If you’ve ever felt like you were abandoning yourself to keep everyone else comfortable, this conversation will likely spark something in your heart.

There’s a season many of us reach where something inside finally says enough.

Enough performing. Enough shrinking. Enough silencing that voice inside you that’s been asking for your attention for years.

I’ve been in that season. Multiple times, actually. Leaving my career in television news. Navigating the unraveling of relationships that couldn’t hold the version of me I was becoming. Learning – over and over again that the path forward requires letting go of who I thought I was supposed to be.

And one of the things I’ve noticed about these pivot seasons is how lonely they can feel. You’re changing, and you’re doing it publicly, and you have no idea if the new version of you is going to make any sense to anyone. It’s like getting undressed and redressed in front of an audience, hoping the outfit lands.

That’s exactly where this week’s conversation on The Worlds Needs Your Medicine began.

We’re always called to the work we needed someone to hold for us

Erin Gallagher is the author, CEO and Founder of HYPE WOMEN – a system-challenging sisterhood of women building collective wealth. Her work unlocks women’s access to human, social, financial, political and spiritual capital. Karma is their currency. Hype is their constancy.

But before she became a leader in this space, Erin spent 15 years climbing the corporate ladder in marketing and PR agencies. She was the good girl. The rule follower. The one who kept her head down and did what she was told.

Until she couldn’t anymore.

What struck me immediately about Erin is that she wasn’t always a hype woman. She was jaded. Skeptical. Burned by relationships that taught her to distrust any celebration that came her way. And that’s exactly what makes her medicine so potent – she built it from the inside out, from her own healing.

You can’t receive hype unless you believe the hype is true

This landed in my body the moment she said it.

So many of us struggle to receive love, celebration, support – not because it isn’t there, but because we’ve spent so long hearing lies about ourselves that we think anyone saying something beautiful must be wrong.

Erin shared how years of being gaslit in corporate spaces taught her to distrust her own intuition. She was told she was too difficult. Too disruptive. Too much. And when you hear that long enough, you start to believe it. You stop trusting yourself.

The past five years of her life have been about relearning to trust that inner compass – and realizing that the people who wanted her to see it as broken were the ones who were afraid of what would happen if she knew her full power.

They were right to be afraid. She left.

The grief no one talks about when they sell you on growth

One of my favorite parts of our conversation was when Erin said something that struck me:

“We don’t talk enough about the fact that in growth, there is so much loss. Growth is sold to us as a really positive, expansive, forward moving idea. But in order to grow, parts of you have to die.”

This is the piece that gets left out of the highlight reels. The relationships that can’t come with you. The identities you have to release. The dreams you built at 28 that no longer fit the woman you’ve become.

I’ve felt this deeply with my own family. My family unit doesn’t always like when I change. They don’t know how to meet the new version of me, and sometimes that mirrors back something they’re not ready to look at in themselves. Learning how to stay connected without shrinking back into an old version of myself has been one of the harder edges of my own evolution.

Erin named it perfectly – they’re not rejecting you. They’re rejecting the version of themselves they’d have to become to meet you where you are now.

Control disguised as protection is still prevention

Erin shared a breakthrough that changed everything for her: all the ways she was trying to control her life – thinking it was protecting her – were actually preventing her from experiencing joy.

I felt that one.

So many of us grip tighter when things feel uncertain. We think if we can just manage every outcome, we’ll be safe. But what Erin realized is that control keeps out the very love, connection, and opportunity we’re hungry for. It blocks the people who would celebrate this new version of us from even finding us.

When we make ourselves small so others feel comfortable, we’re prioritizing their discomfort over our growth. And that math doesn’t work.

The moment she stopped defending her own life

Near the end of our conversation, Erin shared a story that gave me chills.

For years, her husband would ask her, every six months or so, when she was going to get a “real job.” And for a while, she took those words to heart. She defended. She explained. She tried to make him understand.

Until one day, she didn’t.

She told him plainly: I am not the woman you married. I will never be her again. I am not going back to corporate America. I am an entrepreneur. These are the facts. You can accept that and we move forward together, or you cannot accept that and we move forward separately.

That’s the kind of clarity that only comes when you’ve stopped abandoning yourself.

Hype is a shamanic tool

Something I shared with Erin toward the end of our conversation is that hype – celebration, showing love, blessing others… is actually rooted in ancient wisdom. In indigenous traditions, shamanic technology is built on three things: blessings, love, and gratitude.

That’s all hype is.

It shifts paradigms. It shifts reality. When we show someone an expression of the frequency we want to receive, we’re not just being nice – we’re participating in something sacred.

Erin understood this at a soul level before she had words for it. And now she’s building a movement around it.

What this conversation reminded me

This episode reminded me that the work we’re called to is so often the work we once needed someone to hold for us.

It reminded me that fumbling through transformation publicly is braver than waiting until you’ve figured it all out.

And it reminded me that the women who will love and celebrate this version of you are waiting – but you have to stop hiding first.

This episode airs February 3rd. I can’t wait for you to hear it.

Xoxo, Lauren