We talk about voice like it's a soft skill. It isn't. It's wired into the nervous system, and for a lot of women, being seen has never felt safe.

Marta Spirk is a strategic speaking advisor, TEDx speaker, bestselling author, and professional singer who helps women entrepreneurs use speaking, storytelling, and visibility as tools for authority and business growth. She came on The Raw Onion to talk about what actually happens in the body when a woman tries to take up more space, and why "confidence" was never the real problem.

We get into:

• The neuroscience behind why women hesitate before self-promotion
• The difference between confidence and self-trust
• Why the voice is the only instrument controlled by both the voluntary and autonomic nervous systems
• The signature talk versus the elevator pitch
• Why repetition, not talent, is what actually builds the kind of presence people trust

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why women show higher amygdala activation around visibility, and why that's conditioning, not biology
• The difference between chasing confidence and building self-trust
• How the body gives away a dysregulated nervous system before a word is spoken
• How cultural upbringing shapes a woman's relationship with being seen
• Why repetition, not waiting to feel ready, is the actual bridge to feeling safe

🎙️ GUEST:

Marta Spirk, Strategic Speaking Advisor, TEDx Speaker, Bestselling Author of The Empowered Woman: The Ultimate Roadmap to Business Success, Professional Singer, Host of The Empowered Woman podcast

⏱️ CHAPTERS:

0:00 Meet Marta Spirk

3:44 Growing up loud

5:38 Becoming trilingual

8:21 Women and visibility

12:18 The amygdala and self-promotion

15:02 Confidence versus self-trust

16:52 The signature talk

20:19 The inner critic

23:30 Vulnerability in groups

30:43 Knowing your own content

37:23 The body and language

39:47 Discomfort and the real pain point

44:33 Cultural conditioning and saying no

52:35 Repetition and safety

59:10 Where to find Marta

🔗 CONNECT WITH MARTA SPIRK:

Website: MartaSpirk.com

Book: The Empowered Woman: The Ultimate Roadmap to Business Success

Podcast: The Empowered Woman

LinkedIn: Marta Spirk

Facebook: Marta Spirk

Instagram: MartaSpirk

🔗 CONNECT WITH THE RAW ONION:

therawonionpodcast.com

🔗 CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE:

triagebalancedlife.com

🔗 CONNECT WITH YOSHIE:

lotusflowerjourneys.com

#PermissionToBeSeen #MulticulturalVoices #SelfTrustOverConfidence

You've worked twice as hard to get half the credit. You sat in rooms where no one looked like you, no one led like you, and no one understood what it cost you to show up. And you did it anyway.

Adyna K. Pressley is a global women's leadership architect, award-winning author, keynote speaker, founder of Queens Royale, and host of the Pressley on Purpose podcast. With more than 30 years of corporate leadership experience, she built her life's work on one truth: leading from truth, not performance.

We get into:

• What it felt like to be the only Black woman in executive leadership
• Why performing eventually became physically unsustainable
• The moment she chose to speak up knowing it might cost her everything
• The science underneath why generational elevation happens in the body first
• What it sounds like when Oprah gives you eight minutes she only promised you two

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why the brain learns that performing is safe and authenticity is risky
• How exhaustion signals that two versions of you are running in opposite directions
• Why speaking from truth does not mean starting over

🎙️ GUEST:

Adyna K. Pressley, Global Women's Leadership Architect | Founder, AKP Inventions and Queen's Royale | Author, Rise Into You: Reclaiming Power, Love, Life and Legacy | Host, Presley on Purpose Podcast

⏱️ CHAPTERS:

0:00 Meet Adyna K. Pressley

5:08 Who were you before the title?

7:40 The only Black woman in the room

9:03 When he performed as a teammate

13:40 The system is the problem, not the woman

17:43 Hospitalized. Burned out. Done.

21:07 How she stayed grounded in the chaos

27:32 Never changed who she was, not once

33:17 "If he gets this job, I quit."

40:00 Generational elevation starts in the body

43:39 The science behind what she was already doing

48:22 Queens Royale: identity you can wear

59:43 A solo train ride and a book was born

1:01:52 How she ended up on Oprah

1:06:43 Adyna's closing message

🔗 CONNECT WITH ADYNA K. PRESSLEY:

Book: Rise Into You

Website: adynakpressley.com

Queens Royale: queens-royale.com

LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube: Adyna K Pressley

Podcast: Pressley on Purpose

🔗 CONNECT WITH THE RAW ONION:

Substack: therawonion.substack.com

IG: @therawonionpodcast

Contact: hello@therawonionpodcast.com

Work with Stephanie: Free fit call

Work with Yoshie: Free clarity call

#AuthenticLeadership #TruthOverPerformance #WomenAcrossCultures

Reece Soltani was at the top of the table at a billion-dollar organization doing serious work for refugees on a global scale.

And she still felt like she couldn't make a dent in it.

"So why am I here?"

That question changed everything.

She did everything right. Master's degree. Fortune 500 consulting. Billion-dollar nonprofit. But she felt very unhappy and purposeless in a way she couldn't fully explain.

So she left.

"I want to build something with my hands and feel it and literally be able to see what I just made."

And that became Chachi's.

This one goes into the places most career conversations never touch. The hollowness behind the highlight reel. The cost of impact you can never see. And the quiet courage it takes to start over.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why achieving everything you were supposed to want can still leave you feeling empty
• How unfinished stress cycles quietly fuel burnout from the inside
• What it really costs to stay in a life that fits on paper but not in your body
• Why walking away from security can be an act of honor, not betrayal
• How connection and community become the unexpected bottom line in business
• Why a little productive delusion might be exactly what your next chapter needs

🎙️ GUEST:

Reece Soltani is the founder of Chachi's, a Los Angeles sandwich shop building toward franchise expansion and retail. Prior to Chachi's, she spent nearly a decade as a consultant and strategic advisor to Fortune 500 companies and executive teams before burning out and making a hard pivot into entrepreneurship.

⏱️ CHAPTERS:

0:00 Introduction

2:10 Meet Reece Soltani

3:37 What Success Was Supposed to Look Like

8:40 Living Inside the Picture-Perfect Life

9:50 The Feeling of Never Making a Dent

16:29 Stress Cycles and the Dopamine Connection

18:27 Wanting Something Tangible

21:15 Making the Leap

26:55 The People Who Made Chachi's Possible

28:21 The Line Out the Door on Day One

30:53 Universal Act of Care

36:28 Building a People-First Business

38:00 Heart, Soul, and the Loneliness Epidemic

39:27 Two Sides of the Same American Dream Coin

43:04 Building With a Village

46:09 Productive Delusion

50:30 Step One and Cutting Through the Noise

54:00 A Word For the Family Who Worries

56:14 Where to Find Reece Soltani and Chachi's

🔗 Connect with Reece

Website: www.eatchachis.com

Instagram: @eatchachis

🔗 CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE:

Website: Triage Coaching and Consulting

Free fit call: tidycal.com/sohannesian

🔗 CONNECT WITH YOSHIE:

Website: Lotus Flower Journeys

Free clarity call

🔗 The Raw Onion:

Website: The Raw Onion

Email: hello@therawonionpodcast.com

#WomenInBusiness #PeopleFirstBusiness #MultiCulturalWomen

The pressure to keep performing can make you forget who you are. In this episode, Renee Coover joins The Raw Onion to talk about what happens when career success, motherhood, and self-worth collide, and what it looks like to choose yourself before your body forces the issue.

Renee shares her journey from high-stakes legal work to a more aligned life, including the moment she realized that burnout was not just emotional, it was physical. We talk about career transitions, the illusion of safety, self-advocacy, and the courage it takes to rebuild after everything you thought defined you starts to fall away.

This conversation is for anyone who has ever questioned whether the path they are on still fits. If you have been pushing through exhaustion, doubting your next step, or wondering how to trust your inner voice again, Renee’s story offers both honesty and hope.

We get into:

• Career transitions and self-identity.
• Overcoming fear and self-doubt.
• The importance of self-advocacy and boundaries.
• Building confidence and resilience.
• The role of support systems and community.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Why burnout can show up in the body before it shows up in your decisions.
• How to tell when success no longer feels sustainable.
• Why a “power pause” can become a turning point.
• How yoga and meditation helped Renee reconnect with herself.
• What it means to bet on yourself and build something new.

🎙️ GUEST:

Renee Coover is the founder of Engage Law, a fractional outside general counsel who helps growing businesses navigate employment, regulatory, and operational matters with clarity and practical guidance.

⏱️ CHAPTERS:

00:00 Introduction

05:13 Renee's Story: From Big Law to Yoga Instructor

11:07 Listening to the Body and Making Decisions

19:52 Recognizing Opportunities in Life's Moments

25:06 Embracing Change and Taking Risks

37:20 Overcoming Fear of Risk and Embracing Change

47:22 Armoring Up for Yourself

55:28 Advocating for Yourself in the Workplace

01:05:52 Finding Your True Identity

🔗 CONNECT WITH RENEE:

LinkedIn: Renee Coover

YouTube: Engage Law

TED Talk: Taking Back Your Pregnancy Rights

Website: EngageLaw

🔗 CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE:

Website: Triage Coaching and Consulting

Free fit call: https://tidycal.com/sohannesian

🔗 CONNECT WITH YOSHIE:

Website: Lotus Flower Journeys

Free clarity call

🔗 The Raw Onion:

Website: The Raw Onion

Email: hello@therawonionpodcast.com

#WomenInBusiness #PowerPause #CareerGrowth

If you have ever felt like your body gave out before your mind was ready to stop, you are not alone in that experience.

And you are not broken.

What happened, neurologically and physiologically, has a reason. This episode is where we start to look at it.

We closed out the Roadmap to Resilience series with something different this episode. Stephanie brought her own story to the table, and what she’s spent the last decade trying to understand about what actually broke down, and why.

What we explored together:

Resilience is neurological, not just psychological. Culture tells us resilience means endurance, suppression, grinding through. Neuroscience tells us something completely different. It is recovery capacity. Flexibility. The ability of your nervous system to find its way back to safety after stress. Those are not the same thing.

Your body has been scanning for safety your entire life. There is a process happening beneath your awareness, constantly assessing your environment, your relationships, your inner state. When that process has been overridden by years of hustle, inherited messaging, or survival wiring passed down through your family, you lose access to your own signals. You stop trusting what your body is telling you. And that is when collapse becomes possible.

What you inherited may not belong to you. The hypervigilance. The head-down, don’t rock the boat, keep working until someone notices. The inability to rest without guilt. For many of us, those were not choices we made. They were patterns absorbed from the people who came before us, people who needed those patterns to survive. The question is whether those same patterns are serving you now, or quietly running the show without your knowing.

Identity and resilience are not separate conversations. If you don’t know what belongs to you, if your values have been borrowed from a workplace or a family system or a culture that taught you to earn your worth, your system has nothing stable to return to. Resilience requires somewhere to land.

Curiosity is where it starts to shift. Not a program. Not a fix. Just the willingness to ask: what is this trying to tell me? What engine am I actually running on, and is it mine?

We are not here to tell you what is wrong with you.

We are here because what is happening in your body, your brain, your burnout, your exhaustion, your sense that something is off even when nothing looks broken from the outside, has a reason. And that reason is rewritable.

We will be back next week in a new format. Video is coming, and we are stepping into a new series exploring women in business.

Until then, you are more resilient than you think.

If something in this episode is still sitting with you:

Wondering if what you’re carrying might be inherited, not yours? Stephanie works with high-performers ready to remap what’s been running them.

Book with Stephanie

Feeling like you're at a crossroads and not sure which layer to look at first? Yoshie works with people who are ready to get curious about what's underneath.

Book with Yoshie

Dr. Punam V. Saxena is a TEDx and SXSW speaker, two-time author, and advocate with over 35 years of work in equity and education. A second-generation Indian American who grew up as the only Indian family in rural Georgia, she speaks on cultural bias, the Model Minority Stereotype, parent engagement, and empowering South Asian women’s voices in leadership. Her signature TEDx talk, The Key to Enhancing Student Success, explores the minority experience of growing up as “other.”

We are opening a new series on The Raw Onion, and it begins where so much of what we carry as adults actually begins.

With the young brain.

Not because this episode is only for parents. But because every single one of us was once a child in a system, a home, a culture, that was either building us up or quietly chipping away at something essential.

And most of us never had the conversation we needed about what was actually happening.

This episode is that conversation.

Dr. Saxena spent her early years being tested for a gifted program twice and not passing, not because she was not brilliant, but because the assessments were built around a language and culture that was not hers. She describes losing 25 years of her life to what that moment took from her. That experience became the foundation of 35 years of advocacy, and it is the thread running through everything she shares here.

What she brings to this episode is not a framework or a method. It is honesty. The kind that makes you pause and think about the child you were, the adults who surrounded you, and what was quietly being encoded in that developing brain before you ever had words for it.

We explore what the education system was built for, and who it was not built for. We sit with the concept of a secure base, the one relationship, the one presence, where a child can simply exist without performing. We talk about selective cultural identity and what children silently choose to carry forward. We talk about legacy, presence, and what it actually means to show up for a young mind in a world moving faster than any prior generation.

Stephanie‘s work at Triage Coaching and Consulting focuses on inherited generational stress and the neuroscience of how family patterns shape our nervous systems across generations.

If you are in your 40s or beyond and something in your life no longer fits the way it once did, Yoshie works with women navigating exactly that. Visit Lotus Flower Journeys to learn more.

For the first time in human history, we are living inside a global nervous system. Not as a metaphor. Literally.

And for those of us in this community, there is something worth sitting with: we are among the last people who will ever have known life before that was true. We grew up with downtime built into the day by default. Evenings that ended. A world that existed mostly within a radius we could actually see.

That is not nostalgia. That is neuroscience.

The human nervous system was shaped over hundreds of thousands of years to process the emotional signals of a small, contained world. That same system now wakes up every morning and immediately begins processing the emotional temperature of millions.

In Episode 15, we go deep on what it actually means to maintain psychological sovereignty inside an environment that was not designed with your wellbeing in mind. We explore what the brain is actually doing when the noise of the world gets loud, and why so many of us feel depleted in ways that are hard to name.

What we hope you take from this one is not a to-do list. It is a different relationship with what is happening inside you. Understanding that your system is overwhelmed is not the same as something being wrong with you.

This is the third episode in our March series, Discernment in the Age of Chaos. If something here resonates, we would love to hear from you in the comments.

Something happened to Stephanie recently that opened this whole conversation.

She was helping her mom out of a building. Blinkers on. Gone in under a minute. By the time she turned around, a stranger was photographing her license plate, shaking, then screaming, then in tears.

It was not about the car.

We have all felt it lately. Conversations that turn sharp fast. Small moments carrying weight they shouldn’t. Everyone just one thing away from the edge.

So we had to ask: why does everything feel like an emergency right now?

Your brain was not built for 24/7 global threat exposure.

For most of human history, threats were local. Your nervous system would activate, you would respond, and then you would recover. The stress cycle completed. Today, that loop never closes.

Layer in something that is not being talked about enough right now: collective betrayal. Not just disappointment. Betrayal is what happens when a source of perceived safety becomes a source of threat. Your brain, which runs on prediction, experiences that as a full internal alarm. All at once.

And your negativity bias, your attention being hijacked by outrage and breaking news? That is not a flaw. It is ancient survival wiring being deliberately exploited.

Many of us are living in partial activation. Not panicking, not at rest. Just simmering. Cortisol running with nowhere to go. Irritable. Fatigued. Low-grade hopeless.

That is not weakness. That is a nervous system that has been fed urgency until it cannot tell the difference anymore.

This series is about discernment. Not looking away, but developing the filter that the world is actively working against.

It starts with one question:

What are you consuming that your nervous system is experiencing as a threat?

And what would shift, automatically, if clarity guided your attention instead of urgency?

Next week, in Part 2, we turn toward a tender possibility: that some of what you are carrying right now may not even be yours.

Subscribe so you don’t miss Part 2.

What is one thing your system is treating as a threat that might not need to be?