Laura sits down and works through three things that surfaced this week: her first real nasty comments on social media, her grad students finding her on Instagram during her visibility experiment, and the big one — waking up with a pit in her stomach about holding back information on Useful Thinking that she knows could help people. The episode lands on a decision she's been avoiding for the entire run of that podcast: integrating human design into the work.

Key takeaways:

• Why the nasty comments landed lighter than she expected and what that tells her.
• The question of whether her worlds merging (professor, business owner, experimental woo practitioner) is confirmation or catastrophe.
• And the core tension she's been sitting on: she knows no one else is combining brain mechanics with human design energetics, which is both the reason she's scared to do it and the reason she has to.

Connect with Laura:

• Instagram: @think.laura
• Substack: https://thinklaura.substack.com/
• Pod: Useful Thinking
• Hub: thinklaura.com

Laura traces a thread that's been running through her visibility work all year. She starts connecting the dots between a conversation with a dear friend, her Instagram experiment, and a pattern of getting close and pulling back. Also: a birthday gift from Mike that turned into an unintentional experiment of its own, and the decision to finally close a loop she's been leaving open since December.

Key takeaways:

• Why not finishing something you committed to stays open as a loop in your integrity
• Inventing reasons to be scared vs finding one reason it will work
• What the next scary growth move is

Connect with Laura:

• Instagram: @think.laura
• Substack: https://thinklaura.substack.com/
• Pod: Useful Thinking
• Hub: thinklaura.com

Laura records her birthday episode after refusing to force it the day before. What came through on the morning walk was an overwhelming sense that 55 years ago, her specific energetic makeup was declared part of the recipe of this world. The episode moves into a real-time processing of two very different business paths she sees in front of her, and lands on a question she's asking the universe for her birthday: how do you know when to surrender and when to take the reins?

Connect with Laura:

• Instagram: @think.laura
• Substack: https://thinklaura.substack.com/
• Pod: Useful Thinking
• Hub: thinklaura.com