Building your businesswith Sara Troy and her guest Jennifer Watson, on air from August 25th
I have spent my life fascinated by human excellence—the incredible ability of the human body and mind to perform, adapt, and create at the highest levels. My journey began as a high-level athlete, where I experienced excellence early in life, but over time I lost connection with the very system that made that excellence possible. Through my own journey of achievement, burnout, and rediscovery, I learned that sustainable performance does not come from pushing harder or becoming someone else. It comes from returning to the brilliance already designed within us. My work explores the intersection of neuroscience, physiology, leadership, and human potential—helping leaders reconnect with their mind and body so they can communicate, decide, and perform with greater clarity, resilience, vitality, and authenticity. My upcoming book, Known: Returning to the Original Design, shares this journey and explores how each of us can return to the core of who we are, becoming fully seen and fully expressed. The unexpected discovery is that when we return to ourselves, performance becomes more natural, powerful, and sustainable.
Jennifer Watson is a dynamic speaker, elite-performance strategist and leadership advisor with a gift for providing high-level advisory support to CEOs, business leaders, and high-impact decisionmakers navigating complex transitions and high-stakes decisions with focus, clarity and strategic insight. A former D1 collegiate track athlete and two-time All-American, she has been featured on the TEDx stage, NBC, FOX Radio, and top summits. With a clinical background in physical therapy and over 25 years of experience in behavioral science, mind-body performance, and leadership development, she guides top-tier professionals in mastering their internal ecosystem for elite results in any environment. Whether I’m facilitating a boardroom workshop, keynoting a leadership summit, or advising an executive in transition, she helps people unlock their next-level leadership through embodied strategy, powerful insight, and deeply human performance tools. She integrates science and energetics to elevate mind-body wellness, leadership expansion, and performance optimization through transition, growth, and change.
Self Discovery Wisdom is sustained by those who believe in conscious conversation. If this episode resonated with you, subscribe and, if you feel called, make a donation. Your support helps us keep amplifying voices that inspire growth, courage, and compassion. Thank you. Please join Our Forgotten Seniorsanthology and help to bring this book to awareness.
Sara’s View of Life, with Sara Troy. On air from August 18th
I recently saw the Van Gogh exhibit with Monet and I was transformed. The colours, the hues, the flow, the storytelling. If it comes to your neighborhood, please go and see it. I was so moved I wanted to do a show on them and Leo.
Van Gogh, Leonardo da Vinci, and Claude Monet did more than create extraordinary paintings—they changed how we see and understand the world. Van Gogh expressed deep emotion through colour, Leonardo united art with science and an endless curiosity about life, and Monet captured the ever-changing beauty of light and nature. Each faced hardship, criticism, and resistance, yet remained devoted to his unique vision. Today, we explore the men behind the masterpieces and discover what their lives can teach us about creativity, perseverance, curiosity, and remaining true to ourselves.
Vincent van Gogh: Painting what he felt
Vincent van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853. Before finding his artistic direction, he worked as an art dealer, teacher, bookseller, and lay preacher. He did not seriously decide to become an artist until he was 27. Van Gogh Museum
Van Gogh experienced emotional and mental distress, loneliness, poverty, and periods of serious illness. His brother Theo supported him financially and emotionally, and their letters provide a remarkable window into Vincent’s inner life.
His early paintings were dark and earthy. After moving to France, his work became brighter and more expressive. He used bold colour and swirling brushstrokes to paint what he felt, not merely what he saw.
His best-known works include:
The Starry Night
Sunflowers
Irises
The Bedroom
His many self-portraits
Van Gogh created roughly 2,000 artworks, including about 900 paintings, yet achieved little financial success during his lifetime. He died in 1890 at only 37. His work later became some of the most recognized and valuable art in history. Van Gogh Museum
It is important not to romanticize his suffering. His illness did not make him a great artist; he created great art while struggling with illness. Painting gave him purpose, expression, and moments of healing.
What Van Gogh teaches us: Recognition does not determine the value of what we create. Sometimes the world takes time to understand a unique soul.
Claude Monet: Capturing light and change
Claude Monet was born in Paris in 1840 and grew up in Le Havre, Normandy. The artist Eugène Boudin encouraged him to paint outdoors and study nature directly.
Monet became one of the founders of Impressionism. The movement received its name from his painting Impression, Sunrise. Instead of painting every object with exact detail, the Impressionists captured light, atmosphere, colour, and the feeling of a passing moment. Musée de l’Orangerie
Monet often painted the same scene repeatedly at different times of the day and in different weather. His subjects included:
Haystacks
Poplar trees
Rouen Cathedral
The River Thames
His garden and Japanese bridge
The water lilies at Giverny
Monet endured financial hardship, grief, and failing eyesight. Cataracts altered his ability to see colour, yet he continued painting. His later water-lily works became increasingly expansive and almost abstract.
After moving to Giverny in 1883, Monet created the garden and pond that inspired his most famous paintings. His monumental Water Lilies panels were offered to France as a symbol of peace following the First World War.
What Monet teaches us: Nothing remains exactly the same. When the light changes, our way of seeing can change with it.
Leonardo da Vinci: The Man Who Wanted to Understand Everything
Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452, near the small Tuscan town of Vinci in Italy. This is where his name came from—Leonardo da Vinci simply means “Leonardo from Vinci.”
He was born outside marriage to a wealthy notary father and a young mother named Caterina. Because of his birth status, Leonardo did not receive the traditional classical education available to many wealthy boys. Yet this may have allowed his mind to develop more freely. Instead of accepting what books told him, he observed life directly.
As a child, Leonardo was fascinated by water, birds, animals, plants, rocks, light, movement, and the human body. Nature became his first teacher.
Becoming an artist
As a teenager, Leonardo moved to Florence and trained in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the city’s leading artists. There, he learned painting, sculpture, metalwork, mechanics, and engineering.
According to a famous story, Leonardo painted an angel in one of Verrocchio’s paintings so beautifully that his teacher declared he would never paint again. The tale may have been exaggerated, but it reflects how exceptional Leonardo’s talent appeared to others.
Leonardo eventually moved to Milan, where he worked for Duke Ludovico Sforza. He presented himself not only as an artist but also as an engineer who could design bridges, weapons, canals, and buildings.
While in Milan, he painted The Last Supper, which captured the emotional moment when Jesus told his disciples that one of them would betray him. Unfortunately, Leonardo experimented with an unusual painting method, and the work began deteriorating within years of its completion.
The artist and scientist
Leonardo did not see art and science as separate. To paint the human body truthfully, he studied anatomy. To capture movement, he examined muscles, bones, animals, and flowing water.
He dissected human bodies and produced remarkably detailed drawings of the heart, spine, muscles, organs, and a baby developing within the womb. His investigations of the heart led to important observations far ahead of his time. Royal Collection Trust
Thousands of pages from his notebooks survive. They contain ideas for:
Flying machines
Parachutes
Bridges and canals
Military machines
Mechanical devices
Human anatomy
Plants, water, geology, and astronomy
Many designs were never built, but they reveal a mind constantly asking, “How does this work?”
Leonardo often wrote in mirror writing, moving from right to left. We do not know exactly why. It may have felt natural because he was left-handed, or it may have helped prevent the ink from smudging.
The mystery of the Mona Lisa
Around 1503, Leonardo began painting the portrait now known as the Mona Lisa. The woman is generally identified as Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Florentine merchant Francesco del Giocondo.
Leonardo used a technique called sfumato, applying very thin layers of paint to create soft, smoky transitions without harsh outlines. This helped make her expression appear to change as we look at her.
He apparently kept the portrait with him for many years and continued refining it. King Francis I later acquired it after inviting Leonardo to France. Today, it is housed in the Louvre and is considered the world’s most famous portrait. Musée du Louvre
A brilliant but restless mind
Leonardo imagined far more projects than he completed. His curiosity repeatedly pulled him from painting into anatomy, engineering, architecture, mathematics, and nature.
He produced relatively few completed paintings. Some patrons became frustrated by his slow pace and unfinished commissions. However, Leonardo was not simply procrastinating. He was continually investigating, reconsidering, and searching for a deeper understanding.
He did not want merely to paint the appearance of life—he wanted to understand the forces that created it. The Louvre describes his investigation of the world as the “science of painting,” through which he attempted to bring life into his art.
His final years
In 1516, King Francis I invited Leonardo to France and gave him a home at Clos Lucé, near the royal château at Amboise. Leonardo brought several treasured paintings with him, including the Mona Lisa.
His health declined, but he continued drawing, teaching, designing, and sharing his ideas. He died in France on May 2, 1519, at the age of 67.
What Leonardo teaches us
Leonardo reminds us that curiosity has no boundaries. He did not allow himself to be defined as only an artist, scientist, engineer, or inventor. He followed every question that awakened his imagination.
His life also shows that unfinished work does not necessarily represent a wasted life. Leonardo completed only a small number of paintings, but the depth of his observation changed how people understood art, nature, and the human body.
Leonardo’s deeper message: Never stop observing, questioning, learning, and wondering. The desire to understand something can be as valuable as the final creation.
In reflection
Leonardo da Vinci saw connections where other people saw separate subjects. Art led him to science, science returned him to nature, and nature deepened his understanding of humanity. Perhaps his greatest masterpiece was not any individual painting or invention—it was the extraordinary way he taught himself to see.
Self Discovery Wisdom is sustained by those who believe in conscious conversation. If this episode resonated with you, subscribe and, if you feel called, make a donation. Your support helps us keep amplifying voices that inspire growth, courage, and compassion. Thank you. Please join Our Forgotten Seniorsanthology and help to bring this book to awareness.
Building Your Businesswith Sara Troy and her guest Heather D. Black. On air from August 18th
For over twenty years, I sat on the other side of the stage as a meeting planner, in the room where the decisions got made about who got booked and who got passed over. I watched brilliant people show up, pour their hearts out, and walk away with nothing to show for it… and that stayed with me. Then God started nudging me toward something bigger. And I laughed. It took about 2 years for me to realize that He was serious and finally take the leap, and Phoenix Collaborations was born. My work now is helping purpose-driven speakers, coaches, and authors who are visible but not converting, the ones who feel like they’re doing all the right things and still wondering why the effort isn’t paying off. The truth I want every one of them to hear: your message matters, and being seen isn’t the same as being heard. When you get on the right stages with a real strategy behind you, your voice does more than earn applause… it changes lives, including your own. One day is here. Your audience…is waiting.
Heather Black is a Jesus-loving, coffee-drinking, spicy Carolina girl bringing sweet tea to the neon world of Las Vegas. She spent 23 years in the event and conference world before trading the planner’s clipboard for a mission of her own. She’s a builder at heart… more consultant than coach, the kind who hands you the system instead of a pep talk. Through her signature Phoenix Effect framework, she helps purpose-driven business owners turn showing up into real, measurable growth. Warm as a blanket, bold as a hot take, and always in the corner of the person with something worth saying. When the strategy finally clicks? The match is lit.
If today’s conversation stirred something in you… here’s my gift. I’m giving listeners a free 45-minute Stage-Driven Visibility Assessment. It’s a real working session. Together, we’ll find where your stage-driven visibility is leaking, why your stages aren’t converting the way they should, and the one shift that’ll move the needle first. You’ll walk away with clarity you can actually use… whether we ever work together or not.
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Please join Our Forgotten Seniorsanthology and help to bring this book to awareness.
Ignite your heart and soul with Sara Troy and her guest Linda Grace Farley. On air from August 11th
Linda says ” I’m saddened to see how many people are suffering and wanted to do something about it . I work with people to free them from the unconscious identities that quietly sabotage their potential, so they can rise into the clarity, courage, and self-authority their life has always been calling them toward.”
Linda Grace Farley is a transformational mentor, Quantum Human Design Specialist, and founder of Cycles of Life Management Services. With more than three decades of experience in human potential, energy medicine, and identity transformation, she helps individuals dissolve unconscious patterns and reclaim their authentic inner authority. Linda’s work bridges science, spirituality, and psychology, guiding people to discover the deeper truth of who they are and to live with clarity, courage, and self-generated wisdom.
All of our shows/interviews are done by donation; if you enjoyed this show, please support us here with either a one-time donation and subscribe. Thank you.
Please join Our Forgotten Seniorsanthology and help to bring this book to awareness.
Your health is your choicewith Sara Troy and her guest Ruth Minnis. On air from August 11th
I believe my calling is to bring healing and shine light into places where pain, fear, and darkness have taken hold. It has been the thread woven throughout my entire life and the work I was created to do.
Whether through massage therapy, Reiki, energy healing, intuitive guidance, sound, or simply holding compassionate space, my purpose is to help people reconnect with hope, awaken their innate capacity to heal, and remember that they are far more resilient and whole than they may believe.
Every session is an invitation to quiet the noise, restore balance, and rediscover the wisdom that already lives within them.
My life’s work has always been to carry light into dark places until others can see their own light again.
There is no greater privilege than witnessing someone leave feeling lighter, stronger, more peaceful, and deeply connected to themselves.
Ruth Minnis is the founder of Ruth’s Healing Arts, where she has dedicated her life to helping others restore balance, discover hope, and reconnect with their authentic selves.
A Licensed Massage Therapist, Reiki Master Teacher, and intuitive energy practitioner, Ruth weaves together therapeutic massage, Reiki, craniosacral therapy, reflexology, sound healing, aromatherapy, and other restorative modalities to create deeply personalized healing experiences.
Known for her compassionate heart, calming presence, and intuitive insight, Ruth believes true healing begins by addressing the whole person—body, mind, heart, and spirit.
Her passion is creating safe, nurturing spaces where people can release what no longer serves them, remember their inner wisdom, and move forward with greater peace, clarity, and purpose.
Above all, Ruth believes that every person carries within them the capacity for healing. Sometimes all they need is someone willing to hold the light until they can see it for themselves.
When she isn’t working with clients or teaching, Ruth can often be found exploring the beauty of nature, collecting stones and fossils along the Oregon coast, studying personal and spiritual growth, and continually deepening her understanding of the many ways healing unfolds.
Ruth can be reached through any of her links provided through linktree at:
Self Discovery Wisdom is sustained by those who believe in conscious conversation. If this episode resonated with you, subscribe and, if you feel called, make a donation. Your support helps us keep amplifying voices that inspire growth, courage, and compassion. Thank you. Please join Our Forgotten Seniorsanthology and help to bring this book to awareness.
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