Tawnia Converse is an experienced yoga teacher and mentor and the creative force behind A Soulful Space LLC virtual healing arts studio. Tawnia retired from the Marine corps after 20 years of service as a Spanish linguist and intel analyst and now she supports women in their spiritual journey back to become whole, radiant and sovereign souls through yoga.

Tawnia has an incredible journey and experience to share with her clients, students and fellow instructors in the wellness space and this promises to be a really interesting exploration as we learn a little bit more about Tawnia and take a look at how we can build a more authentic voice in our personal and professional lives.

So let’s start our work in with Tawnia Converse …

We’ve talked about sleep, nutrition and movement and the things you can do, the small simple things you can do every single day that can have big lasting effects not just on your physical health but also your mental health. The last piece to the puzzle is connection. And it’s a big piece. Bigger than just one solo episode. So I thought I’d bring in some examples of how we can find connections between our health choices and our health and resilience. My guest today is Beth Kruger. Beth is a women's wellness educator, yoga instructor and coach. She’s spent her career supporting women through childbirth, lactation, pregnancy and fertility. She’s a business owner and entrepreneur and has led many women’s wellness retreats all over the world. Her current focus is on menopause and helping women over 40 through this transition.

one of my goals on this podcast is to try to use these conversations to help normalize the experience of trauma so that people don't feel so alone in their experience. And so that when we encounter someone who has maybe a trauma story, or trauma history or maybe is struggling in that moment, we can hold space for them a little bit and maybe extend a little grace for what they are experiencing. And my guest today is a beautiful example of that and of how you he's using his own experience to help others. Jason Sapp is a retired Army sergeant and Iraq or combat veteran, and now a certified professional life coach and author, Jason guides people to more holistic alternative resources to wellness…

in the fitness industry, of course, we want to have a really fantastic depth and breadth of knowledge to present to our students. And in the quest for that, it's often really easy to kind of fall into this trap of just collecting certification after certification without any real plan, or idea about what it is that we really want to get out of those certifications… sometimes what ends up happening is that we keep collecting certification after certification. And we get lots and lots of letters after our name and it can be very confusing to not just our clients but to ourselves about who we are, what it is we do what we want to offer for real and so I wanted to introduce you today to one of my teachers and good friends in the yoga industry. And we're going to discuss curating certifications a little bit more with Cara Uranga of Drishti Yoga teacher training…

There is NO trick to unlocking resilience. No one skill or tool or practice will guarantee that you will never be overwhelmed by stress or trauma. We can’t trick our body’s survival system. And I don’t think we want to even though people try all the time.

There are 3 things that make something feel stressful or traumatic to your nervous system. And you can apply these to situations, relationships, memories, thoughts or injuries, pretty much any experience you’ve had long or short term, present, past or future. Isolation, uncertainty and lack of control. It could be any one of those things or any combination of them.

The good news is that knowing those three components of stress and trauma, we can customize our own behavior to build the kind of unshakeable resilience that so many people are looking for.

One of the reasons why leadership is so important for them to develop their own resilience is they as a leader probably have more influence on that dynamic between between team members than anybody else. The phrase that I often use is leaders set the tone. So that's in a couple of ways. They set an example. And they set a almost like a status quo of what's kind of the norm. So if you've got a leader who is very stressed, direct directly or indirectly in some of the way that he's going to be affecting the rest of the team.