#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:

• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elisaviaud-orgpsychologist/ 
• Company website: https://elisaviaud.com 

A word from our sponsor:

Great strategies fail without the right behavior.

See how positive reinforcement turns change into measurable results.

• Learn more: https://neotopia.nl  

Which part of yourself are you still trying to hide or fix, when it might be the very thing that holds your pearl?