#41 Elisa’s Journey to integration: some people walk through fire. Others learn how to turn the ashes into meaning.
In this episode which marks the 🥳1 year anniversary🥳 of ✨Journeys of Empowerment✨, I sat down with:
Elisa Viaud, organizational psychologist, therapist and someone who knows what it means to carry complexity and create from it. From growing up as a cultural outlier to navigating burnout at Tesla and personal healing from early trauma, Elisa's story is a rich tapestry of dualities: pain and hope, intellect and emotion, light and dark. Her work is about weaving them together.
What we explored:
👉🏾 Pain as catalyst: transforming personal wounds into creative power;
👉🏾 Belonging vs. fitting in: why embracing your outlier identity matters;
👉🏾 Cognitive diversity: how multiple perspectives fuel real innovation;
👉🏾 Integrity in complexity: standing in truth without polarizing others;
👉🏾 Spiritual grounding in a corporate world: what she carried from Uber and Tesla into her own practice;
Nuggets of empowerment:
🙌🏾 “Awareness is half the work once you see clearly, you begin to heal”
🙌🏾 “Pain doesn’t disappear when ignored, it transforms when acknowledged”
🙌🏾 “You don’t have to become someone else to be accepted. You have to become more of yourself”
Books mentioned:
📚 The Body Keeps the Score | Bessel van der Kolk
📚 It Didn’t Start with You | Mark Wolynn
📚 The Courage to Be Disliked | Ichiro Kishimi & Fumitake Koga
📚 Happy Oysters | Rubem Alves
Connect with Elisa:
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Which part of yourself are you still trying to hide or fix, when it might be the very thing that holds your pearl?