The Conscious Edge Podcast: Redefining Wealth as a Whole Human Experience

Setting boundaries and protecting your peace has become a popular topic in personal development. Alecia and Jonathan break down the real difference between a healthy boundary and boundary language that's actually just avoidance in disguise, and why getting that distinction wrong is costing you the relationships and results you actually want.

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Get Full Show Notes: www.consciousedge.com/ep117

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In this episode, Alecia St. Germain and her longtime co-host Jonathan Dugger dig into a phrase that's everywhere right now: "I'm setting a boundary and protecting my peace." They unpack what actually separates a boundary that's grounded in your values from language that's just avoidance wearing a boundary's clothes. Alecia gets honest about her own break from recording this podcast and whether that was a boundary or something else entirely. Jonathan brings the clinical lens, breaking down avoidance as a short-term, immediate reaction versus boundaries as long-term and value-driven. Together they get into ghosting, people-pleasing, the body's reaction the first time you set a real boundary, and a simple three-step process for knowing which one you're actually doing.

📝 What We Cover in This Episode:

-How to tell if you're setting a boundary or just avoiding something uncomfortable

-Why avoidance can start small and quietly grow into a much bigger pattern over time

-What it means when your boundary is actually an attempt to control someone else's behavior

-Why ghosting someone creates more anxiety for both people than an honest conversation would

-The body sensation that shows up the first time you set a boundary that's actually healthy for you

-A three-step process for checking your motive before you cut someone off or speak up

-Why you can't help your initial emotional reaction, but you can choose your response

If your first half of the year didn't go the way you planned, you’re not alone. The good news is you still have time to make adjustments that will actually change it.

Podcast Club is where the conversation continues. Come hang out in the Podcast Club, a free community that meets most Thursdays. You can join us at consciousedge.com/club.

Get full show notes at www.consciousedge.com/ep116

Instagram:@aleciastg

In this episode, Alecia sits down with Jenn Baas, fractional CFO and facilitator of the Financial Leadership Lab at The Conscious Edge. Based on Jenn’s experience working with entrepreneurs, a majority find themselves off-track from what they predicted back in January by mid-year. But there's a fix. A mid-year audit gives you three things: visibility into what's actually working, two quarters to make corrections, and data to replace the guessing. Even if you’re finding yourself in a windfall, you can still get blind-sided. This is the real conversation every entrepreneur needs to have mid-year so there are no surprises come December.

📝 What We Cover in This Episode:

In this episode you'll discover:

-What Jenn sees over and over: most entrepreneurs’ first halves don't land as planned

-Why mid-year is your actual decision point, not December

-What happens in your head when the numbers don't match the story you told yourself at the start of the year

-The difference between financial data as compliance vs. financial data as strategy

-How looking at your numbers solo creates stories. How sharing them creates solutions.

-The exact adjustments you can make in Q3 and Q4 to engineer a different year-end outcome

-What the Financial Leadership Lab actually does and how it changes how entrepreneurs use their data

You’re Invited to Podcast Club: Listeners of The Conscious Edge are coming together on Thursdays at 1pm ET for Podcast Club. Think book club, but for the podcast. We'll talk about the episodes, what landed, where it's challenging us, and how to actually apply it. It's a chance to meet other business owners, get into real two-way conversation, and stop just consuming content. RSVP for the dates you want at consciousedge.com/club.

Get full show notes at www.consciousedge.com/ep110

Come say “hi’ on Instagram:@aleciastg

Alecia St. Germain and her co-host Jonathan Dugger take on what actually makes change work inside a team, and it has very little to do with the process. In this month's Mindfulness Matters with Jonathan, they dig into why the phrase "change management" misses the point entirely, and what Amy Edmondson's psychological safety research uncovered when Google studied nearly 200 of its own teams through Project Aristotle. The highest performing teams in that study reported more failure than the ones anyone would have guessed were the safest bets, and they held onto their people while they did it.

Alecia shares how the Immunity to Change process can be facilitated with a whole team, surfacing the big assumptions an organization runs on without ever naming them out loud. Jonathan makes the case for treating resistance as an opportunity to learn something no one has seen yet, and for letting grief have a place in professional conversations, because every change asks people to let go of something.

They also get honest about what has been lost in business culture along the way, and why relational capacity is the one thing that cannot be outsourced to an algorithm. Solo entrepreneurs are not off the hook here either. A bookkeeper and the one person she calls when she needs to think out loud already add up to a team.

📝 What We Cover in This Episode:

-What shifts when you stop calling it change management and start calling it change navigation

-What Amy Edmondson's psychological safety research found when Google studied nearly 200 of its own teams

-Why the teams that reported the most failure were also the most effective and had almost no turnover

-How uncertainty changes your brain chemistry and shuts down the exact capacities you are asking your people to use

-Why matching the right person to the right task matters far less than you have been told

-How the Immunity to Change process can be facilitated with a whole team to surface the assumptions running your culture

-Why grief belongs in change conversations, even the professional ones

-What becomes possible when you treat someone's resistance as an opportunity rather than an obstacle

Every time you tuck a good idea away for when you have more capacity, you give it the chance to go find someone else to bring it to life.

If this episode landed, come talk it through with me at Podcast Club. Most weeks we get on Zoom together and turn the podcast into a real conversation with other women who are building real businesses and playing the same game you are. It is like book club without the hangover and the gossip. Pick a date and RSVP at consciousedge.com/club.

Get full show notes at www.consciousedge.com/ep114

Come say “hi’ on Instagram:@aleciastg

In this solo episode, Alecia St. Germain reframes the anxiety so many business owners carry around money and the decisions they make in their business. It started with a question she posed to her clients, one that landed hard: are you playing to win, or are you playing not to lose? From there, Alecia explores what shifts when you stop making decisions to protect yourself from the bad things you fear and start making decisions that move you toward your vision.

Using a sports analogy that runs through the whole episode, she walks through knowing the real risks of the game you are playing and protecting yourself appropriately, the difference between being attached to winning and being invested in it, and why everything tends to feel most intense right before a breakthrough. She connects it all back to the big assumption running underneath your patterns, the one your nervous system built long ago to keep you safe, and how becoming aware of it changes the way you play.

📝 What We Cover in This Episode:

-Why protecting yourself from every possible bad outcome can become the very thing that keeps you from making money

-How to tell whether you are wearing the right amount of protection for the risk you are actually taking on

-The difference between being attached to winning and being invested in it, and why attachment wears down your performance

-What to do with the fear that lingers after a loss, a bad deal, or a market shift you did not see coming

-Why the intensity that shows up right before a breakthrough is not a signal that this is not for you

-How the big assumption you formed years ago can pull you off course right as you reach for your next level

-Why the time and money you think you are missing tend to fall into place once your alignment, your emotions, and your leadership are handled

Too many business owners are paying everyone in their business except themselves, and somewhere along the way they stopped asking why.

Podcast Club is where the conversation continues. If this stirred up questions about your own pay, I would love to keep talking. Come hang out in the Podcast Club, a free community that meets most Thursdays. You can join us at consciousedge.com/club.

Get full show notes at www.consciousedge.com/ep113

Instagram:@aleciastg

You built this business. So why does it pay everyone but you?

For a lot of women, owner pay is the problem they have stopped questioning. There's payroll, there are contractors, there are a dozen things that have to happen before there's anything left, and somewhere in there their own pay became the lever they pull whenever money gets tight. For others it runs the other way. The business did well, the lifestyle leveled up to match, and now there's a number they have to hit every month or the whole thing wobbles.

In this month's Monthly Money Talk, Alecia St. Germain sits down with fractional CFO and financial strategist Jenn Baas to look honestly at both. What owner pay actually is, how to tell whether your business can really afford you, and the simple financial-plan math that shows where your money is going. They also go underneath the numbers, to the big assumption that keeps an owner underpaying herself even when the business could support her, and the entitlement that can creep in on the other side.

This one is warm, practical, and a little bit of a permission slip to look at the number you have been avoiding.

📝 What We Cover in This Episode:

In this episode you'll discover:

- What owner pay actually means, from salary to draws to distributions, and why how you pay yourself matters less than whether you do

-Why most owners pay everyone else first and reach for their own pay as the lever they pull when money gets tight

-The simple financial-plan math that tells you whether your business can really afford you, and where the money is actually going

-The big assumption hiding under "there's just never enough left for me," and why more strategy won't move it on its own

-What overpaying yourself looks like, and how leveling up your lifestyle too fast can leave your business fragile when the market shifts

-Why "if I'm working this hard, it has to be worth it" deserves a closer look before it sets your salary

-How emotional capacity, not just the numbers, decides whether you can hold and enjoy what you have built