Balance & Beyond Podcast

What happens when a corporate CEO dares to embrace her spiritual side?

In this soul-stirring conversation, Sara shares her extraordinary journey from buttoned-up business leader to what she calls a "soul explorer" – without abandoning her executive responsibilities or strategic mindset.

The catalyst? A profound encounter following her stepfather's death when Frank Sinatra's "My Way" mysteriously played through her car speakers while her display showed a completely different song. This unexplainable moment cracked open her perception of reality and possibility, launching her into a spiritual awakening that would transform how she approached both business and life.

Sara reveals her gradual emergence from the "spiritual closet," first sharing her experiences with trusted colleagues, then eventually reading her poetry (which she describes as "transmissions" received in the night) at corporate board meetings where she serves as chair. The surprising result? Rather than facing ridicule, she discovered that approximately 95% of CEOs and philanthropists resonated with spiritual concepts in some way.

This revelation challenges our assumptions about the business world: "We're all in the closet. Everyone's in the closet," Sara observes. Perhaps most powerfully, she shares how shifting from constantly proving her worth to simply trusting her purpose freed her from impostor syndrome: "I may never feel worthy... But what I have learned to do is just trust. I trust that I am there for something bigger."

For ambitious women navigating their own balance between professional demands and deeper meaning, this conversation offers both validation and practical wisdom. The journey doesn't require dramatic spiritual experiences or leaving the corporate world behind—it simply begins with creating space to listen to yourself more deeply and trusting the intuitive nudges that often contradict your logical mind.

Ready to explore how bringing your whole self to work might transform your leadership and life? Listen now, and discover what might be possible when you open your own spiritual closet.

Episode Transcript

INTRO: Welcome to Balance and Beyond, the podcast for ambitious women who refuse to accept burnout as the price of success. Here, we’re committed to empowering you with the tools and strategies you need to achieve true balance, where your career, relationships and health all thrive, and where you have the power to define success on your own terms. I honor the space you’ve created for yourself today, so take a breath, and let's dive right in…

 

Jo (Host) (00:24.747)

Welcome to Balance and Beyond. And today I am joined by Sarah, a guest who is a CEO turned sole explorer who we've managed to meet in a way through a platform, but it turns out that we have a lot in common. So think you're going to have a very hopefully interesting and enlightened conversation.

 

Sara Byers (Guest) (00:51.407)

Jo, thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.

Jo (Host) (00:54.743)

Well, it's lovely to meet you. Now I'm curious, you call yourself CEO turned soul explorer as part of your profile. What does that mean?

Sara Byers (Guest) (01:03.662)

Hmm, such a good question. And I will say what it means to me. I am still a CEO. And so I oversee my family's business and have for about 20 years. But over the last five years, I've started to explore different parts of myself and different parts of the world and the unseen. And I feel like I'm just peeling back layers of all of it. So to me, that's where my curiosity lies now.

It is in sort of discovering what lives around us that I may never have recognized or understood before. And it's been so incredibly gratifying and really changed my life in a lot of ways. So that's why I say that because I don't identify as a CEO any longer without putting that with it because they're so important. Yeah.

Jo (Host) (02:03.639)

But I'm guessing you don't strike me as someone who maybe, you know, if you go stereotypical, up in a hippie commune and wore floral garlands and you're a very, you know, logical business minded person. How did you come to this journey? It's this, this part I feel is so fascinating and important for us to shed light on the many paths that we evolve as humans.

 

Sara Byers (Guest) (02:28.51)

That's such a good question. And I think, yes, you're absolutely right. I mean, I'm PNL and balance sheet and strategy and vision and all of the things. And that is really where my intellectualism and mind stayed. I would have glimmers of this throughout my life. I would have glimmers when I would take a leap that didn't actually make any sense intellectually, but I could just feel it.

It would come through when I was writing speeches because I would write them in flow. Like I remember my first college commencement speech I wrote in 10 minutes because it just, I don't know, it just almost came through me. But the sort of more significant path started in 2020 for me when I lost my stepfather. And he had had Alzheimer's for 12 years and he went into hospice.

And I was driving back and forth for 12 days, back and forth to hospice and my family at home. And I would listen to the soundtrack from the Titanic movie because I just wanted to like feel it all. I mean, that sounds so ominous, but I'm like, really exactly. mean, that's insight into me, but I like, I really wanted to feel it because my stepfather and I really connected in this beautiful way I couldn't really articulate at the time when he had Alzheimer's.

And so he passed away after 12 days and I drove home listening to my soundtrack. And when I pulled onto my road, I was like, okay, now that needs to be done. I'm gonna turn on different music. So I pulled up the Lumineers and their song Ophelia and that's what was showing on my radio screen. But there was a totally different song playing out of the speakers and it was Frank Sinatra's 'My Way.'

And so it said, now the end is near, so I face the final curtain. And I'm like, my screen does not say that. The music is, and I knew that that somehow was my stepfather communicating with me. And I sat in front of the garage, tears rolling down my face, the music blasting in my ears, and I could just feel the same spirit that I felt. of him when he was alive.

But I still, I'm like, come on, is that it really? I don't know. And the next couple weeks he would come in my dreams and one night he told me that he was with my mom in the kitchen and the next day my mom said that was the first night she'd made dinner for herself.

But still, I wasn't sure I was gonna start exploring. So that's when I became Reiki certified because I'm like, I hear about this energy thing, I'm gonna check that out. I read a ton of books. My mom, who is a scientist, very linear thinker, also started reading a bunch of books about the afterlife. And there was this one medium that resonated with her. And I decided to get my mom a session with this medium and it was a seven month wait.

And so on Christmas Eve that year, my mom got on the phone with this medium who is across the country. We've never met her. And she gets on the phone and she says, there is a gentleman here and he is singing. Does Frank Sinatra's My Way mean anything to you? And that for my mind was what I needed to completely trust. That the things that I had been feeling, hearing, exploring were all valid and true. And so then it was almost like everything that I'd believed to be impossible all of a sudden became possible and there were no longer, there's no longer any limitations whatsoever in my life. I just trust what comes in every way. But I would say, you know, that experience really upended everything.

Jo (Host) (06:41.632)

Yeah. And so what started to as you almost looked at your life with a completely different lens?

Sara Byers (Guest) (06:47.694)

My gosh, it was almost like peeling an onion within oneself because the more that I explored this space, the more I started to listen to myself in a different way. so I would, because I was able to feel energy, I was feeling myself and exploring myself and uncovering different parts, so that I realized I was so much bigger, I guess.

I don't like that word, but so much more encompassing than I'd ever felt that I was. And this recognition that everyone around me is and was as well. it's sort of, I became enraptured with awe and wonder of almost everything. And that awe became a further gateway into the recognition of this interconnectedness, that then I had to figure out how to bind together with the profit and loss statement in the balance sheet. and I guess I would say that the awe and wonder

Jo (Host) (08:01.942)

Woo and numbers. They don't really go together.

Sara Byers Guest() (08:15.662)

Yeah, I have come to understand that it's probably similar for you, to became so strong. Like I was not going to let this go because I found so much of myself. Like I almost, never realized I'd been kind of running away from myself for a long time. I had pretty severe anxiety when I was younger and was still kind of racing from achievement to achievement to almost... outrun the things that I needed to face to be able to get to this place.

And once I'd gotten there, nothing was going to turn me back to the other way. Even if I had, you it was like, can't be in business any longer, or you can't serve on any boards any longer, you can't be part of community work any longer. I don't think I would have been like, okay, I have to be this person. So yeah, it's become the most important thing.

Jo (Host) (09:09.718)

How did you face, how did you have the courage to face into that? Because I know a lot of women are, we use the word say waking up or exploring spirituality or recognizing that there's a part of them that they have abandoned or run away from. But it can come with stigma. It can come with, my God, you've turned into this woo person and you've lost your edge and now you're becoming soft and fluffy. How did you have the courage to reconcile those parts and still navigate life?

Sara Byers (Guest) (09:39.871)

Mmm, such a good question. Yeah. Yeah. You know, at first I didn't. I mean, at first I was really, I was like in hiding. that's, yeah, right, exactly. I was like, because I, you know, about a year after my stepfather's death, I started what I would say receiving words in the middle of the night.

Jo (Host) (09:50.742)

Spiritual closet, they call it, I found out. It's a spiritual closet.

Sara Byers (Guest) (10:07.79)

Haha, yes. Those words, I call them poems, although they're almost like transmissions. I wouldn't always remember them in the morning. And I've written about 3,000 of them. And they provided such an amazing foundation for me as I was sort of moving through the world. And eventually, would, so I started putting those out on Instagram. Okay, so one a day, because I'm like, what in the world am I supposed to do with all of this?

And I eventually started to just dip my toe into communicating this with certain people, certain colleagues, certain people. So it wasn't like this just massive like, here I am. It was more progressive than that.

And what I came to find is that, first of all, 95 % of the CEOs and philanthropists that I would communicate with because I'm sort of sometimes on a lunch and coffee circuit, 95 % of them would resonate with us in some way. And that blew my mind. I didn't expect that. you know, different varieties, different spaces within.

But I think the curiosity that you know, we hold curiosity often in business. We have to because we're in this entrepreneurial space and mindset. so curiosity is a big part of it. And the people that are involved are often curious about these aspects of life as well. So that that really helped. And then I found that these relationships became so deep.

I had connections and and friendships that were more expansive because of the sharing of this space. And so the more I did that, it just builds on itself. So it builds, you tell another person it builds, then people start to sort of come to you with what they're facing and you just build this invisible almost community within. And so I got a lot of strength from that.

And so that would be my recommendation to someone is to just start out small, you know, within your professional sphere with people who you trust. So that then you can start to build. Now, I don't care at all because, and so, you know, I recently was chair of a business organization here that represents the top CEOs in our state. And as chair of the board, I speak in the beginning of meetings and I was like, okay, this, just woke one morning and I'm like, 

This meeting, I'm gonna start with one of my poems. No one has any idea that I even write poetry. I am the third female chair in the organization's history, so I may very well be taking a bit of a risk by doing this, but I'm doing it. And it was amazing to me after because all of the women in the room came up to me and said, that was so brave. Like, my gosh, that was so courageous.

And then the men in the room would text me and say, "I write as well." And it was just, it was so interesting.

Jo (Host) (13:29.271)

That's so interesting! We're all in the closet. Everyone's in the closet!

Sara Byers  (Guest) (13:40.275)

I know and we don't know we're in the closet. It's just amazing. So yeah, you know, then it just gets bigger and bigger. So now it's just, it is who I am. I will say that there are moments when I, because I dealt with imposter syndrome within my life. So I, there are moments when I'm like, am I the person that this board needs? You know, I'm on a college board, I'm chairing it. I'm just like, am I the person?

Like I'm up here in the clouds in the sky, but I then just tweak it and realize that I have been placed here for a reason and that maybe that part of myself, the ability to show that vulnerability heart and connection to something greater is actually what even this table needs. So yeah, that's what I tell myself.

Jo (Host) (14:29.451)

Hmm. What would you suggest or have you as, as you've almost flung open the doors of your closet and said, look at me and everyone else goes, my gosh, I can show her my dude. And it's this whole kind of closet opening thing happening for somebody who maybe hasn't had a death in the family or such a visceral, almost proof experience that turned them into a believer.

Whatever you've seen works with others as they get these nudges or hear these whispers, but their logic says, what are you talking about? "Don't be an idiot." "There's no proof of that." "Back to the numbers, push harder, work more."

What have you seen unlocks it for other people that maybe doesn't have as tragic or as a complete event as yours did?

 

 Sara Byers (Guest) (15:08.334)

Yeah, yeah, no, it's such a good question. You know, to me, I'll say two things. The first is that I think that the more we are able to listen to ourselves, so the deeper parts of ourselves, I think the stronger that piece is, gets and not necessarily like some maybe have an aversion to that they're like I don't want this to get stronger I'm like I don't want to end up no one's flinging open my spiritual closet.

Jo  (Host) (15:38.647)

Lock it up, baby, lock it up!

Sara Byers  (Guest) (15:52.793)

But I think that we all throughout life layer ourselves with these, you know, I think of ourselves as being born and then through life experience and everything else, start layering ourselves with these expectations, with standards, with rules, with conformity, with ideas and stories about who we are.

And to me, having space with myself, which looks like literally at moments, not for, doesn't have to be for very long, five minutes sitting, and paying attention to my body, the sensations, what I'm feeling, my thoughts, just for the purpose of noticing them, has allowed me to start to de-layer some of those things that I've always held. And so to me, not even for the purpose necessarily of getting to this space, although I think that is where it ultimately leads, I think you just become a more whole person.

And you will find that this aspect of self, which to me is an interconnected web of all of us and actually all things, is so strong, not only strong, but so comforting. It's so comforting to be guided by yourself. There really is nothing better in life to me than being guided by your uniqueness. 

And so, what I often say to people who, you know, "I don't know whether to trust that", "I don't have the proof for that", is that "What would it look like if you did believe?" I mean, at the end of the day, it's sort of like, what are we afraid of? And to me, we're almost afraid of our greatness. We're almost afraid of how magnificent each one of us is.

So I have chosen in life and what I recommend to people is try, just believe that one thing. See what, because we're here trying to create happiness and joy, love, laughter, fun, excitement, and which direction gives you that. And if believing gives you those things, then why not believe? And so that's sort of where I've landed with it.

Jo (Host) (18:11.179)

Hmm. And it can be really hard, as you mentioned, all those layers, the conditioning, the quest for approval, the external validation that I'm good enough or I'm smart enough or I'm pretty enough or whatever, everybody's own unique flavor of that. can be a journey to walk beside that.

Sara Byers (Guest) (18:21.602) 

Yeah, my gosh. is, I lived most of my life with I'm not enough in a variety. Usually it was smart or capable. And that was existed from a very young age. I, to feel enough, to feel enough now is, I just can't believe I'm here. And I will say, that as I went through that, so as I dealt with imposter syndrome in a lot of ways, I was doing these things that I couldn't even believe that I was doing, but always felt that I really shouldn't, that I wasn't enough and that I was gonna be found out somehow. I finally realized that I may never feel worthy, and that may be a weird thing to say.

There's so much there that I may not feel worthy just for worthiness's sake. Like I may not feel like I'm the smartest person in the room. I may never feel that I'm the most beautiful person in the room. I may never feel perfect in everything that I do, which is what I was always striving for. But what I have learned to do is just trust.

So I have this greater trust that it almost doesn't matter whether I think I'm worthy or not sitting at a table because I trust that I am there for something bigger. So it doesn't, it sort of become beyond myself because I don't think any of us are, it's hard to discard all of that stuff. It's hard to discard all of that conditioning and, for me, it shows up still in moments when things are really stressful or when what's on my shoulders is really, really big.

And so what I've learned to do is just say, "I am who I am." "This is me." "And I have to believe that I am here for a purpose that maybe I can't see." I know a friend said to me the other day, because I have this artist that I absolutely love and I'm like following him around and that is John Battiste who is this composer and jazz artist but you know I would say that like I would feel this resonance with him and and it would almost be hard for me because he would espouse the same things that I did, but he was able to do it through music.

And I could feel it and I was like it's like inside me is pressurized and I don't know how to get it out and a friend of mine said to me, "Do you realize that the way that you feel with John Batiste is the way that all of us feel with you?"

And the reason I say that is because it was this immediate recognition that we are not able to see ourselves, that we see ourselves often through reflection of someone else. But I never really understood that that was seeing myself.

And this analogy was made that was so beautiful. said it's like being the sun and not understanding your own warmth because you can't feel your own sun rays. And so that attempt to see ourselves, that attempt to be enough may actually be the wrong pathway to get there.

And it may instead be finding out deeper and deeper who you are so that you trust it rather than need it to be some external validation of what enough is.

Jo (Host) (22:21.345)

Which is a beautiful way to find freedom really, because then you detach from who you think you should be, what trauma you do or don't have, and that's all still attached to our humanness. Whereas what you've almost described is this almost the way I consider surrender, not in a wave the white flag, I give up kind of way, but in a, I'm just gonna let go, I'm gonna trust. It's funny you mentioned that word.

I have a word every year that I tend to pick, and my word for last year was "faith". And for me, that wasn't faith in a religious sense, but to me, faith is in belief in evidence unseen is my definition of faith. And so it was just that it's happening for a reason. I might not know now. I might learn in hindsight. I might never know. But when you step into that, it's almost an identity or it's almost a way of being a philosophy of life.

You could possibly even say you're able to let go of all the proving because you said in in deciding that you are enough, that's almost approving energy of I'm now proving to myself that I am enough. So it's kind of continuing the circle instead of just accepting it and just saying I am enough. I don't need proof. I don't need validation. I don't need evidence. I just am. It's being, not a doing.

Sara Byers (Guest) (23:25.198)

Yes, exactly. I love it. And I love freedom, which is one of John Battiste's songs. But I love freedom because that is, as I look at what I seek in life, which I never really understood, it really is freedom. And so now I don't understand most of the things that I feel called to do. That's not most. That's not true.

But, quite a few things that I feel called to do. really don't understand, but I go with it. And I feel, I look at myself now like this sort of radar moving through life, seeing what goes beep beep. it's so much fun because I have absolutely no idea what is gonna happen from one moment to another.

Just like our sort of connection and collision, I love you, to people or multiple people. I love my understanding, my uniqueness and embracing it, engaging with others and their uniqueness and creating something new from it. Like there's just nothing more powerful to me. I love it so much, yeah.

Jo (Host) (24:49.877)

And it's funny, because I think that's also very much the entrepreneurial mindset that you have to have in order to thrive as an entrepreneur. But that involves so much letting go, so much willingness to let go of control of things having to be a certain way of detachment of outcomes that so many strive for, but can really struggle to get because it has to come in a certain way with the color coded timeframe, and with all these other dependencies and with the risk register, I want all green lights on my risk register.

Whether that's the kitchen bench, the cleaner's still going to come, the child's not going to get sick. I need all green lights in order for me to accept and trust. It's trusting even in the face of adversity or red lights.

Sara Byers (Guest) (25:16.078)

Yes! Yes! My gosh, totally, yellows and the reds! Because you're so right, because that seeking of green is actually insatiable, I think. I think it is, I don't think it stops. I think you have to stop it. So you could be in that chase forever. I'm just like, to your point, entrepreneurialism, you know, if you are all green and you feel like, okay, we're all good, like you've already turned yellow or red, like it's time, you what I mean? You've gotta, you gotta go to the next.

Jo (Host) (26:00.024)

Yeah, the biggest red light, the biggest warning sign is you thinking that you've got it under control. I'm like, okay, slap in the face. You're about to get sideswiped.

Sara Byers (Guest) (26:10.83)

Exactly. So it's sort of, you know, it's this realization too that I think that we're, we hear even in this space, you hear about this one pinnacle moment when you've achieved this enlightenment or when you've achieved awakening or when you're like finally done and on the other side and you can feel good all the time.

And I don't think that exists. mean, I don't, really, if it does, it's so incredibly rare that I don't think it should be sought after by any of us. But I can say that this space of acceptance allows those moments to flow through in a way. you see everything as sort of river or water or energy flowing, allowing it allows it to move through so much faster.

Whereas when we want it to stop and we're like, gosh, I'm pushing, you're actually pushing against it. You're like keeping it in place. So I've really learned to just let things move through. And it's not that it's always perfect and everything's always great, but I understand that it's moving. And so even in those really hard times, I allow it, I feel it, I cry, I get angry, I do whatever the thing is I need to do and it just moves through so much quicker.

Jo (Host) (27:38.517)

Yeah. Which is counterintuitive because we think that if I hold on tighter, then I can control it and I will be okay. Just that gripping is so prevalent, right?

Sara Byers (Guest) (27:41.966)

 I know. My gosh, I was white-knuckling everything. I was like, it is going to do what I want it to do. yes, you're so right. Yeah. it, yeah. Well, right. I love that. Yeah. And that's the thing is that it's the final understanding.

And sometimes I think of death in this way because death is the greatest unknown for us. So we live in this state of unknown. Life in itself is somewhat unknown because none of us know when or how it ends. And so we go through life trying to control, trying to create knowns because we have this one big one that we can never, never conquer.

And so, it does. It sort of spoils the ride. I didn't know this. It took me a lot of years to figure this out, but it almost now so many beautiful things arrive that had I been in a state of control, they probably never would have because I would have orchestrated it. And the thing is that my mind is only capable of so much.

So my dreams are limited just by the capacity I have within my brain. But if we allowed all these other things, if we allowed the impossible, I mean, our lives become magic. Yeah.

Jo (Host) (29:18.359)

Mm. And that's the word I love, right? Magic. It doesn't have to be a whole lot of woo. It becomes wonder and joy. And that's what we're here for, right? What's the point? Like bring on more magic in the world, I say.

Sara Byers (29:28.663)

Yes! Thank you. I love it. Yeah. mean, you know, and I think about, you know, now I'm asking you the question. I can't help myself. Here I go. can't help it. Is I often wonder, is this, is it because of age? So I'm like, is this just where people get to with age or do we think that it's something that can be cultivated even as I think about my 20 year old daughter?

And I think we can, I think it can, you know, I'm hoping that it doesn't take someone else until the age of 48 to realize this, I'm now 53. But like, I hope it doesn't take them as long because it's peace in this space. But do you think that you need the life experience to get here?

Jo  (Host) (30:23.147)

Yes and no. I wonder if this is just my philosophy on life. Part of the human experience is we're all born pure and perfect. And then it's almost our role. We sign up. I believe we choose our parents and we sign up to the path. And our role is to be wounded and to be scarred. And then our path becomes to heal from those wounds. 

And even if people like me who on the surface, I used to have almost survivor skills and why have I got trauma? I had on the surface what looks like a pretty perfect upbringing. was no big T trauma. There was no, and yet I still have manufactured wounds and scars that are to me comparable with somebody that's had what on the surface looks like a horrific upbringing, but we all manufacture it, which to me says that our path is then to almost spend the first half of life manufacturing things and putting on armour so that we then get to spend the second half of our life taking it off.

Sara Byers (Guest) (31:25.955)

Yes, I love that so much because I just said this week to someone I was on something and I've always said I see it as a clock. Exactly what you said. It's like we layer, layer, layer and then we de-layer until we're like in that sort of pure authentic form at birth and death. That's amazing.

Jo  (Host) (31:49.976)

Hmm. And I, my aim is that I'm hoping to do myself out of a business as in I don't want my, I've got two girls. I don't want my girls to need me in 20 years, but my aim is that by us understanding our path, that the armor or the wounding we're doing of the next generation is less severe and less significant and they can unwind their clock or they can put, they're not carrying as much as we did, for as long so it doesn't get as heavy.

They've still got stuff to carry. They've got social media and AI. They've almost got more external environmental things to hold. So my hope is that they're carrying less internal enough-ness or worthiness wounds, but we will never know. But if you look throughout history, that seems to be the journey that there's very few humans who go through life completely unencumbered and, from what I understand on my spiritual understanding of the world.

That's what we sign up for. That's what Earth is for. It's for challenge. It's for to build muscle in areas that we haven't had because this isn't the type of experience of almost these negative emotions that we have elsewhere. And so that's why we've chosen is for the hard stuff. This is not an easy ticket.

The ones who are here now are like, "All right I'll take the difficulty five." "I'll take the hard door." "Other people are elsewhere." We're the ones like, "Right, buckle up." "I'm going to come in." "I'm going to be a change maker." "I'm going to buck convention." "This is not going to be easy." "I'm going to take on lots of shit and I'm going to have to drop lots of shit, but I'm up for it."

And that's why we tend to find the right guides that help us on that, that help us put it down. And whether that's a medium or a coach or a friend or a teacher or someone that gives us those nudges along the way to help us and remind us of why we're here and to trust and to have faith.

And it takes a variety of ways for us to do that. Some people's path is not to do that, I believe. But if I look at the journey of all the clients that come to me, they all come in very logical, left-brained, PNL'd, and they come out with spiritual awakenings and all kinds of gifts being unlocked. So I've seen it now hundreds of times that I feel like that's enough of a pattern for me to go, there's something here. There's something here.

Sara Byers (Guest) (34:22.894)

Totally! Yeah, that's beautiful. And I not surprisingly agree with you on all of it. And I, I do see, you know, to me, as I think about evolution, I think I feel like this is sort of we're watching evolution because so many of us are exploring all of a sudden this space. And so because of that, I have to believe that it is somewhat evolutionary. And to your point, setting this stage for the next generation to explore in the way they're meant to. But it's, yeah, it's beautiful and scary all at the same time. 

 

Jo (Host) (35:01.751)

Well, apparently that's what we signed up for. So we've got to find other people that are also crazy. My daughter said to me last night, one of her friends, said, I think you'd like her mom. She's into all the woo stuff too. I'm like, oh, that's the mom I am now. Am I, am I the woo mom? And I felt like, oh my God, honey, if you would have seen me 10 years ago in my suit, turning up to corporate being as anti-woo, I almost started my business with an anti-woo tagline. If you'd have known where I've come from, that.

Sara Byers (Guest) (35:27.67)

Really?

Jo (Host) (35:30.519)

There are more and more of us who have led that path and are now bridging the gap as opposed to the spiritual community who've always been around but have always been very alternative. And I struggled to connect with them because they didn't understand what it was like to be the chair of a board or to, you know, I've been enlisted companies and I've been through mergers and acquisitions and they don't understand the pressure and the stress and the deadline. So I think it's people like you and I that have been called who can bridge both worlds and I can talk P&Ls and corporate strategies and vision statements and better than anyone. And I just find it funny when some of my clients get to hear the, they say corporate Joe, when I've often got on the phone with their bosses and things and I spin out all my best corporate Joe, I'm like, my God, you're a different person. I'm like, yeah, that was my life for a really long time. "I got the corporate thing nailed." 

Sara Byers (Guest) (36:17.614)

It really, it's amazing. I mean, it really, it really is. And I look at, so I said, I have a 20 year old daughter. I look at her because she has sort of seen this. So she has watched her mom doing that. And then now she's watching her mom in this new space. And what I find so interesting is that she has a knowing.

She is, to me, not only my greatest teacher, but she's held space for all of it. And I know she has. I know that's part of why, of her purpose at this juncture has been to hold that space. And I'm reverent of that as well, because it's been a ride. 

Jo (Host) (37:00.555)

Hmm. that it is. Well, Sarah, it's been great to have you here and thank you for being another bridge, a bridge holder, climber, builder. I don't know what we are, but all of it. Brave souls walking this path and thank you for being so gracious for sharing your story. And I hope this has brought life to anybody else who's in the closet, spiritual or otherwise to show up authentically, to trust that life is happening for them and to buckle up because this is what we're here for.

Sara Byers (Guest) (37:34.062)

Thank you so much, Jo, for having me. It's been amazing.

Jo (Host) (37:36.695)

You're welcome. Thank you.