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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?
[00:00:43] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Before we dive into our next speaker in the Stand Tall in Your Story series, I wanna ask you a question. How much of your energy this week, let's just narrow it down to this week, went into proving something. Proving that you belonged in a meeting, proving that you're worth your title, proving you can handle it, pick your poison.
[00:01:09] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Because it is kind of poison. We don't usually call it that. We usually call it ambition or work ethic. It's our drive. But what's happening in our nervous system, and we've, you're gonna start to see a bit of a theme in these talks is what business has created in so many of us, which is. Contingent self-worth.
[00:01:36] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I'm only worthy if, and it's if I have the title, if I make this much money, if I get a good review and research shows, it's one of the most expensive patterns that our nervous system can run because it costs us creativity. Great long-term decision making. Leadership capacity. Capacity for the relationships with the people that matter most in our lives.
[00:02:08] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It has a high cost, and when your sense of value is tied to outcomes that you can't fully control, you can't control how someone else. Thinks about you or feels about you, then your nervous system is in this constant state of vigilance trying to prepare for every eventuality because you can't control how other people feel about you.
[00:02:39] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: You are running on this low grade activation, which shuts off the things that you really need and want in your life, in your career, That's one of the themes that you're gonna hear from Michelle Lay a controller at Certa Prop Painters.
[00:02:56] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Uh, she's also gonna talk about how our identity gets formed, but what we can do if we want to change some of the, patterns that exist from our early days in life. All right, let's hear from Michelle.
[00:03:14] Michelle Lea: I've spent my whole life trying to prove myself to be seen in school and work with family, with friends. Growing up, I was called the shy one. Every time I see my grandma, I'm reminded of the story of how she took me to the neighbor's house and I hid behind her and wouldn't say a word. Or there's the story of my sister who's just 16 months older than I am.
[00:03:41] Michelle Lea: Anytime someone would ask me a question, she would jump in front of me and say, this is my sister Michelle. She's five years old, and she's shy. I got in trouble in school for not talking. Instead of getting a call saying, your child's talking too much. My mom got a call saying, your child's not answering questions in class, and that's a problem.
[00:04:05] Michelle Lea: So much of my childhood and honestly adulthood too, has been trying not to let anyone down to do what I thought everyone else needed from me. And it took me a long time to realize something simple, but life changing. I don't actually have anything to prove so much of my life. I've been listening and observing to what's going on around me.
[00:04:28] Michelle Lea: And as adult Michelle standing here on the stage, I can now see that for the beauty and benefit that holds. I grew up in a blended family. My parents divorced when I was pretty much still a baby. I was the youngest of four girls, and when my mom remarried, we became a family of six kids, five girls and one boy.
[00:04:49] Michelle Lea: We grew up in a ranch style home with one bathroom. Can you imagine the chaos in that house with six girls and two boys and only one shower? I'm honestly not sure how we survived, but apparently we managed. Being one of the youngest, I had the privilege of watching, listening and learning for my older siblings.
[00:05:11] Michelle Lea: That's a lot of lessons on what to do and what not to do. And since some of my families in the audience, I'll let everyone else know that those lessons learned is the reason why I am the favorite child. Being a blended family, we didn't have a typical rhythm or routine. We did shuffle between houses every other weekend for the most part.
[00:05:33] Michelle Lea: To visit my dad.
[00:05:35] Michelle Lea: My dad's battle with the demons of addiction really tuned me in for love and empathy for those who love us, but can't love us the way they want to. Life with dad also came with a few adventures, such as joining him at the bar you never forget singing karaoke with a bunch of drunk adults until the wee hours of the morning when you're just a child yourself.
[00:05:59] Michelle Lea: It is obviously not an ideal condition for a child, but what I know now is God was giving me the wisdom, strength, love, and empathy for others that I still use in beautiful ways today.
[00:06:20] Michelle Lea: Gimme one second. Thank you.
[00:06:28] Michelle Lea: And when a young girl living in chaotic conditions needs stability, God will bring it to her. When I was just 13 years old, I started dating a boy who was 16. That boy is now my husband. We've been together for 24 years and married for 15. It's been so beautiful to grow up together, to change over the years and still be in love.
[00:06:53] Michelle Lea: He is and will forever be my person. My number one, the one God knew I needed when it was time to start our family. We thought it would happen quickly, but it didn't. My husband's childhood, cancer treatments presented some challenges we didn't anticipate. At one of the many doctor's appointments, I asked the doctor, what are the chances of us conceiving on our own?
[00:07:18] Michelle Lea: And he looked at us and said, without help, it's very unlikely. We were devastated. There were tears, prayers, and many moments of wondering why things weren't happening the way we thought they should. But then our miracle came. Our first daughter, Charlie, was born, but only after we let go and fully gave it to God.
[00:07:40] Michelle Lea: Then three years later, we were blessed again with another beautiful baby girl, Tegan, completing our family of four. And you know what? The doctor was right. We did need help. We needed God's help. As my family was growing, my dad's life was slipping away. He was falling deeper into addiction at this point in my life.
[00:08:03] Michelle Lea: I desperately wanted a relationship with him, one that I had missed out on for so many years due to his addiction and the time he spent in prison. But in August of 2022. My dad got really sick and was admitted to the hospital. I knew he was really sick this time. Early that Sunday morning, I arrived at the hospital before any of my other sisters, and within 30 minutes of me arriving at the hospital as I stood by his side and let him know that I was there.
[00:08:34] Michelle Lea: My dad went into cardiac arrest. I watched helplessly as the nurses and doctors rushed in and began CPR. They tried to bring him back. I'm not sure how much time passed or how many times I heard the words no pulse, but I had to be the one to tell 'em to stop. To see your parent leave this world in such a traumatic way was too much.
[00:09:04] Michelle Lea: Honestly, some days it still is. People often say about those living with addiction when they pass away, that they lost their battle. But I had been praying for my dad since I was a child. I found out at his funeral that just a couple of weeks prior to his passing, he had gone to church and given his life to Jesus.
[00:09:25] Michelle Lea: My dad didn't lose the battle. God rescued him from it.
[00:09:34] Michelle Lea: I've learned that the hard moments, the ones where we wanna grip tighter and fix everything can become some of the most transformational. So I ask you tonight, what are you holding onto that you need to let go of? What are the things that you need to release to God? As I stand tall on this stage tonight, here's what I've learned through it all.
[00:09:54] Michelle Lea: Life is messy. We have good days and we have really difficult days, but we don't have to do it alone. Lean into those around you, your family, your friends, badass women's groups such as Rise and Thrive, but more importantly, lean into God. I am asking you to join me and releasing what we can't control and leaning into the truths he promises us.
[00:10:20] Michelle Lea: I'll end with this verse that was shared with me recently. That's not only stuck for my story, but the phase of life that I'm in right now, and I know there's someone else who may need to hear it too. Two, his word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path and the good days and in the difficult days.
[00:10:39] Michelle Lea: God is lighting the way. So stand up and just take the next step.
[00:10:49] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Don't you just love her? Now, if you are like most of us, when we watched that video or listened to that video for the first time, your brain probably did a couple of things. It connected with her story and maybe triggered a memory of your own, That's what we're designed to do. And that's not just empathy, which empathy is a beautiful thing, but that's your nervous system is sensing patterns in others and asking yourself, am I connected to this person in some way?
[00:11:29] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And Michelle's story illustrates some common themes for most people. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about what's happening in Michelle's story. It's a masterclass in how your identity gets wired and how it runs on, sometimes, uh, an original childhood wound for many years until we become, aware of it and learn how to shift it.
[00:11:58] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Michelle was labeled pretty early. There's the shy one, as she talked about. Gave illustrations of how her sister reinforced that teachers reported it as a problem. And so then her nervous system, which at that age is its most formative stage, encoded that not just as a label or an opinion, but as a fact about her safety.
[00:12:26] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Now, here's why that matters. This matters for leaders your life right now, the brain doesn't store childhood experience as memories. The way we like store a file on a computer, it stores them as predictions. Your nervous system's job is always from the day you're born, is to predict what the world requires of you to stay safe.
[00:12:57] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And to belong, and it learns it fast and it builds a pattern around it. So the shy one doesn't just become an identity, it becomes an instruction. Stay small. Don't speak unless you're sure. Watch and wait before you move. And the child who learns to watch and listen and observe. To survive, which is, you know, a childhood thing.
[00:13:28] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: that's a pattern that
[00:13:30] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: develops so then she brings that pattern into adulthood, into career, all of us have these experiences. It's not just Michelle. whatever type of experiences you had in your youth formed a pattern. That told you this is what's required to stay safe. and so you can kinda look back on your own experience and ask yourself some questions about that because Michelle also showed us that we don't have to stay there.
[00:14:06] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So Michelle reframed what? Look like a deficit in her quietness, in her, observational way of being. As the gift that shaped her capacity for empathy in the way that she listens and, connects with her team, with her family. It really is for her now a gift. She's able to read a room very quickly. listen for not just what's being said, but what isn't being said.
[00:14:46] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And again, we talked about this, in Kate's story, it's post-traumatic growth. There's something happened that your nervous system read as a traumatic experience, but then Michelle took it and said, actually, that's what makes me great, and. When there is adversity that gets processed through to give it meaning, rather than we're going to either stuff it, avoid it, it actually rewires the brain to greater resilience and, emotional intelligence, empathy, the things that Michelle's using in a beautiful way in her leadership and in her parenting, and in all ways of her life.
[00:15:30] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: it wasn't just about surviving chaos of childhood. I don't know anybody, especially the high achievers that I surround myself with that has some perfect nirvana childhood that they're leaning into none, zero, no. Perfect childhood experience. It's not, that's just not a thing. And so. The way that we choose to process through our experiences, and be shaped by it, that is where we can take, control and influence over our future and not just be a victim of circumstance.
[00:16:08] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So the proving pattern, the one that she names so. Eloquently and clearly in this talk. we've also talked about in the last, episode with, um, the other Michelle, Michelle Clendenning contingent self-worth. It's such a pattern that I see throughout all of my clients because business is a big part of that.
[00:16:31] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: But let's, let's roll the tape back even further and let's talk about school. If we're gonna talk about contingent self-worth and working for grades. Or even sports. most developmental years are
[00:16:48] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: based on patterns of contingent self-worth. Am I gonna be on the honor roll? Am I gonna be picked for the varsity team?
[00:16:58] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Am I going like.
[00:16:59] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It's not great y'all as a societal pattern. It's not helping us because then it just perpetuates. And the studies are very clear that people with contingent self-worth, hardwired into their patterns, experience higher anxiety, greater fear of failure, if you're listening to all these episodes from Stand Tall back to Back, it's gonna start to sound like a broken record, but it reduces our ability to be creative, innovative, and make great long-term decision.
[00:17:28] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So the very drive to prove yourself undermines the performance that you're actually trying to prove. It's what I call the counterfeit. Which is a book that I just finished writing that's in the editing stages. Can't wait to bring that to you. the Counterfeit Life, your nervous system cannot fully access its greatest and highest capacity when its sense of safety is attached to results that it can't fully control.
[00:17:59] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: There's the punchline, but as Michelle illustrated in her talk. She doesn't have anything to prove. And so a big part of her transformation in our time together in this experience was her learning to regulate her nervous system so that she could get access to greater decision making and come to that conclusion fully.
[00:18:25] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Like, wait a minute, I don't have anything to prove. Once that comes from a regulated nervous system, then she can start to look at the beliefs that are, we're running those patterns and make the shifts that she wanted to make to live the life that she wants to live now. Michelle's story really, illustrates a framework that I used with, these ladies in our coaching, I call it the aligned framework, which is just the culmination of what's happening under the level of consciousness of our nervous system state, our beliefs and our patterns.
[00:19:06] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Form together and make a decision before it even gets to your prefrontal cortex, where you're gonna have an actual conscious thought about it. And so I like to make what has largely been subconscious conscious so you can make better decisions. So I wanna walk through that as it relates, to Michelle's story because it does all map directly to it.
[00:19:30] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So.
[00:19:31] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: This is the framework that you would use. This is the framework that I use with all of my clients, including these speakers. Before you make a single decision, before you do anything, you're going to assess your nervous system. State, do I feel safe? Do I feel threatened? Am I basically, you're asking yourself, am I connected?
[00:19:54] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Do I feel like I can really connect with someone else? Or do I feel activated where I feel like I'm protecting myself? So check that first because your nervous system state makes decisions for you below the level of consciousness. And so if you can take matters into your hands to manage
[00:20:17] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: your nervous system state, you're stuck in the deck in your favor.
[00:20:22] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Second, then your beliefs. Weigh in, not the values that you state are important, your actual beliefs. Example of that, many people will state that family is the most important thing to them, but their beliefs that are running the show are afraid to rest. And take the breaks that they need to spin with family, because if they rest, they're a slacker or they're afraid they're gonna get behind.
[00:20:56] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And so you state that family is really important, but when it's time to leave to get to the practice or the soccer game, you, are late or have to miss it because you're afraid to. Forego work for family like you, you value it, you want it, but your belief system, unless you, actively change it, is gonna override your values.
[00:21:22] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So your beliefs are formed by every experience, every label, every story that has been told about you, that you've. heard about yourself, told yourself about yourself. So, Michelle's belief that was running, you know, silently beneath her ambition for many, many years was, I have to prove myself so I'm worth paying attention to.
[00:21:43] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And that belief shaped all of her decisions and how hard she worked and how much she took on, and how little she asked for help. Then the patterns takes over and your patterns take over because your nervous system wants to be really efficient. It wants to use the least amount of energy as possible. So it creates this pattern like a well-worn path in the woods that you're always gonna take because it's the fastest route.
[00:22:10] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It's the one, you know. So Michelle's pattern was to observe to over-function and never let anyone see her struggle, you know? Sound familiar. Like many of my clients have this same loop that plays for different reasons. then Michelle made changes. she wasn't gonna change her pattern by working harder.
[00:22:33] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: That's just reinforcing the pattern that already exists. She changed it I don't think she'd ever she'd done it, but I don't think she'd talked about it in the way that we talk about it. in our coaching, she surrendered it. She surrendered it all, not in defeat, but surrendered in the truest sense, releasing in the outcomes and letting go of what she couldn't control.
[00:22:58] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Her example of infertility is. A perfect example of this. The doctor said, Hey, it's unlikely that you're going to conceive without help. And she and her husband tried and then tried to manage. It wasn't, you know, working. They didn't have the, the funds to go through a lot of the extraordinary efforts. And then, she gave it to God she surrendered it, guess what?
[00:23:26] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: As her story said, that's when, she was able to conceive. And the thing about surrendering and faith in God is many of my clients and my friends, most everybody I know, especially in the business world, has in some way struggled with identity. Who am I really? When we surrender to God, then we get to ask ourselves, well, who does God say that I'm?
[00:23:54] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Because our identity is in Christ, and that is the safest place to put your identity. It takes all the bets and the bargaining off the table and takes you to truth. And so neuroscience actually has language for it because you know what science is? Science is. When humans observe what God has created and give it names and labels, it's observing, uh, what God had already created and stated in scripture.
[00:24:26] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And the more I've studied it, it actually makes me giggle. And that's a lot of the book that I just wrote, which is the intersection of business success, neuroscience, and Scripture. I can't wait for you to read it, but neuroscience has language for this in a framework of acceptance and commitment Therapy.
[00:24:43] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Research consistently shows that releasing the illusion of control, what psychologists call experimental acceptance. See, they're just fancy names for what God already said he was creating for us. I'm not mad about it. reduces the threat. Activation in the nervous system and actually increases the capacity for Wait for it.
[00:25:06] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Drum roll please. Creative problem solving and resilience. I mean, how many different ways do you want me to say it? I can keep going. Holding on instead of surrendering costs us more than we know. And Michelle paid that cost for years before she found. This release. Now, when I write about, this in the book called The Counterfeit Life, the word surrender is a religious word.
[00:25:35] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: I'm not really a big fan of religion, but I love Jesus. the word that the Bible uses is to submit, and I love the word submit, especially for us as business people. 'cause we submit proposals, we submit our financials, we submit, which is, here it is. Can we work together? And I think that's a much
[00:25:54] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: better term for us in business because surrender feels like giving up.
[00:26:00] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It feels like, failure. And that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about getting the promotion of submitting our lives to the one who created it all. That's an upgrade baby. that's a promotion. That's not a failure. I love knowing that I've studied, you know, all of the etymology of the.
[00:26:19] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Languages of the Bible, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic. And it is, fun to see what many of those words mean at their purest form before we change the language share. And there to make it simpler. Sometimes we, miss the plot when we updated, upgraded Bible language, but that's for another day. But the alignment framework back to the, the real story.
[00:26:42] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: We're here to talk about. The Align framework really asks three questions. what state is your nervous system in right now? What belief is running beneath that state and what pattern is that belief producing automatically Before you learn this, below your level of awareness, in your leadership, in your relationships, your work, your life, and so Michelle's story.
[00:27:07] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Is an invitation to all three. And that's, that's the kind of work that we did before people get on stage and the work that they're called to continue to do after. It's an ongoing journey of, of how we do life once we learn how well it works. So in Michelle's case, I wanna go even a layer deeper than the Align framework because.
[00:27:33] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Michelle deserves that, especially with what she shares near the end of her talk. she loses her father real time bedside, she's the one who has to make the call, that's a human story in its rawest form. And what she does with it is what I wanna talk about because she reframes the ending. And, you know, her father, as you talked about, who had battled addiction his whole life, wanted to get clean, tried, just couldn't quite get there, and in and outta prison because of those battles, wasn't able to love her the way that she needed him to.
[00:28:19] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Quite frankly, the way that I'm sure that he and his soul and his heart wanted to, when she found out that he gave his life to Jesus just weeks before he died, she said something. We had a really beautiful conversation as she was preparing this story, and we both came to this beautiful understanding that her dad didn't lose the battle.
[00:28:45] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: God rescued him from it. that's just beautiful when you think about it. So that's a belief. Reframe that at the deepest possible level. And it matters. It matters for us as leaders because. What the research shows about meaning making and the way that we process information in our brains that we are able to construct narratives around our most painful experiences.
[00:29:19] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And it's. Again, fancy neuroscience word, redemptive sequence. When we're able to do that, shift the story, and it's still the truth, but we're able to shift the story, then we're able to get to a greater level of psychological wellbeing. We're able to, mature through this. And people can find meaning in really hard chapters.
[00:29:45] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: You can find meaning in really tough business situations. You can find a reason to let it tank you, or you can find a reason to help you rise in every situation. But when we use it to rise, we're more grounded. We're more generous. It's not just for that moment in time, it changes who we are.
[00:30:12] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It uplevels us. And then we carry that story, that redemptive story with us into the next challenge or the next opportunity, a greater, better version of ourselves. And Michelle closed with, a scripture. Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path. that's not just a religious statement.
[00:30:35] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: It's a leadership posture. it describes that you don't need the full plan. You don't need complete certainty before you make a move. You need enough light for the next step, when we do an A next step. The science says that the brain wants forward momentum instead of spinning in anxiety and wondering and afraid to take a next step.
[00:31:04] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: You don't wait until you can see the whole picture. You just take the next visible step with the light that you have. that's good theology. It's good neuroscience, it's good leadership. Actually, that's my favorite thing. When all of those threads, are woven together, that's where you get some real strength.
[00:31:24] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: So here's your question. As you go into the rest of your week, what are you holding onto right now that is costing your nervous system more than you realize that you've come to some realizations through this, that you might need to submit some things to? God who created you? What belief is running your patterns that was handed to you before you were old enough to even question it?
[00:31:58] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: Well, guess what? Now you're old enough and you're allowed to question it. You're not only allowed to question it, you're allowed to stop believing it. You're allowed to trade it in. My favorite thing to trade in old beliefs that aren't serving me is to trade it for God's promises, because that I know I can be sure of.
[00:32:22] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: And what would it look like in your work, in your team, your home, just to take a next step on something that you've been thinking about? Just one little step and just see what kind of momentum that one step might make. You don't have anything to proof, and I'm so glad that Michelle stood on that stage in front of 400 people and said those words out loud so that we can continue to say them to ourselves and each other because I want you to believe that too.
[00:32:56] Rebecca Fleetwood Hession: There's a whole new level waiting for you when you do. All right. Y'all love, you made it.
[00:33:02] 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!