Unlimited
Valerie Friedlander
The Unlimited Podcast is a podcast for badass women who are on a journey to release learned limitations and live a more present, joyful, and intentional life. It's about reaching for the stars while keeping your feet on the ground. Your Host, Valerie Friedlander is an ICF certified coach, sociologist, business owner, and mom. You can find out more at www.valeriefriedlander.com and follow her on Instagram @unlimitedcoachval
Vulnerability and Tending to What Is Important - Bonus episode with Cher Hale
Send me a text!Vulnerability and tending to what is important is particularly critical in a chaotic time. After my wrapping my interview with Cher Hale, she inquired into my next steps around demanding attention. As listeners who gift me your attention, it seemed appropriate to share with you my own in the moment reflections on attention and what’s important about it to me. Together, Cher and I share insights around unlearning supremacy conditioning, the power of community, and the transformat
Navigating Change in the New Year
Send me a text!Navigating change in the new year without the overwhelm can feel like a lot—especially when life feels messy, uncertain, or heavy. Real change starts with understanding the waters we swim in (ie the pressures of our social norms) and engaging our internalized patterns as well as the emotions and discomfort of stepping into the unknown. We must unhook from perfectionism, certainty and results, and lean into the experience of an emergent process. When we take time to understand why
Healing Our Relationship with Attention With Cher Hale
Send me a text!Healing our relationship with attention begins with noticing the ways in which our natural need for attention has been damaged. In a society that commodifies attention and polices who and what is allowed attention, we develop a distorted relationship with a core aspect of how we connect to each other. This disconnection feeds feelings of isolation and loneliness, leaving us vulnerable to systems that exploit our need to feel seen and heard. By addressing the shame around seeking a
Responsive Practices to Create a Supportive Relationship with Your Teen with Donna Lynne Booher
Send me a text!Responsive practices to create a supportive relationship with your teen starts with acknowledging your own inner child’s unhealed wounds so that you can create space in yourself to hold space for another. These wounds often become activated when we see them mirrored in our children’s behavior. Unfortunately, the tools we were taught to address these behaviors often perpetuate the very patterns we hope to break. Whether you have teenagers now, are preparing for those years, or are
Navigating Tough Conversations with Emotional Awareness
Send me a text!Navigating tough conversations with emotional awareness is a critical skill as we are all likely to need to engage difficult dialogues, especially during this time of heightened political and social tensions. These types of conversations can be emotionally taxing, and it's important we approach them with both strong self-awareness and self-care. Our ability to show up authentically, compassionately, and aligned with the change we want to see in the world as we interact with o
Learning Self-Advocacy to Strengthen Collective Action with Jenique Jones
Send me a text!Learning self-advocacy to strengthen collective action is a critical component of sustainable social change. Those of us socialized as women are often conditioned to prioritize supporting others, which can make self-advocacy more difficult. However, by connecting to our own value and values, and speaking up for ourselves even when it’s uncomfortable, we lead by example and inspire others to do the same. Cultivating this sense of self and worth strengthens our resilience, reducing
Embracing Periods of Reflection
Send me a text!Embracing periods of reflection, introspection, and processing is a crucial but often overlooked and devalued aspect of personal and societal growth and change. To create real shifts in the world’s imbalances, we must first engage with the internalized patterns and conditioning that hold us back. This self-work not only deepens the impact of our efforts, but also cultivates more intentional, present, and joyful relationships. However, by undervaluing these periods of reflection an
Being Intentional with When to Say Yes
Send me a text!Being intentional with when to say yes isn’t just considering yes vs no. Intentionality also involves how you engage internal resistance to what you say you want to do. There are many reasons you might experience tension and resistance even when you want to do something. First, it could highlight an area that needs clarification or additional discernment. Your subconscious will send you signals when it perceives potential danger including from a values conflict or past experience
Supporting Changes in Your Life
Send me a text!Supporting Changes in your life means reconnecting to your power in your relationship to change. It allows you to transform the patterns that aren’t serving you during the transition period, rather than carrying them with you into a new space. Unfortunately, what often happens is that changes in our life feel in some way like they're imposed upon us, even when they're ones that we choose because the ripple effect of those changes are typically things that we get carried
Collaborative Leadership from Boardroom to Patient-Centered Caregiving with Heather Maurer
Send me a text!Collaborative Leadership from Boardroom to Patient-Centered Caregiving is essential for fostering effective relationships between CEOs and board members, as well as between healthcare professionals and patients. This approach not only enhances organizational dynamics but also improves patient outcomes by prioritizing communication, trust, and shared goals. By empowering all stakeholders and embracing transparency, collaborative leadership creates an environment where diverse persp
Micro-Actions to Manifest Big Change with Taina Brown
Send me a text!Micro-actions to manifest big change is key because we can often feel overwhelmed by the changes we want to make in our own life, let alone the change we’d like to see in the world. The best part is micro-actions naturally build on themselves. First and most obviously, they provide momentum as you do the next thing and then the next thing. Second, they teach our brain what to focus on, so we notice more opportunities to access or create what we want. Understanding how our brain re
Realigning Your Core Values
Send me a text!Realigning your core values requires exploring both what is consciously important to you AND your societal conditioning. Your values, both conscious and subconscious, shape your decisions and motivate our behavior. If you find yourself feeling stuck, drained, or sabotaging what you say you want, it’s likely you have a subconscious values conflict. There are 5 values that I regularly find creating conflict within my high-achieving clients. They are responsibility, reliability, resp
Navigating our Relationship with Death with Nikki Smith
Send me a text!Navigating our relationship with death is a profound part of our human experience, yet we often avoid talking about it. This avoidance not only prevents us from asking for and receiving care, it also reduces our capacity to provide care. Additionally, we must be able to embrace our mortality (rather than trying to transcend it) in order to fully embrace living this one precious life. Death doulas are a valuable resource for those looking for support around the emotional, practical
3 Essentials to Maximize Your Experience at an Event
Send me a text!“Three Essentials to Maximize Your Experience at an Event” provides a strategy to keep your planning simple and ensure you get the most out of your investment of time, money, and energy. Some of the obstacles to event ROI include overwhelm, self-doubt, shiny object, peer pressure, FOMO, and other such distractions. Additionally, the so called “mom guilt” is a common struggle for high-achieving women with children at home. With these kinds of challenges, you need something simple
Redefining Our Relationship to Productivity with Lisa Zawrotny
Send me a text!Redefining our relationship to productivity is a necessary component of preventing burnout and cultivating well-being. Our current societal relationship to productivity is built on Industrial Revolution era conception of work ethic. This conception wraps our value into what we can produce, dehumanizing us in the process. In order to rehumanize our relationship to our energy, we must first reclaim our worth separate from external measures of production. Additionally we must learn t
Tending Your Self-Relationship through Values & Shadow Work with Erica Courdae
Send me a text! Tending your self-relationship through values & shadow work helps you engages the roots of your motivation and how you live your life. Our values form the basis of our core motivations. Shadow work helps us acknowledge and heal the wounds that inhibit awareness and access to our full self. While we live in a world full of obstacles to self-expression, this work will always be an ongoing process. By engaging focused value and shadow reflections, we can better align our action
Cultivating Collaboration Over Competition
Send me a text!Cultivating collaboration over competition is essential in today's interconnected world. We don't exist in a vacuum; our social understanding and discernment must be engaged collectively. The spaces we inhabit, like social media platforms, exert significant influence on our interactions, sometimes more than our intentions to be collaborative versus competitive. The Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers, is structured around a corporate discernment proce
Reclaiming Creativity and Healing Through Art with Krishna Kayastha
Send me a text!Reclaiming creativity and healing through art is essential because you’re innately creative, even if you’re someone who wouldn’t label yourself as “a creative.” Many of people learn to disconnect from their creativity as children because self-expression doesn’t feel safe, pressure to do art “right” surrounded it with perfectionism, and internalized productivity prioritizing. All of these have an impact on our mental health. This is why reclaiming space for creativity for creativit
Foundations for Authentic Public Relations with Catharine Montgomery
Send me a text!Foundations for authentic public relations support building solid connections whether you are an organization or individual. The value of truly listening to others, understanding different perspectives and pathways toward a goal, and then following through on what you learn cannot be overstated. These principles of communication and relationship building are critical to create an impact and drive meaningful change in a way that respects all people. Giving the space to engage in a
Understanding the 5 Love Languages
Send me a text!Understanding the 5 Love Languages has helped facilitate communication for many people but it has numerous limitations. While the 5 Love Languages has become an extremely popular relationship tool, it’s not a fix-all and it may not be the right approach for everyone. What about this tool makes it helpful and where it falls short can help you determine if and how to apply it in your own life.In this episode of Unlimited, I’m exploring understanding the 5 Love Languages and how to a
Building a Relationship to Pleasure and Intimacy with Daniela Stevens
Send me a text!Building a relationship to pleasure and intimacy takes a lot of intention in this society that still treats talking about sex as taboo. So many people struggle with intimacy due to lack of communication, trauma, and societal conditioning to disconnect from their bodies and desires. Improving intimacy requires us to unlearn harmful norms and relearn our embodied self. Tools like love languages and embodied practices can help us engage in conscious communication with partners. It he
Creating Healthy Relationships
Send me a text!Creating healthy relationships in all areas of our life is the focus of this season of Unlimited. A relationship is how we relate to another person, place, thing, or even concept. How we relate to ourselves is at the core of how we relate to others. Yet, how we understand and relate to ourselves is also built from those external relationships. Unfortunately, most of us haven’t been taught how to cultivate healthy relationships let alone experienced examples of them. In many cases
Season 3 Wrap-up and New Year Transition Tips
Send me a text!Discover valuable New Year transition tips in this Season 3 wrap-up for the Unlimited Podcast. The period between one cycle and the next is a great time to reflect both on where you’ve been and where you’re going. It’s important to create supportive space to engage and focus that reflection. You can set that foundation through honoring your humanity and connecting to what’s really important to you. Celebrating helps you acknowledge yourself even in the small spaces we too often ov
Aligning With Your Astrology with Babs Cheung
Send me a text!Aligning with your astrology is a way to explore what works for you. From new year plans to parenting, it’s one thing to recognize that there’s no one size fits all, but it can be hard to step outside the norms without some kind of framework to work from. Not to mention, it’s even harder to think outside the box when you’re already exhausted from trying to function within the normalized systems that aren’t working for you. Astrology is a tool that can help you explore other ways t
Accessing the True Power of Gratitude: Beyond Individualism
Send me a text!Accessing the true power of gratitude requires going beyond the individual mindset approach that is typically referenced. Expressions of gratitude have been observed among many communally based species. It supports group functioning. Thus, the true power of gratitude is in collective connection, not individual mindset. Studies show that there are a plethora of benefits to gratitude. The problems of toxic positivity and tolerating unacceptable behavior shows up when gratitude is us
How to Create Belonging with Amena Chaudhry
Send me a text!How to create belonging starts with understanding that most of us don’t know what belonging really is. It’s hard to create something that you haven’t first experienced and there is a difference between intellectually understanding vs experiencing something. What most of us do experience is strong conditioning from a young age around fitting in - to our families, in our school, and, ultimately, in society. This “fitting in” is part of how we are taught to uphold oppressive social s
Reclaiming Humanity Through Grief
Send me a text!Reclaiming humanity through grief is necessary for our ability to intentionally create a world that honors each person's humanity. Understanding and having space to grieve and support each other through our grief helps us to connect to our shared humanity. In so many often unconscious ways, we are encouraged to dehumanize ourselves and others. One way this happens is a disconnect from our emotions and especially a lack of understanding and space to honor grief, not just our i
Rethinking Empowerment and Releasing Comparison
Send me a text!Rethinking empowerment and releasing comparison go hand in hand in a society where empowerment is treated as a commodity and lifestyle is used as a sales tactic. Lifestyle as a sales tactic encourages us to compare how happy we are to how happy someone supposedly living a particular lifestyle appears to be. When empowerment is the commodity being sold, it becomes the way to achieve that lifestyle. These idealized lifestyles tend to uphold societal norms and often become internaliz
How to Cure Comparisonitis
Send me a text!How to cure comparisonitis starts by understanding the cause and that this isn’t just a “you” problem. It’s something that impacts you, your confidence, your sense of self, and your well-being, so it feels deeply personal. Since it’s internal, comparisonitis feels like a habit of comparing yourself to others in one or multiple areas. It’s usually triggered in an area that already feels endangered in some way – often things like financial success or belonging. It turns into a cycle
Insights from Change Making Feminist Founders with Becky Mollenkamp
Send me a text!Insights from change making feminist founders are an important type of support for other feminist business owners and leaders. We are surrounded by stories of what success is and what you must do to achieve it that perpetuate exploitation of ourselves, of others, and of our planet. These stories are what is normalized but they aren’t the only way. Hearing other stories and ways of doing business helps us believe and trust in the possibility of change. It helps us tap into and gene
How to Create A Schedule That Works For You
Send me a text!How to create a schedule that works for you cannot take a one size fits all approach. Most so called “successful people” strategies play on the false idea that we all have the same 24 hours and should, therefore, be able to get the same amount done. These strategies fail to factor in our humanity, discount our lived experiences, and fuel self-doubt. Instead of trying to fit someone else’s mold, you deserve routines that honor your humanity and support you where you are. Part of cr
How to Cultivate Self-Love
Send me a text!How to cultivate self-love is also how you develop self-confidence, make room for self-care, and show up as your best self. This episode is an updated replay of the season one episode, Relearning Self-Love. Your relationship with yourself is the foundation for your relationship with everyone and everything in your life. Unfortunately, it is also the relationship that we are constantly conditioned to ignore. Even the emphasis on the importance of self-care turns into a pressure whe
7 Ways to Relax this Summer and Beyond
Send me a text!The 7 Ways to Relax this Summer are also the ways we can learn to bring more rest into our lives. We have seven areas that influence our energy and each needs care as we learn to release, relax, and rest. Our society is infused with stories that pull us away from our humanity, which includes devaluing rest. Part of the process of truly relaxing is recognizing the stories we’ve internalized that keep us from relaxing. This allows us to see the systems that feed us these stories mor
How to Navigate Societal Gaslighting and Stay Empowered
Send me a text!How to Navigate Societal Gaslighting and Stay Empowered is an updated replay of the season one episode “No, You’re Not Crazy.” Most information regarding gaslighting focuses on the psychological experience within individual relationships. However, gaslighting is actually a societal phenomenon with roots in social power dynamics. Those roots are why it is common to experience the psychological impact of gaslighting during periods of social change. However, because we tend to think
Resilience Through Unexpected Career Shifts with F. John Potter
Send me a text!Resilience through unexpected career shifts is often something you realize in retrospect. It's natural to feel stress in times of change, especially during unexpected transitions that impact your financial security. It can feel overwhelming when you're walking through them. Once you know that you successfully regained a certain equilibrium in your life you can look back with greater perspective. It's rare these days to have a job that lasts a life time or even to ha
3 Things You Need to Create Stability in Times of Uncertainty
Send me a text!Three things you need to create stability in times of uncertainty are to know yourself, to stay curious, and to build community. We are in a massive period of change and that comes with a great deal of uncertainty. Uncertainty naturally triggers feelings of overwhelm, which make it hard to take action. This is NOT an individual failing. Much of what feeds this instability is systemic, not individual. With that in mind, I invite you to remember that you are part of the system and y
Values Aligned Leadership with Alesia Galati
Send me a text!Values aligned leadership is central to running a values aligned business. Companies of any size that want to go beyond checking boxes must intentionally cultivate leadership based in clear values. A company’s most valuable asset is its people. Centering humanity at all levels of a company supports morale, efficiency, quality of work, and, ultimately, company health. Unfortunately, many people haven’t experienced examples of values aligned leadership and that makes it hard to crea
Am I Just Making Excuses?
Send me a text!“Am I just making excuses?” is something most people wonder at some point when they are not following through on something they say they want to do. From health goals to work goals, the story we’re surrounded by is that of weakness. It’s self-sabotage. You aren’t trying hard enough, so you don’t want it badly enough. It’s lack of maturity. Basically, whatever the details of the message are, the energy is judgmental and shame inducing. This is the messaging because we’ve learned to
How to Prioritize Your Needs (beyond Maslow)
Send me a text!How to Prioritize Your Needs in a supportive way means going beyond Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. People often reference this motivational theory when trying to understand behavior and choices. It's popular because it creates a simple framework that makes sense in our hierarchical, over-individualized society. It's problematic for the same reason, AND because it's based in a highly biased study influenced by the colonial corruption of native wisdom. Additionally
Creating a Human-Centered Work Culture with Marissa Badgley
Send me a text!Creating a human-centered work culture is the antidote to the burnout that is now pervasive in the work place. While learning how to create a human-centered work culture is of particular importance to managers and leaders in organizations, it is not for them alone. Brains love patterns and, without intentional engagement, people carry this dehumanizing relationship with work when they leave a particular workplace and even into their own entrepreneurship. So, regardless of your cur
Leaning into a Mid-life Career Change [coaching]
Send me a text!Leaning into a mid-life career change isn’t easy. Yet it is a reality for many people, especially Moms, and even more so recently. This change often challenges our identity, worth, and sense of place since we are socialized to intertwine these aspects of our life. The woman I work with in this episode reached out to me feeling STUCK. A recent ADHD diagnosis rocked her world. Due to the reverberations of this diagnosis, she made the decision to leave a job that felt like the perfec
What to Do When You’ve Fallen Behind
Send me a text!What to do when you’ve fallen behind isn’t push yourself harder. It’s pause and allow yourself to recalibrate. Understandably, you may experience resistance. We are surrounded by stories that tell us that failing to plan for all the things is a personal failing. Additionally, there’s a constant message that we aren’t doing enough. This conditioning programs us to set unreasonable expectations, beat ourselves up when we don’t meet them, and push harder. The good news is that you ca
The Pressure to Love Your Job with Cristin Downs
Send me a text!The pressure to love your job is something you’ve likely experienced whether you love your job or not. In the United States, we are surrounded by the story that you achieve success through having a job you love. Perhaps success is simply that you enjoy the privilege of doing a job you love. Another possibility is that you won't feel like you’re doing work, will then work harder, and therefore create success. (Likewise, this story also perpetuates the idea that working hard wi
Why Work Life Balance Is a Myth
Send me a text!WHY work life balance is a myth is as important to understand as knowing that it is one. It’s important because the way a topic is framed has a large impact on how we think about it. It directs our focus and influences the options we perceive. Most people I speak with consciously know there is no real balance between work and life. Yet work/life balance is still used to describe a primary challenge facing people. The fundamental issue with the term work/life balance isn’t just tha
A Simple Way to End the Year Strong
Send me a text!A simple way to end the year strong involves allowing yourself a little space for three activities. First, focusing your attention. Second, celebrating your accomplishments. Third, assessing what worked and what didn't and feeding that into your new years plans. Sounds simple, right? Yes, it's a simple outline, but the practice of it is less simple. It can actually be rather confusing and messy. There are many factors that go into the decisions about where you put your f
How to Say No Without Guilt
Send me a text!How to say no without guilt is a common struggle for Moms but also for most highly empathetic people. The fear of letting people down or upsetting others can make saying no extremely uncomfortable. You may worry about hurting someone. That worry may feed a fear that you will then be seen as uncaring, lazy, incompetent, or otherwise judged. There are many articles with step-by-step instructions for the logistics of politely saying no. However, it’s one thing to know the steps and a
Setting Healthy Boundaries
Send me a text!Setting healthy boundaries is a process that improves with practice. Part of the challenge of setting boundaries is that most of us didn’t grow up with examples of healthy boundaries. Additionally, the media often idolize emmeshed relationships. Consider how many songs and stories idealize relationships where someone’s emotional wellbeing is dependent on one other person. In our societal narratives, love and caring look like being able to read someone else’s mind. You most likely
Dealing with Impostor Syndrome
Send me a text!Dealing with impostor syndrome is a topic commonly and historically focused on working women. Most women have experienced the feelings of self-doubt and fear of not being good enough despite their accomplishments. Of course, working women aren’t the only ones who experience self-doubt. So, why are we the focus for this topic? We are social beings and our understanding of ourselves is generated in large part from our interactions with others. The experience of what is called impost
Silencing Your Inner Critic
Send me a text!Silencing your inner critic can help you start to get out of your own way but there’s a more effective way. Using the silencing technique is only a temporary solution for two key reasons: First, it fails to address why the inner critic showed up. Second, it means you’re spending energy fighting yourself instead of harnessing that energy to help you. Most of my clients “know better” when their inner critic shows up, but it still freezes them. That’s normal because it’s not about wh
Become Empowered By Your Emotions with Dr. Mavis Mazhura
Send me a text!Become empowered by your emotions, rather than stuck in them, by understanding their purpose or lack thereof. It's important to remember that though "feelings aren’t facts," they still matter. They are an intrinsic part of our whole humanness. Supporting emotional wellbeing starts with embracing the value of emotional information. Despite some of that information being outdated or maladaptive, it can still provide direction for what support, boundaries, changes, etc
To Emotional Awareness and Beyond
Send me a text!To emotional awareness and, beyond that, to USING that awareness is this week’s topic. As we explored last week, you must first find the emotions and allow space for them. Following that, you can learn how to use them in a helpful rather than harmful way. This is also called being responsive rather than reactive in our behavior. Reactivity isn't just lashing out. Another facet of reactivity is shutting down or avoiding. Both are rooted in survival mode, which is a natural mod
Fantastic Emotions and Where to Find Them
Send me a text!Fantastic emotions and where to find them guides you to where you begin to access your power within your emotions. You often hear emotions spoken of as powerful. However, it's really YOU who are powerful. The problem is we aren’t taught to understand the dynamics of our emotions. Instead, we are conditioned to avoid unpleasant emotions and simultaneously hope that the enjoyable ones will eventually be earned. This leaves us feeling at the mercy of our emotions instead of empo
Deep Self-Care to Shift Habits [coaching]
Send me a text!Deep self-care is necessary to shift habits in an effective and healthy way. The “stop it” or “just do it” model often isn’t sustainable and can even be harmful. Habits make up a lot of the way we show up in life. Thus, they can become confused with personality and limit what we believe possible. Our societal norms are made up of collective habits. Similarly, most collective habits are so internalized that we stop seeing them as aspects we have power over. One of the overarching
Do You Want To Build A Habit?
Send me a text!Do you want to build a habit? Or does the idea stress you out? Habits are often a focal point in conversations around personal development, business development, career development, etc. When we talk about habits the conversation is usually about changing them and the emphasis is on control. These conversations are often full of sense of judgment around what are deemed "good" and "bad" habits and a pressure "be better." For many people the idea of hab
Bonus Episode: Give Yourself A Break
Send me a text!Give yourself a break, you are not a machine. Hustle culture tells us that we should have everything planned, systematized, and organized. It says that, if you do this well enough, then you will be successful, happy, and stress-free. But failure is part of growth. Unhappiness, discomfort, anger, overwhelm, etc. are normal emotions when it's time to do something different. In this time of change that is naturally, understandably, necessarily stressful, this episode is a little
Finding Time to Proactively Plan
Send me a text!Finding time to proactively plan is hard in a world where our attention is constantly in demand. It is especially difficult to find time to plan when your plan involves doing something new. First, you must navigate a society designed to keep you busy – physically busy, mentally busy, emotionally busy. Second, you must face your own internal resistance from fear based in limiting beliefs, conflicting values, shifting relationships, etc. The key to finding time is the self-awareness
How to Create A Plan You’ll Follow Through On
Send me a text!How to create a plan you’ll follow through on starts with setting a clear foundation for that plan. Many clients come to me when they aren’t following through on achieving something they want. Even when they have a plan, they still aren’t doing what they think they need to do to achieve it. Once we dig in the reason is usually based in a lack of clarity around what they really want. Or more specifically, the motivation underneath what they think they want. Without that clarity, mo
The Courage To Change
Send me a text!The courage to change comes from inside of you but requires and deserves support from others. You need other people to help you see and hear yourself clearly as well as to see more clearly what needs to change. This is especially true the easier it is for you to fit into and follow the conventional rules of society. One of those rules being that we’re supposed to be fully self-reliant. If you are not it indicates weakness and deficiency. Change is inherently stressful, and this ru
Break Free From Assumptions & Misaligned Rules
Send me a text!Breaking free from assumptions and misaligned rules is a multi-layered process. We all have rules for how we believe we are supposed to do life. They are tied to our values, to societal norms, and the stories we’ve been told about who we are and the way the world is. Since we do not exist outside of a societal context, we must acknowledge the influence of societal stories as we engage our own programing. First, looking at the rules for the roles that we occupy and whether they fit
A Roundtable to Improve Your Perception with Aleia Walker
Send me a text!A roundtable to improve your perception is necessary because perception isn’t just an inside job. The inside part is only the first step. You do need the willingness to expand and the courage to change. Then, improving your perception requires conversations and learning from others who have different experiences. Only through this next level of awareness expansion can we make the meaningful and effective changes needed to make a better world for everyone. For me, the ultimate pur
Helpful vs Harmful Mindset Work
Send me a text!Helpful vs harmful mindset work is a critical distinction to make for anyone interested in real change. Too many of the problems our society faces are framed as individual issues and placed on individuals to solve. First, this fails to address the real issues and instead perpetuates them. Second, it has developed a billion-dollar industry that feeds on itself. Mindset work IS powerful and CAN make a huge difference in your life. The key is to know the difference between individua
Shift From Drained to Motivated
Send me a text!Shift from drained to motivated by understanding five commonly internalized values that often work against women. Our values are beliefs that motivate us and drive our decisions. Not all the values we hold are intentionally chosen values. Actually, many of them are internalized beliefs from important adults when we were young, as well as beliefs emphasized by the society that we live in. Even if we consciously think about them one way, they may be motivating us in a way we don’t r
How to Stop Reacting and Start Responding
Send me a text!How to stop reacting and start responding starts with understanding that internal reactivity is normal. It happens when your brain perceives a threat. That internal reaction doesn’t differentiate between a real or imagined threat or between an emotional or physical threat. Some of our most common reactivity comes from a perceived threat to our values. When this happens it’s important to first acknowledge that there’s nothing wrong with you that you’ve had a reaction. The stories w
Clarifying What You Want
Send me a text!Clarifying what you want can be overwhelming, especially when you’re stressed out where you are now. Gaining clarity is something a lot of clients initially come to me for help with. It’s one thing to recognize that you don’t like the way things are. That’s a helpful first step. Next, you want to find what you DO want, which is much harder because there are so many obstacles to clarity. Many of these obstacles are internalized stories that block your ability to hear yourselves an
How to Manifest What You Want
Send me a text!How to manifest what you want in life is a fairly mainstream topic these days, yet it's also typically misunderstood. It's misunderstood because it's a concept popularized by books like The Secret and The Law of Attraction. This concept of manifestation is based in problematic pseudoscience. It relates to believing something into existence and it is closely related to the toxic use of positivity. True manifestation does have roots in psychology and does have practic
Done With New Year, New You
Send me a text!I’m done with the "new year, new you" thing. It’s really common messaging at both the end and beginning of the year. We hear it ALL the time from people trying to sell you things. You could even say we’re bombarded with it. At least, that’s how I feel about it because it really pushes my buttons. I know that no one can push a button I don’t have but I also know I’m not alone in being bothered by it. The reason it bothers me so much is because underneath this message is t
Bonus Episode: Seven Ways to Reduce Holiday Stress
Send me a text!Seven ways to reduce holiday stress and really stress in your life in general is the theme for this bonus episode! Despite the joyful intention of the season, many life stressors expand this time of year. Stressors such as time, money, and family dynamics. Throw in a dose of inclement weather and you can suddenly find you’ve flipped from the warm and cozy person you want to be, to a cold and prickly “just get through it” kind of you.In this episode of Unlimited, I share seven ways
Seven Steps to Mindful Time Management
Send me a text!Seven steps to mindful time management sounds simple and, in some ways, it is, but it isn’t what you think. It’s not about tips for the best productivity hacks, habits to manage your time wisely, or tools to schedule yourself for optimal effectiveness. It actually starts with acknowledging that we have an unhealthy view of what we should be doing with our time in the first place. Along with that we have unreasonable expectations of how much we should be able to do with our time. O
What’s Killing My Motivation?
Send me a text!What’s killing my motivation and how do I fix it are two questions many clients come to me with. They usually have something they want and can’t seem to get themselves to DO what they need to do to get it. There are lots of reasons they think are the problem – they don’t know the right thing to do, they have a mindset issue, they need to be more organized, more disciplined, manage their time better, etc. While there may be some truth to these beliefs, they are surface issues, whic
The Myths Around Productivity
Send me a text!The myths around productivity are hurting both your productivity AND your mental health. Mythologies always have a purpose for being created, usually to explain something or to illustrate a cultural ideal. These myths of productivity were generated to turn abusive labor practices into an internalized cultural ideal that we then perpetuate upon ourselves. This narrative leads us to abuse ourselves to live up do this mythology’s “good person” and the belief that if we are good enoug
Empowering Evolution In Your Work with Myrna Daramy
Send me a text!Empowering evolution in your work is first and foremost about recognizing that you CAN evolve. You are not confined to what you currently know or the way you currently are or even what you’ve done in the past. With that belief, each choice becomes an opportunity to evolve into MORE the person you want to be both in experience and impact. This mindset is key to creating content that is accessible and meets people where they’re at because it allows for curiosity over judgement. It e
Do You Feel Called To Get Involved with Kristal Larson
Send me a text!Many women feel called to get involved in their local government. Women and other minorities are drastically under-represented on all levels of government. Most of us agree the consequences of this are highly problematic. We want to contribute to make our communities a better place, but we typically opt for volunteer opportunities over running for office. Volunteering IS certainly important but what holds us back from running and helping reduce this representation gap ourselves? T
Leading With Growth Mindset with Andre Vasquez
Send me a text!Leading with growth mindset takes a certain amount of willingness to be vulnerable. Why? Because it means you own your mistakes. This isn’t easy in a society dominated by fixed mindset, which feeds the idea that if you make a mistake then you ARE a mistake. Fixed mindset leads to constantly trying to prove good enough because of a believe that we are born a certain way and cannot change. Thus, everything is an indication of our inherent being. Growth mindset is a belief that you c
Unlearning Internalized Beauty Standards
Send me a text!Unlearning internalized beauty standards and redefining beauty for myself continues to be a big work for me. As a young person, one of the ways several of the kids in my class (especially the girls) bullied me was with the label “fat.” I pointed out that the boys who were my size or larger were not also labeled this way, but it didn’t matter. It wasn’t about them. It wasn’t really about me either, but I took it on. We learn many norms, like body norms of size/shape/hair/etc., thro
Finding The Best Bra For You with Bare Moxie
Send me a text!Finding the best bra for you can make a huge difference in how you feel about your body. Unfortunately, it’s a lot harder than it should be because most stores will size you based on what they carry. That means that the majority of women who wear bras are wearing the wrong size bra for their body! However, most of us don’t even realize it. We think that’s just the way the industry is or the way our body is. We believe it’s just one more thing we have to tolerate in life unless we
Building Confidence Through Boudoir Photography with Liz Hansen
Send me a text!Building Confidence through boudoir photography is about empowering how you view your body. Empowerment is about choice and tapping into your possibilities. Women are bombarded with unrealistic body ideals, which makes it hard not to internalize the idea that we are flawed. Then, our choice is limited to what products to buy to try to become more beautiful to the assumed gaze of others. Or to disconnect and deprioritize our physical self. Boudoir invites you see yourself and your
No, You're Not Crazy
Send me a text!No, you’re not crazy. You’re living in a period of rapid change in a society full of unhealthy coping mechanisms. Almost all of my clients recently have brought up concerns around dramatically increased levels of anxiety and anger. They know navigating the pandemic is a factor but it unnerves them how often they don’t feel like themselves. Naturally, that exacerbates their stress and triggers self-doubt. My hope is that this episode can support clarity and relieve some of that str
Red Flags In Online Coaching
Send me a text!Red flags in online coaching are important to notice, especially because they can often play on the very patterns you are looking for support to change. Coaching can be extremely helpful when you want to create something different in your life. Working with a coach can help you build a business that fits you, develop sustainable healthy habits, feel more confident in your personal and/or professional life, navigate a life transition, and engage with clarity so many other aspects o
So, You Want To Start A Podcast with Alesia Galati
Send me a text!So, you want to start a podcast… or maybe you’re thinking of turning a side-hustle into a business. Both are big commitments, which means there are several similarities between the two. (And if you want to do both, even better!) Marketing initiatives use stories of starting a successful business, successful podcast all the time. If you’re like me, you wonder about the behind the scenes of some of those “then I built a 6-figure biz” montages. You know they tend to skim over the tou
Calling Out BS In Online Business with Sam Munoz and Karyn Paige
Send me a text!Calling Out BS in Online Business is critical to creating space for innovation in the way we balance work and life. Women often step into building an online business in order to create more freedom in their life. However, they are then bombarded with all sorts of should and a lot of how tos that ended up becoming shoulds. Most of these success strategies don't actually work for everybody because they are not for everybody. They're for the person who created them, their b
Making Decisions I Can Trust
Send me a text!Making decisions I can trust is at the root of the idea of having clarity and feeling confident. Clarity and confidence are the two things most of my clients come to me saying they want. They’ve started doubting themselves because they’re not doing the things they say they want to do or they’ve checked all those boxes but haven’t achieved what they expected. Paralysis by analysis sets in and they feel stuck, unable to make decisions they feel like they can trust. Most of us have b
How Do I Get Out of My Own Way [coaching]
Send me a text!How do I get out of my own way and into aligned action is a common frustration that leads people to sign up for coaching with me. My client in this session is an empathic introvert with strong intuition that she struggles to follow for herself. Her hope in signing up for a session was to uncover what keeps holding her back from living in alignment with her intuition. Unfortunately, most of us learn to question our intuition through multiple facets of our socialization. From there
Allowing Space to Imperfectly Love Your Body and Yourself with Naomi Gottlieb-Miller
Send me a text!Allowing space to imperfectly love your body and yourself is so important but yet not something most of us do. Our society tends to be very focused on hard work and results, which feeds an attachment to outcome. We are sold over and over the idea that something else has to happen before we can have space, embrace our body, enjoy life. Unfortunately, if your brain is fed something enough without sufficient contradiction, it internalizes it as it's own idea. That's where w
More Self-Control Is Not Always The Answer
Send me a text!More self-control is not always the answer to creating calm and order in your life, despite what you may have heard from other personal development folks. Many of my clients come to me seeking calm and order because they’re feeling overwhelmed, unclear, disorganized or scattered. We’re trained to believe that what we need to overcome this sense of being out of control is to become more disciplined. That if you want to get off the emotional roller-coaster and be more consistent you
Retraining Your Body and Your Brain with Kira Macoun
Send me a text!Retraining Your Body takes Retraining your Brain and establishing a conscious relationship between the two. Brains love patterns and most of them reside in your subconscious because your brain is designed to make things easier for you. It learns the pattern and, as soon as possible, moves that learning into your subconscious, in order to respond faster and with less energy. Though that pattern was created for a reason and must have served you (or even generations before you) in so
How Do I Motivate Working On MY Projects? [coaching episode]
Send me a text!"How do I motivate working on MY projects, especially as my work gets busy?" asks the woman in this episode. She is a CPA in a small town with her own tax and accounting practice that has exploded in the past 3 years. Recently divorced, she was not expecting her business to grow so quickly at this point in her career. She has lots of creative hobbies she wants to work on but when she’s done with work for the day she finds herself watching tv rather than engaging any of h
Aligning Life As A Multi-Passionate with Bev Feldman
Send me a text!Aligning Life as a Multi-passionate can seem complicated. How do you decide what to focus on, what to monetize, and what you actually WANT to do? It can get a little overwhelming. It’s hard not to fall into worrying about picking the “wrong” thing or letting go of the “right” thing. Even passions in our life can have seasons but it’s hard to let go when you’ve spent so much time, money, and energy in a particular area. It’s important to know when something no longer fits and how t
Dealing with Burnout Beyond the 9 to 5
Send me a text!The experience of burnout exists beyond the 9 to 5, though we mostly hear it talked about in relation to being an employee for a company. In most studies, the number one factor identified as the cause of burnout is a boss. Many entrepreneurs leave the corporate burnout culture in order to have the freedom and fulfillment of being their own boss. However, the patterns of burnout aren’t unique to corporate, they are embedded in American culture and without deprogramming those patter
Learning and Living Outside the Box with Tiana Kubik
Send me a text!Learning and living outside the box makes the ability to think outside the box SO much more natural. Yet, while thinking outside the box is considered an asset in entrepreneurship and business, it’s isn’t very supported when it comes to education or how we do life. Our society gets so caught up in measuring sticks like standardized test scores and house sizes to determine whether someone is “doing well” in school and life. How often do you stop to think “How well is this really wo
Learn How to Apologize
Send me a text!Learn how to apologize meaningfully, if you truly want to be in integrity. Otherwise, you will likely end up repeating the harm that led to the need for an apology in the first place. We’ve seen this recently with a number of highly visible people. This isn’t surprising since, like so most aspects of relating to others in a healthy way, apologies aren’t something we’re taught how to do. However, I do find the blundering of the apology particularly ironic with those in the self-hel
Stop Being Nice and Start Being Resilient
Send me a text!We need to stop being nice and start being resilient. Hurt feelings happen but we've been trained to avoid them, rather than how to process and deal with them in a productive way. This leads to codependent behaviors on an individual level and feeds problematic power dynamics on a societal level. This is emphasized in corporate culture etiquette and unconscious expectations on women to manage other people's (especially men's) emotional comfort. These expectations are
Supporting Your Relationship With YOU
Send me a text!The number one relationship in your life is the one you have with yourself. It influences how you experience and engage every other relationship be it with people, situations, or resources. Interestingly though, your relationship with yourself is also built by all your other relationships. Most of the dynamics of your self-relationship happen in the background of your mind, unconsciously influencing what you notice around you, how you feel about what you notice, and how you then s
Healing from Toxic Money Stories [coaching]
Send me a text!Money stories. Many of the ones our society is swimming in are toxic. In order to change those stories and create healthier structures, we need to consciously engage them as individuals. I have many clients who are working to step out of lack mentality and create a greater sense of abundance in their life. They come from a variety of backgrounds and make anywhere from $0 staring out to 6 figures. The woman I’m coaching in this episode is a current client. She signed up for this se
Sustainable & Ethical Entrepreneurship with Erika Tebbens
Send me a text!Growing up we learn to follow the rules, hustle to create success, if we make enough money we'll be happy and valuable... Most of these stories are rooted in toxic systems that reinforce harmful ways of engaging money and people. This doesn’t make money bad. But it does mean that we need an additional level of mindfulness to engage running a business that is sustainable and ethical in practice as well as product. It takes cutting out the noise from all the “right way” gurus
Ditch the Shame & Support Your Goals with Ornella Yovo
Send me a text!Money is a topic we are obsessed with in this society. It’s incredibly sensitive, so we rarely talk about it directly. Yet we’re constantly surrounded by conversations related to it. Part of the reason is that there is a great deal of shame surrounding it – mostly in not having it, though for some there’s shame in having it that leads them to not have it. All this emotional weight and avoidance creates a very disempowering dynamic. In order to reclaim this tool to build sustainab
How to Plan for the Future AND Enjoy the Present
Send me a text!We're taught from a young age to look toward the future. That life really begins once something in the future happens, such as once you become the person you're going to be when you grow up. The problem is that this sets us up in a pattern of chasing, not having. Many clients come to me saying they have big dreams and want to make an impact in the world but they don't want to sacrifice the present moment. They believe both is possible but don't know HOW. It sta
Creating Your Ideal Day YOUR Way
Send me a text!There are tons of books all about creating an ideal day or how to start your day so that you set yourself up for success. The problem with all these strategies is that they often tell you to do things that may not fit YOU and instead leave you feeling more frustrated and less productive. The truth is that your level of productivity will look different on different days and how you support your day needs to meet you where you’re at. At the same time, outlining what you want and cre
It's Simple, So Why Am I Not Doing It? [coaching]
Send me a text!Have you ever really wanted to do something yet kept not doing it?The woman in this session came to me because she wanted to write a book and she couldn’t figure out why she wasn’t. All her natural obstacles were gone, and she had the perfect conditions for finally doing it: stable income, older kids, stuck at home… yet she still didn’t write. In this episode of Unlimited, we dig into what creates “stuck” and develop practical steps to taking action with added inspiration from a s
Embracing Your Identity with Ellie Dote
Send me a text!You can follow all the strategies but ultimately, success is multi-faceted and can only be defined by you. Yet authenticity is vulnerable and comes with greater risk, especially for people who are marginalized in our society. Stepping into greater alignment with your true self involves letting go of pieces of your life that you were previously defined by. It’s never comfortable, often messy, and there is no perfect – only progress. In this episode of the Unlimited Podcast I invite
Toxic Positivity
Send me a text!Toxic positivity is a hot topic right now because the growing awareness of its presence in the health and wellness industry. It’s used as a way to spoof life coaching in the media and I’ve even had someone at a networking event assume I’d agree that a positive attitude would cure illnesses such as Covid. (That’s a no BTW – less stress helps but it’s not a cure). Based on personal and professional experiences, I’ve come to believe that it is one of the biggest blocks to personal an
How Do I Find What I Really Want? [coaching]
Send me a text!A single woman in her early 40’s who loves to sing, dance, craft, and cook was contemplating starting a business in performance until the Coronapocolypse began. She’s trying to use this time now for introspection and personal development while also balancing a fulfilling but low paying day job with paying student loans and renovating a house. She signed up for this session because she has a history of people pleasing and wanted support to learn how to identify her own wants and ne
Learning to Trust Ourselves with Shelly Robinson
Send me a text!How much do you trust yourself to make decisions? Women especially are taught in both subtle and not so subtle ways not to trust ourselves. We are given messages over and over again that we don’t know enough, that we don’t do enough, that we aren’t enough. (Then, when we ARE true to ourselves, we’re told we’re “too much.”) This feeds a need to prove ourselves and to try to control other people’s behavior and emotions for us to be “okay.” The self-relationship is the cornerstone of
Feeling Confident Being Visible [coaching]
Send me a text!This gifted intuitive is tired of just “getting by” in a job she doesn’t feel spiritually or emotionally fulfilled by. She recently became certified as a crystal practitioner and is working toward a tarot certification and wants to start a business but struggles to believe she really can. As a recovering alcoholic she’s done a lot of self-work in recovery as well as around a traumatic past. Her hope from this session was to uncover and explore what attitudes/beliefs were holding h
Owning Your Worth [coaching]
Send me a text!Married, mom of a 3 year old, wants to make a career shift but is feeling stuck as to how. She had a near death experience after her son’s birth that rearranged her priorities and inspired the non-profit she started. She has a PhD in virology and is working on her Masters in Public Health but has been struggling to land a position that fits the work she wants to do. Her hope from this session was to have a little bit more clarity and an idea for a path forward.In this episode of U
Planting Seeds to Take Confident Action
Send me a text!We are right between winter and spring equinox, which is a time for preparing seeds to plant for the year. The next few coaching sessions I’m sharing in the next few weeks all centered around finding not only clarity to take action but uncovering the hidden blocks to confidence that were ultimately preventing that clarity. Ultimately this is a deeply personal process (as you’ll see in the coaching episodes) but there are some concepts that can help you engage your own process. In
Breaking through Paralysis by Analysis [coaching]
Send me a text!Multi-passionate entrepreneur and married mom of 2 wants to create a new branch of her business but is lost in the weeds of how. A self-identified “ideas person” she’s been stuck in analysis paralysis for months now. She signed up for this session because she was longing for someone to just tell her the “right way” even though she knows there isn’t really a “right way.”In this episode of Unlimited, we dig in to understand the block and use that knowledge to help her create a plan
Clarifying Next Steps [coaching]
Send me a text!What is coaching? It’s a question I get asked a lot and I talk about it in episode #1 but it’s one thing to talk about and another thing to experience. So, I put out an invitation to participate in a recorded coaching session to share with you and received a number of applications. Today’s episode of Unlimited is the first of those sessions.In this episode of Unlimited, I share a coaching session I did with an artist, community activist, entrepreneur, and soon to be divorced mom o
Relearning Self-Love
Send me a text!There is A LOT going on right now. It’s heavy and draining yet you don’t want to get sucked into the yuck. You want to be a light in the darkness. You want to show up for the people who you love and the things that really matter. Your relationship with yourself is the foundation for your relationship with everyone and everything else, however it tends to be the thing we poke holes in first.In this episode of Unlimited, I’m diving into actively cultivating self-love, especially in
Getting Comfortable in the Uncomfortable
Send me a text!Neuroscience shows that it is possible for us to develop new neuronal networks but that doesn’t mean change is easy. Actually, the only sure thing is that it isn’t – it’s uncomfortable, confusing, and takes work. Yet we’re in a time that is inviting us, actually more like shoving us, into change. That we show up and how we show up is up to us.In this episode of Unlimited, I’m diving into playing big and getting comfortable in the uncomfortable.Some of what I’ll cover in this episo
Reflections and A Way Forward
Send me a text!At the end of the year I take some time to reflect on the year gone by. This year is special, not just because it’s been so crazy but because it marks my 5 year anniversary of stepping into entrepreneurship. I’ve learned a lot about myself, about stress and resilience, and about the dynamics of change, all of which have served me very well through this 2020 experience.In this episode of Unlimited, I’m diving into how to create a flow in the process of growth.Some of what I’ll cove
Loving Yourself Through Grief with Lisa Zawrotny
Send me a text!The holidays can be a very difficult time for anyone grieving the loss of a loved one, regardless of when that person passed. That grief is particularly present and extensive this year with COVID making 2020 the deadliest year in U.S. history. Many people are also experiencing grief from loss of jobs, plans, relationships, etc. and even simply in empathy with our communal grief.In this episode of the Unlimited Podcast I invited Lisa Zawrotny to join me for a conversation focused o
Can I Make Plans Yet?
Send me a text!It’s that time of year when lots of people start talking about goals and intentions for the next year but it's different this year. Of course, I definitely get the desire to move on from 2020 but we are STILL in the thick of the Covid crisis. Though I resisted being one of the many to talk about New Year goal setting, I thought it was important to explore how we honor the desire to move forward while still feeling paralyzed in many ways by the trauma we’re still experiencing
Bonus Episode: How to Start Meditating
Send me a text!You’ve probably heard all about the value of meditation but it’s another thing to actually DO it, especially when you’re a busy mom entrepreneur. Even if you used to have a practice, if you’ve fallen out of the habit, it can be hard to get started again. It’s easy to inadvertently set unreasonable goals that keep you from the benefits of that valuable space of rest.In this episode of Unlimited, the podcast, I’m diving into cultivating a practice that meets you where you’re at.Some
Navigating Obstacles to Rest
Send me a text!After a conversation with my Flow Mastery group, I realized we needed to talk a little more about rest, particularly about navigating the obstacles to making space for rest. As your life shifts, so does your relationship to rest. Also, though now is a natural time for rest, it’s still important to meet yourself where you’re at when it comes to making space for it.In this episode of Unlimited, the podcast, I’m diving into applying grace, gratitude, and intentionality when it comes
The Value of Rest
Send me a text!Rest is one of the most important parts of productivity but by far the least acknowledged. It's also so much more than just productivity. It's about honoring your humanness. Winter is a time when we are naturally called to rest and rejuvenate, yet we’ve instead made it one of the busiest times of the year. Allowing yourself the space to rest is critical to creative thinking, making aligned choices, and showing up as the person you want to be.In this episode of Unlimited,
Setting Holiday Boundaries
Send me a text!Healthy boundaries are super important as we head into the holidays, especially in the midst of the Covid 19 pandemic. The word boundaries is used a lot in the personal development space but not always explained clearly. Understanding is key to feeling empowered to set supportive boundaries.In this episode of Unlimited, the podcast, I’m diving into how to set healthy boundaries in general but especially around pandemic life and holidays. Some of what I’ll cover in this episode inc
Understanding Your Stress Language
Send me a text!Our society has a love hate relationship with stress. We rely on stress for a sense of productivity and we spend a lot of energy on stress management trying to prevent the chronic stress from causing burnout and harming our health. Stress isn’t inherently bad. It’s our relationship with stress that’s problematic. In this episode of Unlimited, the podcast, I’m talking about a different way of engaging stress so that you can use stress instead of having stress use you.Some of what I
You're More Than Your Personality Test
Send me a text!Lots of people love personality tests. Personality tests can definitely be fun and can also be helpful to normalize your experience of life. BUT the self-labeling that happens with personality tests can also create an identity box that limits you and holds you back in ways you don’t even notice. In this episode of Unlimited, the podcast, I’m exploring beyond personality and into the more expansive and actionable realm of perception.Some of what I’ll cover in this episode include:T
What Is Life Coaching?
Send me a text!One of the questions I get asked most often is "What is a life coach?" That’s why episode #1 of Unlimited is all about life coaching! In this episode of Unlimited, the podcast, I’m sharing the importance of life coaching and how to understand this very popular, very helpful, but also very vague modality. Some of what I'll cover in this episode include:The differences between coaching and therapy, consulting, and mentoringCertification and the International Coaching
Welcome to Unlimited!
Send me a text!Welcome! I'm Valerie Friedlander, CPC, ELI-MP and the host of Unlimited.In this episode I share a snapshot on the whats and whys of this podcast as well as my background and approach to the topics we'll cover here.Topic such as:Impostor syndrome, stretching comfort zones, and building confidenceNavigating emotions and setting healthy boundariesLiving in the present while planning for the futureRelationships with people, social structures, and most importantly yourselfInt