The Making of a Warrior of Light is part memoir, part motivational guide, and challenges readers to turn survival into strength through discipline, truth, and relentless self-reinvention. Was there a particular moment when you realized your experiences could help others?

I first realized my story could help others when I was in college at Alverno. Until that point, I carried a lot of shame about my childhood and almost never spoke about it. My focus was simple: survive it, bury it, and move forward.

Then I read A Child Called “It.”

While reading that book, something shifted inside me. For the first time, I saw how a painful story, when told honestly, could become a source of strength for someone else. Instead of something to hide, it could become something that helps others feel seen and understood.

At the same time, I was confronting the beliefs I had carried about myself for years. Growing up, I had internalized the message that I was dumb and worthless. Simply believing that I could succeed in college felt like a radical act of defiance against the past I came from.

In that moment, I made a quiet but powerful decision: my past would not determine my future. And I promised myself that when I made it to the other side, I would share my story so others could see what was possible. If I could overcome those beliefs and rebuild my life, then maybe someone else reading my story would begin to believe they could too.

That promise eventually became The Making of a Warrior of Light.

You describe how survival behaviors can look like personality. Can you explain that idea?

Most people don’t realize how much of their personality is actually built around survival. When we grow up in environments where we feel unsafe, unseen, or unsupported, the mind adapts quickly. It creates strategies to protect us, and over time, those strategies can start to look like personality traits.

Hyper-independence can look like strength. Perfectionism can look like ambition. Emotional distance can look like confidence. But often those patterns began as ways to stay safe.

One of the biggest survival patterns in my own life was overworking. From the time I was fifteen, I was working two to three jobs while going to school. That pattern continued through college and into adulthood. Even after I started my own business, I was working seventy-hour weeks while also being a full-time caregiver for my son and pursuing multiple degrees and certifications.

For a long time, I framed that as a positive identity. I told myself I was a “growth goddess,” someone who loved learning, building, and achieving. But underneath that drive was a deeper belief I hadn’t yet questioned: if I wasn’t producing, learning, or accomplishing something, I didn’t feel valuable.

What looked like ambition was actually survival.

Recognizing that was a turning point for me. When we start to see the difference between who we truly are and the version of ourselves we built just to get through hard circumstances, we can begin to release the patterns that keep us exhausted and disconnected from our worth.

Because the truth is, our value was never meant to be measured by how much we produce.

Worth is not something we earn through survival. It’s something we remember when we finally stop trying to prove we deserve to exist.

What does “Beast Mode” mean in the context of personal growth, and how can readers apply that mindset to their own challenges?

In the context of personal growth, “Beast Mode” means making a non-negotiable decision that you are done living the old way. It’s the moment when you stop negotiating with your limitations and commit to doing whatever it takes to transform your situation.

A lot of personal development advice focuses on gentle, daily practices, and those are incredibly valuable. A few minutes of meditation or a short coherence practice each day can create powerful shifts over time. But there are moments in life when things are collapsing all at once—your finances, your health, your emotional stability, your sense of direction. In those moments, transformation often requires a different level of commitment.

Beast Mode is when you decide that your breakthrough is the priority.

For example, creating heart-brain coherence through practices like breathwork or HeartMath can absolutely be done with a few minutes a day. But when I’ve gone through intense seasons of my life, Beast Mode meant something much more devoted. It meant practicing coherence every hour for several days, or committing to that level of discipline for weeks if necessary. It means regulating my nervous system, aligning my thoughts, and staying spiritually anchored again and again until the internal shift became undeniable.

Anyone can wait for life to improve. Beast Mode is when you become the person who decides it will. It requires devotion–a willingness to show up for your transformation with extraordinary focus until the old pattern breaks.

Because ultimately, a breakthrough doesn’t belong to the most talented people. It belongs to the ones who become relentless about their own evolution.

What advice would you give someone who feels stuck in survival mode?

The first thing I would tell someone who feels stuck in survival mode is this: start by regulating your nervous system. When your body is constantly operating in stress, fear, or overwhelm, it becomes almost impossible to see clearly or make empowered decisions. Practices that bring your body back into coherence—breathwork, stillness, movement, prayer, or meditation—create the internal safety required for real change.

But regulation alone isn’t enough. You also have to become devoted to aligning with your highest timeline.

What that means in practical terms is that you begin disrupting anything in your life that dishonors who you are becoming. Sometimes that’s a habit. Sometimes it’s an addictive coping pattern. Sometimes it’s the way you treat your own body through food or self-neglect. And sometimes it’s the dynamics within your relationships.

Growth often requires a reordering of your life. I’m not saying people need to abandon their families or cut everyone off. But many people do need to establish stronger boundaries around their time, their energy, and the environments they allow themselves to stay in. Survival mode thrives in chaos, depletion, and misalignment. When you begin protecting your energy and choosing environments that support your expansion, everything starts to shift.

Moving out of survival mode is rarely a single decision. It’s a series of courageous choices that gradually reshape your life.

Because ultimately, the life you’re meant to live can’t fully emerge until you stop making space for the patterns that keep you small.

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