, and one of the world’s most recognized independent researchers on Brown’s Gas technology. He has written twenty-four books on alternative energy and applied science, holds blasting certifications from his years in industrial mining, and has spent nearly four decades helping people understand what the body needs at the most foundational level. His work has contributed to a growing body of evidence connecting hydrogen deficiency to virtually every serious condition researchers have studied.CONNECT WITH GEORGE!

🌐 Website: https://eagle-research.com
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ecopegasus
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100054308450085
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgewiseman1984/
🐦 X: https://x.com/Eagle_Research
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-wiseman-53969814/

── ✦ ── ⚠️ DISCLAIMER: The AquaCure is not classified as a medical device by the FDA. Always consult a healthcare provider for medical decisions. ── ✦ ──Final Thoughts

Here is what Wiseman says about the timeline: healing is not fast, and it is not linear. When you start inhaling, your body decides where the hydrogen goes. If you have arthritis but your body is addressing something more urgent, the arthritis waits.

He stood in the shower four years into inhaling, washing his toes, and realized he was standing on one leg without leaning against the wall. He had not been able to do that in decades. His sense of balance had come back, quietly, without announcement. That is how this works. Not a dramatic moment. A morning you realize something is different.

Think of it like eating. Schedule it into your day the way you would a meal. For serious illness, Wiseman recommends at least eight hours daily, which most people achieve by inhaling overnight. For healthy people optimizing performance, one hour a day is a reasonable minimum. If discomfort appears, reduce the dose rather than stopping. The body is healing something. Give it room to do it at its own pace. George Wiseman has spent forty years building the evidence for what that process looks like.

Calm & Grounded with Stacey Chillemi is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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I remember the exact moment it happened.

I was in my third year of college, driving back from my boyfriend Michael’s house on a quiet road in New Jersey. It was an ordinary evening. And then I felt the aura.

Anyone who lives with epilepsy knows that feeling with a particular and intimate clarity. It is the warning. A few seconds, sometimes less, between knowing and losing.

I turned to the passenger seat and said it as calmly as I could.

Michael, I am going to have a seizure.

I started pulling toward the side of the road. The clock ran out before I got there.

My body stiffened. My foot pressed down on the gas. My arms locked onto the wheel. Michael grabbed it with everything he had, pulled the car away from a lamppost we were heading straight toward, and got us stopped.

He told me later that if he had not been sitting beside me that night, I would most likely have been killed.

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A few days after that, I sat across from my doctor and heard the sentence I had been dreading. He told me to stop driving until my seizures were fully controlled.

I thought he meant a few months.

It was fifteen years.

What Fifteen Years Actually Costs

People who have never lost their independence tend to picture the inconvenience. They imagine arranging rides. Scheduling around other people. A logistical problem, solvable with enough planning.

That is not what it is.

What it is is standing at your own window watching the whole world come and go exactly as it pleases while you wait for somebody to have a free hour.

It is not being able to take your own children anywhere. Not to school, not to a friend’s house, not to the store for milk. It is explaining to a four-year-old why Mommy cannot drive, and then explaining it again when they are seven, and again when they are twelve.

It is a thousand small humiliations that nobody around you ever quite registers as humiliations.

And underneath all of it is a grief you cannot say out loud, because the people who love you are already doing so much for you, and complaining feels ungrateful. So you carry it quietly.

That is the part the epilepsy community understands without being told. The seizures are what the world sees. The life rearranging itself around the seizures is what we actually live.

What I Built Inside the Walls

But I did not stop.

I started writing.

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When my seizures were at their worst and the world outside my door felt closed to me, I turned inward and poured everything I had into the page. Partly because writing was the only thing I did not need a ride to get to.

I wrote letters to other people with epilepsy. I answered questions nobody had answered for me. I took those letters and turned them into my first book, and then another, and then another, until there were twenty, including Epilepsy: You’re Not Alone.

I testified before the United States Congress on disability rights and job discrimination, because of what had happened to me in the workplace, and because I did not want it happening to anyone else.

I built a podcast that now reaches more than a million listeners around the world.

And one day an email arrived from a stranger who had found one of my books on a shelf at Barnes and Noble, and who wrote to tell me what it had meant to her.

None of this was the life I had planned. All of it was built inside the walls of the one I got.

The Day I Gave Up

I want to be honest about this part, because I think the honest version helps more than the triumphant one.

Somewhere in those fifteen years, I stopped believing it would ever change.

My license expired and I did not renew it. What was the point? Every time I thought the seizures were under control, another one came. A medication would work, and then it would stop working, and we would try the next one.

I was a woman approaching forty who had quietly let go of one of the most ordinary freedoms a person has.

I did not announce it. I just stopped hoping.

But I kept working. I kept writing. I kept building. And my doctor, to his enormous credit, never once gave up on me, even in the stretch when I had given up on myself.

We changed my medication. We changed my diet. We changed how I managed stress and how I slept and how I lived.

And the seizures began to decrease.

And then they stopped.

The Written Test

When I was finally cleared to drive again, I had to start completely from scratch. Expired license, no credit for the twenty-odd years I had been alive and licensed before.

So I sat in a room full of sixteen-year-olds taking their written test for the first time, a grown woman decades older than everyone else in the room, with my pencil and my sheet of paper.

I passed.

And the first thing I did with my license was put my children in the car and drive them to the toy store.

Not because they needed anything. Because I could. And because for fifteen years, I could not.

What Happened After This Story Was Published

Every October, NYU Langone’s Comprehensive Epilepsy Center publishes its FACES newsletter. It comes out once a year, and part of it is given over to patients and families telling their own stories. This year, they published mine.

A few days after it went out, an email arrived from a pediatrician in New York City. I had never met her. She has lived with epilepsy herself for decades.

She wrote: “I received the recent FACES magazine the other day and your article hit me with a BANG!! I imagined I would never drive or have ultimate independence in my life. Oh, has the world of epilepsy come a long way.”

Then she told me her own story, including the parts she said she had not spoken out loud in a long time.

I have been sitting with that email ever since. Not because of what it said about my writing. Because of what it says about how many capable, accomplished, entirely functional people are quietly carrying something they almost never mention.

She is a physician. She spends her days caring for other people’s children. And she read a stranger’s article about not being able to drive and saw her own life in it.

What I Want You to Know

If you are reading this from inside your own fifteen years, whatever yours happens to be:

Your limitation is not your life sentence.

The things this takes from you are real losses, and they deserve to be grieved honestly. Anyone who tells you to look on the bright side has not lost what you have lost. Grieve it properly.

But it is not the whole story.

You are not alone. You never have been.

And what you build from inside the limitation may turn out to be the most extraordinary thing you ever make.

I would like to hear your story. Reply to this email. I read every single one.

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You could be eating perfectly and still be starving at the cellular level.

Not because your diet is wrong. But because the process your body was designed to use to extract its most important nutrient has been quietly dismantled — by antibiotics, by glyphosate, by decades of exposure to things the human gut was never built to handle.

Calm & Grounded with Stacey Chillemi is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

George Wiseman, founder of Eagle Research and one of the world’s foremost independent researchers on Brown’s Gas technology, has been investigating this for nearly 40 years. Here is what he has found.

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The Nutrient Your Body Runs On That Nobody Measures

Your body is 62% percent hydrogen by volume.

Not protein. Not magnesium. Not anything on a standard blood panel. And when hydrogen runs low, the body makes a sequence of calculated decisions about what to let go. Stem cell activity goes first. Aging accelerates. Immune function goes next. Then organ systems.

“Hydrogen is part of every chemical process in our body, either directly or indirectly,” Wiseman says. “It can’t be denied.”

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The Step in Digestion Nobody Told You About

In the colon, specialized bacteria are supposed to break the carbon-hydrogen bond in digested food. When that bond breaks, hydrogen passes through the colon wall directly into the bloodstream. That is how the body was designed to fuel itself at the most fundamental level.

“So even though they’re eating food,” Wiseman says, “they’re not digesting it fully and they’re not getting the nutrition, especially the hydrogen, from that food.”

If those bacteria are gone, the hydrogen never makes it in. You absorb calories. But the macronutrient powering your regeneration and immunity stays locked inside what you just ate.

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Why Those Bacteria Are Gone

Antibiotics are the primary culprit. They do not distinguish between harmful bacteria and the colonies responsible for hydrogen extraction. Glyphosate in wheat products is another major driver. Add artificial sweeteners, herbicides, and pesticides, and the gut that was supposed to make you hydrogen-rich has been under sustained assault for decades.

Wiseman points to a Japanese longevity study that found a clear common denominator: long-lived families had measurable excess hydrogen in their exhaled breath. Short-lived families did not. The body saturates and exhales any surplus, the same way it exhales excess carbon dioxide.

Longevity is not mysterious. It is measurable. And it connects directly to a nutrient most doctors have never thought to check.

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What Brown’s Gas Adds That Ordinary Hydrogen Cannot

Wiseman’s electrolyzers produce something standard hydrogen production does not: Electrically Expanded Water, or ExW. It forms when water absorbs electrons until it becomes a negatively charged cold plasma, a fourth phase of matter that is not steam, not vapor, and does not condense back into liquid when cooled.

When Brown’s Gas is inhaled, the body receives hydrogen and the energy to use it simultaneously. For people whose systems are too depleted to activate what they are given, this is the difference between a therapy that works and one that does not.

Wiseman has seen this in his own body: a childhood heart murmur gone, neuropathy in both legs resolved, scars disappearing in reverse chronological order as his stem cell system reactivated. Not from a drug. From the body doing what it had been waiting to do.

“Your bodies are incredibly intelligent to bringing you back to health once they’re given what they need.”

George Wiseman, founder, Eagle Research

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What To Take With You

🔑 Hydrogen is your body’s most important macronutrient — not protein, not calcium.

🔑 Your colon was designed to extract it from food — most people’s can’t anymore.

🔑 Antibiotics and glyphosate are the biggest culprits — not personal failure.

🔑 Brown’s Gas includes ExW — electrons that give depleted cells energy to heal now.

🔑 Excess hydrogen in breath predicts longevity — Japanese research confirmed it.

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🎙️ The Full Episode with George Wiseman

📺 YouTube:

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/breathe-different-the-brown-s-gas-revolution--7060704

About George Wiseman

George Wiseman is the founder of Eagle Research, an inventor, certified automotive technician specializing in fuel systems, and one of the world’s most recognized independent researchers on Brown’s Gas technology. He has written twenty-four books on alternative energy and applied science, holds blasting certifications from his years in industrial mining, and has spent nearly four decades developing practical applications for hydrogen technology in both industrial and health contexts. His work has helped tens of thousands of people understand what their bodies need at the foundational level.

CONNECT!
🔬 AquaCure: https://www.aquacure.life
🌐 Website: https://eagle-research.com
📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ecopegasus
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100054308450085
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/georgewiseman1984/
🐦 X: https://x.com/Eagle_Research
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/george-wiseman-53969814/

─────────────────────────────────────
⚠️ DISCLAIMER: The AquaCure is not classified as a medical device by the FDA. Always consult a healthcare provider for medical decisions.
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Final Thoughts

Wiseman spent nine years dismissing his own customers’ health reports because his existing framework made them seem impossible. It took until 2005 for them to convince him to try it himself. He has not been seriously ill since.

He is not asking you to take anything on faith. He is sharing a sequence that unfolded slowly, skeptically, and with results that eventually became impossible to argue with.

Start with the water. Drink Brown’s Gas-bubbled distilled water daily, the same way you would take any other essential nutrient. Give it time. Healing happens in cell cycles, not overnight. And the body, as George Wiseman has spent forty years documenting, knows exactly what to do when it finally has what it needs.

Calm & Grounded with Stacey Chillemi is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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▶ Watch the preview — https://youtube.com/shorts/nSSNLEDXNQU

The full interview is coming soon.

Hi friend,

Today, Shawne “Lights Out” Merriman is being inducted into the Maryland Athletics Hall of Fame.

You may know him as one of the most feared players in NFL history: Defensive Rookie of the Year, three-time Pro Bowler, and the man who led the entire league in sacks.

But that’s not the story I want to tell you.

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When I sat down with Shawne, we didn’t start with football. We started with a little boy who had nothing. A kid growing up in a poor neighborhood, who knew what it felt like to go without food, and who came closer to homelessness than most of us will ever understand.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, he made a decision.

He decided that where he started would not decide where he finished.

Here are three things from our conversation that I haven’t stopped thinking about:

1. Your starting line is not your story.
Shawne didn’t have money, connections, or a safety net. What he had was a decision, and the drive to back it up every single day.

2. Who you are is bigger than what you do.
When injuries ended his playing career, the thing that had defined his whole life was suddenly gone. Instead of letting that be the end, he reinvented himself and built something new.

3. The people who struggled the most often build the most for others.
Today, the kid who grew up without a safety net spends his time building opportunities for other people.

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This is one of the most honest conversations I’ve ever had on the show, and I think it will stay with you the way it stayed with me.

🎙️ Watch the full episode here: https://www.youtube.com/@StaceyChillemiAdvisor

If you know someone who needs a reminder that it’s never too late, and that where you start doesn’t decide where you finish, please send this to them.

Stay connected with us:

The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theadvisor_sc/
🎬 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@StaceyChillemiAdvisor
🎧 Spotify:

The Authority Business Show, our brand-new channel for entrepreneurs and leaders. Join us from the very beginning!

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theauthoritybusinessshow/
🎬 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAuthorityBusinessShow?sub_confirmation=1
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With so much gratitude,
Stacey 💜

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Hi friend,

I want to tell you about something I have never fully said out loud.

For most of my life, every time someone pointed the finger at me, I shrank.

A client was unhappy, and I assumed I had failed. Someone was frustrated, and I took it as proof that I wasn’t enough. I apologized for things that were never mine to apologize for.

Maybe you know that feeling too.

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The Girl Who Shrank

I think most of us start out as people pleasers. We want to be liked. We want everyone to be comfortable, even when it costs us our own comfort.

I was the girl who gave everything to everyone. I worked hard, helped people, and said yes when I should have said no. And when someone was disappointed, I turned the blame inward before they even finished their sentence.

That was the first chapter of my life.

The second chapter looks very different.

The Choice I Kept Making

I have lived with epilepsy since I was five years old. An ear infection turned into encephalitis and left me in a coma, and the doctors told my parents I might never walk again.

Since then, I have lost mobility in my arms. I went fifteen years without being able to drive. There were days when I lay in bed asking one question over and over: When is this going to stop?

And every single time, I faced the same choice. Stay in that dark place, or pull myself out and keep moving forward.

I chose forward. Every time.

That choice became the foundation of everything I built: my books, my podcasts, my business, and the life I have today. I started my business making $15,000 a year. Then $30,000. Then I grew it ten times over and kept going.

And somewhere along that road, I realized that if I could choose forward through epilepsy, I could choose forward through someone else’s disappointment.

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What I Finally Understood

Here is what took me years to learn.

When someone is frustrated with you, it is very rarely about you. It is usually about the gap between what they dreamed of and where they are right now. That gap hurts, and I have so much compassion for anyone standing in it.

But their frustration is not your identity.

I can care about someone deeply and still know that I did my part. I can hold compassion for them and confidence in myself at the same time. That was the moment everything changed for me.

As Mel Robbins says: let them. Let them blame you. Let them point the finger. Your job is not to carry their story. Your job is to keep building yours.

Three Things I Want You to Try This Week

Ask yourself one question. The next time someone is upset with you, pause and ask: did I do what I said I would do? If the answer is yes, you can be kind without carrying their disappointment as your failure.

Set one boundary before you need it. Think of one situation that drains you, and decide now what you will and will not accept. It is so much easier to hold a boundary you set calmly than one you have to invent in the middle of a hard moment.

Start a “proof” folder. Save the kind messages, the thank-you notes, and the moments when you made a difference for someone. On the hard days, open it and read it. It is the truth about who you are.

Before You Go

Courage is not something we are born with. It is something we earn, every time we refuse to give up and every time we get back up instead of staying down.

I have more courage today than I have ever had in my life. And I am just getting started.

If you are still letting someone else’s opinion decide your worth, please hear me: their opinion of you is not your identity. Your resilience is. Your consistency is. Your refusal to give up, especially when everything in you wanted to- that is who you are.

Keep going. I am right here cheering you on.

With love,
Stacey

P.S. If this letter spoke to you, please share it with one person who needs to hear it today. And if you have a “let them” moment of your own, hit reply and tell me about it. I read every message.

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She was sitting in a wooden chair while her boss screamed at her. How dare you. Who do you think you are?

And the only thought in her head was this one: I deserve this. I did something wrong, and it’s my fault.

That was Susan Schmitt Winchester, decades before she became a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney, a USA Today bestselling author of thirty books on leadership and workplace culture. She went on to serve as Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, a Fortune 500 and a Fortune 150, over a career of more than 36 years.

She resigned about a month later. She still does not know what set her boss off.

Here is why that story matters for your body, not just your career. The anger in that room belonged to her boss. The exhaustion belonged to Susan, because she took all of it home with her.

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There Are Two Ways to Do a Career, and Nobody Told You There Was a Choice

Schmitt Winchester describes two paths. The first is what she calls the unconscious wounded career path, and she spent 30 of her 36 years on it.

It feels like constant stress, anxiety, and worry. Feedback lands like an indictment. Your boss is in a bad mood, and your stomach drops.

The second is the conscious healing career path. Not a place you arrive and stay, she says, but a decision you have to keep remembering to make.

People on that path still get upset, because they are human. The difference is fewer triggered moments, faster recovery, and much less time spent beating themselves up afterward.

Try this today: the next time you replay a meeting in your head at 9pm, name it. That is the first path talking. Noticing it is how the second one begins.

── ✦ ──

The Property Line Nobody Taught You to See

Schmitt Winchester keeps coming back to a daily reading called Property Lines in Melody Beattie’s The Language of Letting Go.

Your reactions, your decisions, and your choices are your property. Another person’s emotions and behavior are theirs.

Almost all of the tiredness you feel after a hard day at work comes from picking up property that was never assigned to you.

Think about what she says now about that screaming boss. If it happened today, she would let her blow off all of it, stay calm, and then ask one question. Wow, you are really angry. What’s going on?

She calls what actually happened back then something worth remembering. She was the innocent character in a play of her boss’s, recruited into her story as the villain.

Try this today: when someone unloads on you, ask yourself one question before you respond. Is this mine?

── ✦ ──

Her Coach Told Her She Was Addicted to Anxiety

One of Schmitt Winchester’s executive coaches said something she laughed at, right before she realized it was true. You are addicted to anxiety.

The adrenaline and the cortisol had become exciting to her. That chemical rush fueled the drive to keep proving herself, and it wore her out.

Her coach taught her practices to calm her nervous system so those chemicals stopped running the show.

This is the part people skip. You cannot think your way out of a body that is running on alarm all day.

Try this today: notice whether you are chasing the next urgent thing because it matters, or because the buzz of urgency has become familiar.

── ✦ ──

Joy Is a Practice, and She Has 27 Journals to Prove It

Most of us treat joy like a personality trait other people were born with. Schmitt Winchester treats it as something you build.

Her starting point is a belief she states plainly: to have joy consistently, you have to begin believing that every single moment is designed perfectly for you.

She is careful to say your faith, whatever it is, does not change whether the idea works.

The practice is gratitude, and she is specific about it. She is writing in her 27th gratitude journal, one a year for 27 years, a habit she picked up from Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance.

And when something falls through, like the promotion that went to someone else, she leaves room for the possibility that she is being protected from something she cannot see yet.

Try this today: write down three things from your workday you are grateful for, including one thing that went badly.

── ✦ ──

Change the Question and Your Brain Goes Looking Somewhere Else

The last tool is one she credits to Tony Robbins: pay attention to the quality of the questions you ask yourself.

We ask them all day. Why didn’t that work out? Why is my boss such a jerk? Those are low-quality questions, and they return low-quality answers.

Schmitt Winchester explains it through the reticular activating system, which she describes as a radar that responds to whatever we tell ourselves.

So change the input. Instead of why is this job so miserable, ask how you could experience this job in a more rewarding and satisfying way.

Try this today: catch one question in your head that assumes the worst, and rewrite it as a question about what you actually want.

── ✦ ──

“The first person you hire is yourself. That’s a place where you are advocating for yourself.”

Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer

── ✦ ──

🎁 A GIFT FROM SUSAN FOR LISTENERS

Susan is sharing her Bumper Car Moments® Performance Course, about an hour of material walking through how these collisions at work actually play out and what you can do in the moment.

It is the clearest place to start if this letter described your week.

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🚧 Their anger is their property, not yours.

🧠 Ask better questions. Your brain answers them.

📓 Gratitude is a practice, not a personality.

☎️ Build a personal board of advisors on purpose.

🔋 You cannot hire yourself while running on empty.

── ✦ ──

Here is the line from this episode that stayed with me. Schmitt Winchester says she would not have hired herself years ago. She was needy, and the neediness pushed people away.

What changed was not a promotion or a title. It was deciding, and then deciding again the next day, to be the person who advocates for her.

So if today was one of those days, try her question before you go to bed. Not what did I do wrong, but what part of tonight actually belongs to me? You may find you are carrying far less than you thought, and that is exactly where Susan Schmitt Winchester says the healing starts.

── ✦ ──

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Susan Schmitt Winchester:

📺 YouTube: Watch the episode 🎙️ Podcast Episode: Self Worth Was Never Something Your Boss Could Give You 🎧 Podcast Series: Healing at Work: Clock In, Heal Up

── ✦ ──

ABOUT SUSAN SCHMITT WINCHESTER

Susan Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and a Fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources who spent more than 36 years in corporate leadership, including sixteen and a half years as Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, a Fortune 500 and a Fortune 150. She is the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney, a USA Today bestselling author of thirty books on leadership and workplace culture. She helps high achievers stop handing their worth to other people and build careers that feel like something other than a daily performance review.

── ✦ ──

CONNECT WITH SUSAN SCHMITT WINCHESTER

🌐 Website: susanwinchester.com

📚 Free Resource: Bumper Car Moments® Performance Course

📸 Instagram · 💼 LinkedIn · 📘 Facebook

You leave the meeting rattled.

On the walk back to your desk, you reason with yourself. It was not personal. Your work is good. You have handled worse than this.

And you feel exactly the same.

Susan Schmitt Winchester can tell you why, and it is not a discipline problem. The limbic system, where our emotions are stored, has no capacity for language. You have been talking to a part of your brain that does not read.

She is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney. Over a career of more than 36 years, she was Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies. She says she did not learn that fact about the brain until recently, and it changed how she teaches everything else.

── ✦ ──

Your Best Thinking Goes Offline Exactly When You Need It

Three parts of the brain matter here, and they explain a lot of regret.

The amygdala runs survival. She uses the image of a lion crossing the savanna after a zebra, and the zebra running instantly. That system does not check with you first.

The limbic system stores the emotions and has no language. And the prefrontal cortex, the problem-solving part, cannot function properly while you are in fight, flight, or freeze.

So the moment you feel most compelled to act is the moment you are least equipped to. As she puts it, we cannot make good decisions from fight, flight, or freeze.

Which is where her rule comes from: you never quit on a bad day.

── ✦ ──

Start With One Question About Your Body

Her three-step process is called the Rapid Power Reclaim, and the first step is Create Choice. Nothing else can happen until it does.

You cannot do anything, she says, until you release the energy charge inside you.

So she starts with a question anyone can answer. Where am I feeling this charge in my body right now?

Hers felt like an elephant sitting on her chest, the anxiety radiating through the middle of it. For other people, it is the throat, the gut, the neck.

Try it today. You cannot release something you have not located.

── ✦ ──

“We can’t talk our way out of that charge. We have to release it.”

Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer

── ✦ ──

Sound, Movement, and Breath Are the Only Three Doors

Those three, she says, are the only channels the limbic system has for letting a charge go, which is exactly why the pep talk in the hallway does nothing.

One technique comes from Pathways to Successful Leadership, where she trained for years. It is called the silent scream, and she credits Sue Page with it. You stand, reach for the sky, grab the emotion and pull it down hard with breath and sound, then throw it out behind you.

She likes it because you can do it in an empty office or a restroom without making a sound.

Her other tool is a five-dollar plastic baseball bat. You hit a padded chair or a couch as hard as you can while yelling. Jumping works. Jumping jacks. Singing at the top of your lungs.

There is no wrong way to do this, and you will know it worked because the heaviness in your chest or gut will have let go.

She points out that zebras shake their bodies after escaping the lion. They are releasing the adrenaline of the near attack.

── ✦ ──

What to Do When You Cannot Leave the Room

All of that assumes privacy. Meetings do not offer any.

So she has a shorter list. Excuse yourself, say you need a quick break, get cold water on your face. Box breathing works right there at the table: four counts in, four counts held, four counts out, and nobody notices.

Grounding helps too. Feel your feet on the floor. Sit up with your shoulders back. Look around and notice specific things: a light, someone’s brown shoes.

Then tell yourself you will do the full process later.

She calls these small, simple acts of kindness toward yourself, which is a better description than techniques.

── ✦ ──

The Step Almost Everyone Skips

Once the charge is out, you choose a different response. She calls that Elevate Action, and hers was once four lines on a pink sticky note before a presentation she was dreading.

Then comes the part people dismiss. Celebrate and Integrate.

Schmitt Winchester is emphatic that it is not optional. Celebrating what you did differently is what lays the new neural pathway over the old one. Skip it, and you are more likely to repeat the old pattern next time.

She admits she was terrible at this. Her own coach opened every session by asking what they were celebrating, and for a long time her answer was that she did not know how.

It counts smaller than you think. Step outside for sixty seconds and notice one beautiful thing. Put a hand on your heart and say out loud that you did that differently. Text a friend who knew you were walking into something hard.

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🫀 Locate the charge in your body first.

🗣️ Sound, movement, and breath. Not words.

🚫 Never quit on a bad day.

🧊 Cold water, box breathing, feet on the floor.

🎉 Celebrate it, or the pattern comes back.

── ✦ ──

Here is what I keep thinking about. If talking yourself down has never worked, that was never a failure of willpower.

You were using the wrong language for the part of you that needed help.

So take one thing into tomorrow. The next time something knocks you sideways, before the email or the replay in your head, just ask where you feel it in your body.

That question costs nothing, and Susan Schmitt Winchester says it is the door to every other step.

── ✦ ──

Listen to the full episode

🎧 Emotional Regulation Is Physical Not a Mindset Problem

📺 Watch on YouTube

🎙️ The full series, Healing at Work: Clock In, Heal Up

🎁 Free for You From Susan

The full twelve-week course, free with code HWgift

Susan is giving readers free access to her Healing at Work® Signature Course.

It is a twelve-week program for leaders working through the emotional patterns holding them back, covering the Unconscious Wounded Career Path, the Conscious Healing Career Path, Bumper Car Moments®, and the full Rapid Power Reclaim® process from this episode. You get a workbook, a 90-day planner, and bonus mini-courses.

One thing worth knowing: questions go straight to Susan. If a lesson raises something, or something surfaces in your own work life while you are going through the material, you email her, and she answers you personally.

Use code HWgift at programs.healingatwork.com/course

34 Ways to Make Yourself Feel Better Instantly

Exactly what you want in the thirty seconds this episode is about. Susan and her co-author, Martha I. Finney, built this list for the moment you are upset at work and still have to function.

Get the free list at programs.healingatwork.com/34-ways-to-feel-better

── ✦ ──

About Susan Schmitt Winchester

Susan Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney, a USA Today bestselling author of thirty books on leadership and workplace culture. Over a career of more than 36 years, she was Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, which means she spent decades watching people carry what she was carrying herself. She teaches self-acceptance as a path to a more joyful working life, and gives people something practical to do in the moments that used to derail them.

Find her

Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook

Healing at Work is co-authored with Martha I. Finney and available wherever books are sold.

There is a statistic that stopped Victor Bretting cold while he was writing his memoir.

He already knew the number most people cite — that roughly 22 veterans die by suicide every day in the United States. What he did not know was that construction workers die by suicide at nearly double that rate. Fifty men per day. Men who build things with their hands, carrying weight no one can see.

Calm & Grounded with Stacey Chillemi is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Victor Bretting is an 8th-generation Texan, construction executive with nearly 50 years in the industry, rancher, and author of The Man That I Would Become. He founded Bretting Texan Ranch in Olney, Texas, which grew from a planned retirement retreat into a sanctuary for veterans with PTSD, at-risk youth, and families walking through hard seasons. He has donated more than 60 hunts to people who needed something the city could not give them.

His message is not complicated. But it is one most men have never been permitted to hear.

── ✦ ──

The Lesson Every Boy Learns Before He Can Choose Otherwise

Victor traces the silence most men carry back to something simple and early.

“When we’re young boys, the first thing you remember is get off the ground, stop crying, you’re gonna be okay.”

Nobody means harm by it. But the message lands anyway: feelings are inconvenient, showing them is weakness, and the right response to pain is to get up and keep moving.

Most men carry that instruction for decades without ever questioning it. They get very good at staying upright. They get very bad at asking for help.

Here is what Victor wants men to understand: toughness and empathy are not opposites. One without the other costs you more than you realize — in marriages, in friendships, and sometimes in your life.

── ✦ ──

What Happens When a Man Finally Opens Up and Gets Shut Down

Victor has watched this play out across job sites, campfires, and ranches for 50 years. A man works up the nerve to say something real. The other man deflects, jokes it off, or goes quiet. And that is it.

“The first time a man opens up to another man and that man shuts him down, you’re done. That man will never open up again.”

This is why Victor says men need to become as good at listening as they are at talking. When a man finally speaks, it is rarely small talk. It is normally something he has been carrying for a long time. The man on the receiving end has a choice in that moment — and most of us were never taught what the right choice looks like.

If someone in your life gets quiet and then suddenly tries to say something, pay attention. That moment may not come again.

── ✦ ──

Why the Outdoors Can Do What a Therapist’s Office Sometimes Cannot

The ranch was never supposed to be what it became.

Victor and his wife planned it as a private retreat. He was in the middle of building the lodge with his sons when his daughter grabbed his arm at an outdoor show in Wichita Falls and pulled him toward two strangers holding flyers. One was Gordon Melton, the 20-year founder of Hunting with Soldiers. The other was Casey Allen, state director of Cross Trail Outfitters, a faith-based outdoor organization.

Those two conversations changed everything.

What Victor has watched happen at the ranch since is hard to put into a clinical framework. Veterans arrive guarded. Then they sit around a campfire. They look at stars that are not just stars but galaxies. They hear an animal move in the dark. The noise of the city disappears, and something else surfaces.

“All the stress kind of disappears a little bit. You can hear yourself think.”

Two veterans discover they were deployed at the same time. The teasing starts. The camaraderie comes back. And men who have been alone with their pain for years start talking, not because someone told them to, but because the setting made it feel safe enough.

── ✦ ──

The Wall Inside — and How It Finally Came Down

Victor did not recognize his own emotional wall until well into adulthood.

He watched his mother work 60 to 70 hours a week without complaint and absorbed the lesson quietly: do not show what you feel, just keep going. He carried that posture into marriages that eventually failed. For a long time, it was easier to blame the outcomes on someone else.

“The truth was, I didn’t know how to give a heart. There was nothing to give. I didn’t know it.”

What changed was his wife, who held up a mirror and refused to put it down. And a mentor who kept asking the same question: have you turned yourself inside out and really looked at what you see?

That question is the beginning. Not a grand revelation. Not a program or a retreat. Just the willingness to stop and ask what is actually wrong before you can admit that something is.

Victor draws the parallel to recovery programs himself. The first step is admission. But you cannot admit something you have not yet identified. For men who have spent decades confusing their distance for strength, that identification is the real first step.

── ✦ ──

“The knowledge that I have gained is not from my success. The knowledge that I have gained is from all the failures, all the adversities, all the things I failed at.”

~ Victor Bretting

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🎯 Toughness without empathy is incomplete. Balance is the real work of becoming a man.

👂 Be as good at listening as you are at talking. When a man speaks, it usually matters.

🌿 The outdoors creates conversations that rooms cannot. Nature lowers defenses in ways we do not fully understand.

🔍 You have to find the wall before you can take it down. Awareness comes before admission.

💡 You need two things: something to love, and a reason to get up. That is not small. That is everything.

── ✦ ──

Victor said something near the end of our conversation that I have been thinking about since.

He was in a hotel room once, far from his family, wondering why he was there. He knows what the inside of that tunnel feels like. He also knows it ends. Not because someone handed him the answer, but because he kept going long enough to find it.

If you are carrying something right now — quietly, the way most men do — this episode is for you. Share it with the man in your life who goes quiet when things get heavy. He may not say he needed it. But he will remember that you sent it.

Victor Bretting built a ranch to retire. What he actually built was a place for people to come back to themselves. That does not happen by accident. It happens when someone decides that what they have been through is worth something to the person still in the middle of it.

── ✦ ──

Listen to the full episode with Victor Bretting:

📺 YouTube: The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi

🎧 Spotify: The Advisor with Stacey Chillemi

🎙️ Podcast Series: Built, Not Born: The Man That I Would Become — Victor Bretting Series

── ✦ ──

About Victor Bretting

Victor Bretting is an 8th-generation Texan, construction executive, rancher, and author of The Man That I Would Become. He founded Bretting Texan Ranch in Olney, Texas, where he has donated more than 60 hunts to veterans, youth, and families in need through partnerships with Hunting with Soldiers and Cross Trail Outfitters. He speaks on leadership, legacy, faith, and what it actually takes to become the man you were meant to be.

CONNECT WITH VICTOR!
🌐 Website: https://brettingtexanranch.com
📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/btexranch
💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victor-bretting-907bb746
📘 Facebook: https://facebook.com/btexranch
📚 Book: The Man That I Would Become — available on Amazon

Calm & Grounded with Stacey Chillemi is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Someone interrupts you in a meeting.

That is the whole event. And underneath it, quieter, is a message you did not ask for: what I was saying did not matter.

Susan Schmitt Winchester calls that second a Bumper Car Moment, a term she and her co-author Martha I. Finney use in their book Healing at Work. She is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and spent more than 36 years in corporate life, including as Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies.

She estimates she has had thousands of these. Which is why she is so specific about what actually matters, and it is not the crash.

── ✦ ──

Your Body Knows Before Your Mind Does

Ask most people how they know they got upset and they will describe a thought. Schmitt Winchester starts somewhere else.

A Bumper Car Moment has a physical address. Hers lands in the chest. For other people, it is the throat, the neck, or the stomach.

The feelings that arrive with it are almost universal: angry, upset, afraid, stupid, unworthy, unimportant. All of that in the single second it takes someone to cut you off.

Here is why the body matters more. The tightening in your chest arrives a beat before the sentence your mind is about to write about what just happened.

That beat is your whole opening. Today, just find where yours lives. You cannot use a signal you have never noticed.

── ✦ ──

The 90 Seconds Almost Nobody Knows About

This is the part that changes the math on everything.

Schmitt Winchester points to Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist who studied what an emotion does in the body. Once triggered, the emotion itself stays in your system for roughly ninety seconds.

So if you are still upset at dinner, the original feeling cleared before you got back to your desk. Everything after that is the story you have been telling yourself since.

She is honest about the implication without being harsh about it. Hang on to that story longer than ninety seconds, she says, and you are the one keeping the feeling alive.

She knows it from the inside. She used to name her upsets by how long she carried them: an issue of the day, an issue of the week, an issue of the month, and an issue of a career, the kind where she was certain she was about to be fired.

But this is not an instruction to be calm. It is permission to stop treating something that passes through your body in a minute and a half as a verdict that deserves a week.

── ✦ ──

“Go ahead and feel it, but then release it.”

Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer

── ✦ ──

What She Actually Did in the Bathroom

In the thirty seconds after a crash, you are not solving anything. The only job is buying time.

Her own version is refreshingly unglamorous. Years ago she was badly triggered in a meeting, so she excused herself and said she needed a minute.

She went downstairs to a women’s bathroom nobody used. She stood there and cried. She splashed cold water on her face, then did box breathing, four counts in and four counts out.

Five minutes later she was back in the room. Nobody thought anything of it, she notes, because nobody ever does.

When you cannot leave, she has smaller versions. Feel your feet on the floor. Feel your shoes. Take a quiet inhale and exhale; nobody will notice. Put a hand on your heart.

Then tell yourself something simple: I am having a reaction, I will look at this later, and I am not deciding anything right now.

── ✦ ──

When Something Goes Wrong, It Does Not Have to Stay Wrong

This is the most hopeful thing in the whole conversation.

Schmitt Winchester draws on Dr. Ed Tronick and Dr. Claudia Gold and their book The Power of Discord. Their finding is that people are genuinely in sync with each other only about a third of the time.

The rest is misreads and missteps. And what builds secure human beings, in the phrasing she quotes directly, is not the harmony. It is the repair.

The word rupture landed hard for her. Her own childhood had plenty of rupture and almost no repair, and what a child learns in that house is that when something goes wrong, it stays wrong.

A lot of us are still running that belief without ever having looked at it.

Which makes the fix almost absurdly small. Go back to someone and say you were short with them yesterday and you are sorry. Every time you do that, she says, you are rewriting the story.

And if you already blew it, you are not behind. The rupture happened. The repair is the part you still get to choose.

── ✦ ──

Nobody Else Is in Charge of Your Worth

Schmitt Winchester says this shift took her the longest.

For years she believed everyone else got to decide her worth, and her job was to earn it through perfectionism, people pleasing, and overwork.

She tells a story about a man new to her company who came to her office genuinely upset because nobody was greeting him in meetings. He was ready to conclude he did not belong.

Her advice was to imagine that everyone else in that room might feel exactly the same way, and then to be the one who speaks first. Ask how people are doing. Turn to your neighbor and ask about their morning.

Even if nobody answers, you have taken back the part of you that was waiting on them.

She is not dismissive about praise. Recognition from someone senior gives you a real hit of adrenaline, and it feels good. Her only caution is not to get too drunk on it, because you already know whether you did a good job.

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🫀 Find where a trigger lands in your body.

⏱️ The emotion clears in 90 seconds. The story does not.

🚰 Cold water, box breathing, feet on the floor.

🔁 The rupture happened. The repair is still yours.

🙋 Be the one who speaks first in the room.

── ✦ ──

Here is what I keep coming back to. Schmitt Winchester is not telling you to stop getting upset.

She is telling you that getting triggered is normal, that it is information rather than failure, and that the whole opportunity lives in what you do in the next thirty seconds.

So carry one question into tomorrow. When something knocks the wind out of you, ask whether you are reacting this strongly to something old or something happening right now.

You do not have to answer it perfectly. Susan Schmitt Winchester spent three decades learning that simply asking is where it starts.

── ✦ ──

Listen to the full episode

🎧 Emotional Triggers Fade in 90 Seconds. Your Story Doesn’t.

📺 Watch on YouTube

🎙️ The full series, Healing at Work: Clock In, Heal Up

── ✦ ──

About Susan Schmitt Winchester

Susan Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha I. Finney, a USA Today bestselling author of thirty books on leadership and workplace culture. Over a career of more than 36 years she was Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, which means she has watched thousands of people quietly carrying what she was carrying herself. She helps people understand why work affects them the way it does, and gives them something practical to do about it.

Free from Susan

📄 34 Ways to Make Yourself Feel Better Instantly, her own list for the moment right after a Bumper Car Moment

📊 Take her free assessment

Find her

Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · Facebook

Healing at Work is co-authored with Martha I. Finney and available wherever books are sold.

You fired the difficult client.

Six months later, a new one signed, and within three weeks you knew. Same energy. Same knot in your stomach on their calls.

Susan Schmitt Winchester describes the mechanism almost like a radar. We search out the people we have unresolved history with, and then we hook in. Her own hook is angry, aggressive authority figures, and she found them at every single company she worked for.

Schmitt Winchester is the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney, a keynote and TEDx speaker, and a former Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, a Fortune 500 and a Fortune 150, over a 36-year career. She spent eleven months blaming a team of nine men before she worked out that she was the constant.

── ✦ ──

Leaving Does Not Reset the Pattern

This is the expensive part for anyone running their own business.

You end the engagement. You dissolve the partnership. You reposition, raise your rates, change your niche. And the same personality walks through the door wearing different shoes.

Schmitt Winchester is blunt about why. If you leave without resolving your own reaction, you meet the same person at the next company, because the recognition is doing the selecting, not the market.

The action is not to tolerate bad clients. It is to notice which type keeps arriving, because that repetition is data about you and not about your luck.

── ✦ ──

The Role You Learned at Six Is Setting Your Rates

Schmitt Winchester describes five roles children take on to survive a difficult household, and her point is that we bring them straight into our working lives.

The hero never causes problems and carries the weight of the family. In business, the founder who cannot delegate, paying in burnout and in resentment from people who feel they can never measure up.

The enabler takes care of everyone and becomes the person the whole operation leans on, which only increases what comes their way. When the enabler finally quits, she says, the team discovers it was a house of cards held together by one person. If that describes your company, you did not build a business. You built a dependency.

The scapegoat reads as argumentative and oppositional, though she is quick to note they spot the risks nobody else will raise.

The lost child stays quiet to avoid being noticed, which is close to fatal when your income depends on visibility. The mascot uses humor to defuse tension, charming at first and wearing when the jokes get in the way of real work.

Every role has an upside. The cost only shows up when it runs unconsciously, which is another way of saying it is currently pricing your services for you.

── ✦ ──

“We have just roped them into our story and made them the villain.”

Susan Schmitt Winchester, co-author of Healing at Work and former Chief Human Resources Officer

── ✦ ──

Eleven Months, Undone by One Conversation She Was Avoiding

Early in her executive career, Schmitt Winchester joined a team that called themselves the pirates. For eleven months she tried to prove herself, and the harder she tried, the more she pushed them away.

Her coach ran an exercise instead of offering sympathy. Close your eyes, picture how these men see you, and name the animal.

She burst out laughing. A golden retriever puppy. All she wanted was for them to pat her on the head and tell her she was a good girl.

Then the coach reversed it. A gorilla. A grizzly bear. A wolf. A hyena circling. And then the question that ended it: is it possible your neediness is pushing them away?

So she picked a lioness, walked into the grizzly bear’s office unannounced, and asked him directly why he had never attended a single meeting she scheduled.

He looked away, looked back, said she was right, and never did it again. They became good friends, and she stayed with that team for years.

Count the conversations you are currently avoiding. Then price them at eleven months each.

── ✦ ──

Your Business Is the Best Practice Ground You Will Ever Get

Here is why this is a business topic and not only a wellness one.

You see the same clients, the same collaborators, the same dynamics, on repeat, with real money attached. That repetition is exactly what makes it a laboratory rather than a grind.

Schmitt Winchester’s point about neuroplasticity is the practical one. The brain builds pathways, the pathways can be rebuilt, and what rebuilds them is doing something different in a live situation rather than reading about it.

She is also clear that the fear does not go first. She still expects to feel worried before a hard conversation. Doing it while afraid is what builds the muscle, and there is no version where the muscle arrives before the reps.

── ✦ ──

What To Take With You

🔁 Same client type keeps arriving? That is recognition, not luck.

🏠 Enabler-run companies are dependencies, not businesses.

🦁 Name the avoided conversation. Have it this week.

🧠 Reps in live situations rebuild the pathway. Reading does not.

😬 The fear does not leave first. Go anyway.

── ✦ ──

Most business advice about difficult people is about managing them. Schmitt Winchester’s is about noticing that you keep casting the same person in the same role.

She is not asking you to keep bad clients or excuse bad behavior. She is pointing out that your reaction is the only part of the exchange you control, and it happens to be the part with the highest return.

So take one action this week. Find the conversation you have been putting off, and go have it, badly if necessary.

Susan Schmitt Winchester spent three decades and two Chief Human Resources Officer roles learning that the hard conversation is almost always shorter than the eleven months of avoiding it.

── ✦ ──

📄 Free Chapter 5: The chapter behind this conversation, on why the workplace can be where you heal rather than just where you cope, https://susanwinchester.kartra.com/page/fPv846

🎙️ Listen to the full episode with Susan Schmitt Winchester:

📺 YouTube:

🎧 Episode: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/workplace-triggers-are-showing-you-an-older-pattern--74336788

🎙️ Podcast Series: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/healing-at-work-clock-in-heal-up--7020703

── ✦ ──

About Susan Schmitt Winchester

Susan Schmitt Winchester is a keynote and TEDx speaker, an executive coach, and the co-author of Healing at Work with Martha Finney. Over a career of more than 36 years, she served as Chief Human Resources Officer for two public companies, a Fortune 500 and a Fortune 150, for a combined sixteen and a half years. She helps leaders and high performers see how patterns from their past are shaping their working relationships, and gives them practical tools for the moments that used to cost them months.

──────────────────────────────────────────

CONNECT WITH SUSAN SCHMITT WINCHESTER:

🌐 Website: https://www.susanwinchester.com

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/susanjschmittwinchester

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susanschmittwinchester/

📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/falcorspirit

📚 Book: Healing at Work, https://www.susanwinchester.com

📊 Free Assessment: https://susanwinchester.com/assessment/ ──────────────────────────────────────────