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We need a new definition of success—one that harmonizes meaning and money.
Imagine diving into your workday with renewed energy, leaving behind the exhaustion or dread of a monotonous grind.
Traditional beliefs about success and the root cause of burnout are the same:
Prove yourself.
Work harder.
Take care of the business, and it will take care of you.
We’re recycling the mindset and practices that keep us stuck. Our souls need a jumpstart into The Age of Humanity.
Tune in for a new way of working that honors our nervous system and the bottom line, using knowledge of the brain, the Bible, and business. We’ll discuss timeless truths that amplify growth, ignite change, and reshape the world of work. No corporate speak or business BS. Let’s get to the heart of a rewarding career and profitable growth.
We speak human about business.
What’s in it for You?
Value, Relevance, and Impact (VRI): No, it's not a new tech gadget—it's your ticket to making your work genuinely matter to you and your company.
Human-Centric Insights: We prioritize people over profits without sacrificing the bottom line. Think less "cog in the machine" and more "humans helping humans."
I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hesson, your thrive guide leading you into the new Age of Humanity. I’ve navigated the highs and lows of business and life, from achieving over $40 million in sales, teaching thousands of people around the world about leadership, trust, execution, and productivity to facing burnout, divorce, raising a couple of great humans (one with ADHD), and navigating the uncertainty of starting a business.
I’m committed to igniting change in the world by jumpstarting business into profitable growth with the timeless truths of our humanity.
Sound crazy? It’s only crazy until it works.
Hit subscribe to never miss an episode, and leave a review to help other listeners discover our show.
Want insight and advice on your real career and business challenges? Connect with me on social media or email me at rebecca@wethrive.live. Your story could spark our next conversation.
[00:00:00] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Welcome back to the Business is Human podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Fleetwood Hession, and we're here to bring you episodes that blend a meaningful work with profitable success. Here to steward what I call the Age of Humanity. I believe if we transform the way we work. We can transform the way that we live.
[00:00:28] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: As always, my friendly request, if you like what you hear, hit subscribe so you don't miss any episode and leave a review to tell the other humans that they might like it too. Always looking to help you and connect with others. All right, let's get into it, shall we?
[00:00:42] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Welcome back to the show for our final in the Stand Tall in Your Story series, the final talk in the series. And that is Amanda Smith with Share Your Genius who produces this podcast, so shout out to the team.This talk has so much meaning for me personally that I'm gonna share with you after we hear Amanda's story, which is about our obsession with how something ends, and what it could be in our lives to celebrate that each passing day is a new beginning and a fresh start and a new opportunity.
[00:01:28] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Let's hear Amanda's story, and then I'll be back to tell you a little bit about my story, and you don't want to miss it.
[00:01:34] Amanda Smith: All my life, I've been surrounded by stories. It started when I was little. My mom, she would sit in the hallway reading books to us aloud as kids. We were snuggled in our beds as we were drooling over the descriptions of food and feasts described in Redwall books, prayed that one day we too might receive our very own letters from Hogwarts, or find out that maybe, just maybe, one of our parents was in fact a Greek god from mythology, and we were tasked with a world-saving quest History lessons involved historical fiction novels, and every Friday we would pick a meal to make from that country and time period.
[00:02:29] Amanda Smith: Worlds, cultures, stories. I couldn't get enough. And I'm sure it was this foundational love of story that led me to have very, very vivid dreams.
[00:02:43] Amanda Smith: And I'll tell you, there was never one like the one I had when I was 10 years old. At that time, I had my best friend over for a sleepover, and we claimed the basement, much to the chagrin of my six other siblings, and pulled out the pull-out couch, threw up a pop-up tent, and settled in for a night of shenanigans.
[00:03:05] Amanda Smith: Now, I will say there's not much about that night that I do remember, but I can tell you that that night my life changed forever. Because in the middle of the night, I woke up with the bones of a world and characters and stories that just had to be written down. And so I scrambled through the house at 3:00 AM trying to find a pen and a notebook.
[00:03:31] Amanda Smith: And by the time my friend woke up, I had the first three chapters written. Over the next several years, that book became who I was. It was my personality, as they say. And those first 10 pages ended up being my college entrance essay into a creative writing program, and I went on to study story in all of its forms and fashions.
[00:03:59] Amanda Smith: And so I immersed myself in other people's stories even after college, while conveniently avoiding my own. Yeah. I can tell you after spending the last several months with all of these amazing women, that I wasn't the only one who wasn't paying enough attention to her own story.
[00:04:25] Amanda Smith: Every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, right?
[00:04:30] Amanda Smith: We all know that. And so I was convinced that I was always at the beginning trying to figure out what the heck my ending was. That's how stories are written, right? In order to begin, you have to know the ending I stand here before you today and laugh at that thought because it's very logical, it's very planned, it's very businesslike.
[00:05:02] Amanda Smith: What's the end goal? What's the outcome we want to achieve? As somebody who's helping build a business, those questions cross my mind daily, hourly, in fact. And while there are a lot of good things that I can take from my work life and apply to my home life, I started to treat my entire life like it was a Gantt chart and an Asana board.
[00:05:29] Amanda Smith: Resonate with anybody? Yeah. And so I had to stop and ask myself, are we really writing our own story, or are we just making the next best decisions as we live out our lives? And if that's the case, let's imagine for a few seconds longer. What if we had the ability to make our stories whatever we wanted them to be?
[00:05:58] Amanda Smith: Novel concept, right? Maybe a little more adventurous, a little more romantic, maybe even a little more slow. I wanted that.
[00:06:12] Amanda Smith: And so that got me thinking, well, then maybe the ending isn't really all that important after all. In fact, maybe every sentence is a new beginning. And isn't that what keeps life interesting and exciting?
[00:06:30] Amanda Smith: I mean, think about it. That way we're always creating, we're always evolving. I don't know about you, but I'm not the same person I was 10 years ago, a year ago, yesterday. Heck, I'm standing on this stage in front of you guys. I wouldn't have been doing that yesterday, right? I have had so many experiences that have brought me to where I am, who have made me who I have become, and the journey that I'm on has so many more experiences for me to live to make me who I'll be tomorrow.
[00:07:11] Amanda Smith: And so now I'm learning still to enjoy every new beginning and not be so focused on that ending. Because the reality is the time between right now and that ending, it's my life. And so when the people who have been the characters in my story gather around to tell it, I'd like it to be a memorable one
[00:07:43]
[00:07:48] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Now, what's interesting about Amanda's story, well, there's lots of things. A- as soon as I knew what she was going to talk about, I had this sense that that was going to be the finale talk for the season, for season seven, because it was just a beautiful, way to end the show and say we're always beginning.
[00:08:09] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: We always have a fresh start, and that's such a hopeful and true look at our lives. I think especially as business people, we're just obsessed with looking for the problems and fixing the problems, and we can tell you what the problems are and what challenges are. But we don't have a very good version of great expectation to be able to say, "
[00:08:35] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: What are you excited about?What if it goes better than you can ask, think, or imagine?" Amanda's story reminds us that we are always writing a new story if we choose to. And so I had this just knowing, back in January that that was going to be the final talk of the show.
[00:08:54] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Now, most people didn't know is all throughout season seven of the Rise and Thrive Experience, I was having conversations with God about, "Is this the final one?"
[00:09:06] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Because it was sevens. It was seven women spending seven months coaching with me, and then getting on a stage telling a seven-minute talk. And seven biblically is the number of completion, perfection, when everything j- just completes, and the number eight then is about new beginnings. I had this inkling so much that it might be the last one that when, Angie Woods, who you heard her talk a few weeks ago, when she was talking to me about being a part of the Rise and Thrive Experience, she said, "I'm gonna be the first one to sign up for season eight."
[00:09:41] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: " I'm just not ready this year." And I said, casually, Holy Spirit guided, over coffee, "What if this is the last one?" ' Cause she was really set on the number eight and new beginnings. And I said, "Well, 2026, six plus two is eight. Maybe this is it." And she ran with that, and she jumped in, so we actually had eight women this year for the first time instead of seven.
[00:10:05] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And so after the season ended, the event was in March, I went into prayerful discussion just before my birthday in April, ' cause I always look at my birthday as kind of the start of my new year And I had fasted for three days, and then sat down with the Lord and said, "I want to spend the day with you."
[00:10:28] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Spent six hours praying and asking the Lord for guidance. " I want to spend the day with you, and I want you to show me what doesn't go into this next season, this next year of my and what does. Like, let's break off anything that doesn't belong, and, what do I need to know start afresh this year?"
[00:10:50] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And so I had several questions that I took to him and got really good answers. And on this one in particular, I said, "Lord, are we doing this next year or And then I opened my Bible to a never random page, and there on the page it said- " On the seventh year, we stop working the land and all the debts will be canceled."
[00:11:13] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And I said, "Well, there's the answer." And sometimes it just be like that. Again, I had been fasting and preparing myself to hear from the Lord because I want Him to be the CEO of my life and my business. And so what I thought was a great ending to season seven was prophetically the ending to all of Stand Tall in Your Stories.
[00:11:41] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It was the final talk.
[00:11:42] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And nothing could have made it more perfect as the final talk because I just finished writing another book called The Counterfeit Life that I'm editing right now, and I'm excited to continue the work I've been doing with leaders of small and mid-sized businesses, trades companies, to help make what is largely invisible governing our lives and decisions, nervous system and the subconscious world as well as the spiritual, um, world.
[00:12:14] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Combining those two things and bringing it into business is what I'm super excited about. I don't know exactly what's next other than I've already been doing that kind of coaching and that kind of speaking. In fact, I have a talk coming up in a couple weeks called Why Can't We All Just Get Along?
[00:12:31] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That I'm excited to, to give to more companies. if that's something you're interested in talking to me about, let's do it. And I've got capacity to take on some new coaching clients, so if that's you, let's chat about it.
[00:12:44] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So as I wrap up this series, the Stand Tall in Your Story podcast series for season seven, it's also a wrap on this chapter of my story, and I am completely at peace and excited about what's next. It's like Seinfeld. Sometimes we just wanna go out on top. The event had grown 600%. We had 400 people there this year, I'm really proud of that, and I'm really proud of the work that I got to do with these women, and from their words based on them hearing the announcement, life-changing work. And I can't wait to continue to do life-changing work on a broader scale, inside businesses.
[00:13:23] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So that's all for now, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for being here, and until next time, make it a great day. Love you, mean it.
[00:13:32] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Thanks for being here. You can follow us on Instagram, Business Is Human, or TikTok, Rebecca Fleetwood Hession. It's a great way to share some of the clips with your colleagues and friends. Alright, make it a great day. Love you, mean it!