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Soulful Ambition

The podcast for ambitious people yearning for more soul. Formerly known as A Balancing Act, Soulful Ambition explores what it means to live inside out and go after our deepest longings. Analisa Leaming is a Broadway actor turned down what would have been her 5th Broadway show to move her family to the mountains of Colorado and become a full-time coach. Soulful Ambition might sound contradictory at first… Because we’ve let society define ambition as striving for individual success, monetary gain, and personal achievements. But that’s not what the soul really craves. In each episode, we’re calling back the parts of ourselves conditioned to society’s grind and external pressure. And awakening the longing in your chest that is so big it threatens to swallow you whole. So you can shine unapologetically, source from within, and work towards your dreams with abandon.
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Now displaying: November, 2023
Nov 28, 2023

Learn more about 1:1 Soulful Coaching w/ Analisa Leaming HERE.

Get your free audition meditation & stay in the loop with Analisa and A Balancing Act HERE.

Episode Highlights: 

  • Looking at your dreams through the lens of the enneagram 

  • Your unique vice turned to virtue

  • A story of an actor who left New York and found creative success on their own terms

  • How to use the enneagram as an acting tool

Episode Summary:

In this episode Analisa interviews Elizabeth Newcomer, Actor turned Enneagram Coach. Analisa and Liz talk in depth about each type to help you identify your own number and Liz explains the core desires of each type as well as their greatest virtues and vices. Throughout their conversation, Liz and Analisa share stories of how the enneagram has helped them follow their big dreams and navigate interacting and communicating with others. Listen to this packed episode to learn how the enneagram can be an incredibly powerful tool and how to see beyond the “box” that personality types often lead us to feel trapped in.

Time Stamps 

0:00 Analisa’s Intro 

3:00 Elizabeth’s journey from actor to enneagram coach 

8:30  Letting your dreams be a north store to guide you

13:29 Introduction to the enneagram and how it can help us or hold us back

16:48 Overview / definition of what enneagram is

20:38 Liz’s recommendation for how to find your type, examples of 2s, 4s, and 9s

26:36 The Body Triad: 1, 8, and 9

28:14 The Head Triad: 5 (motivated by knowledge), 6 (preparedness), and 7 (options)

30:55 Taking action upon your deepest callings through the lens of your enneagram

31:40 Vice to virtue, is an action in alignment with where you want to go

32:11 How this looks for the Heart Triad: 2 (the giver)

37:20 Type 3 (the performer) Type 4 (the dreamer)

40:53 Head Triad: Type 5 (the observer) Type 6 (the questioner) Type 7 (the adventurer)

44:39 Body Triad: Type 8 (the challenger) Type 9 (the peacemaker) Type 1 (the perfectionist)

51:20 Using the enneagram as an acting tool 

54:40 Using the enneagram to work through triggers and find growth

1:02:35 Wrap-up, how to find & follow Elizabeth

 

Take The Narrative Enneagram test HERE

Take the Riso-Hudson RHETI test HERE

Follow Elizabeth on Instagram @liz.newcomer 

A Balancing Act is hosted by Analisa Leaming, Broadway actor + soulful coach.  This season is designed to inspire performers and creatives to journey towards their dreams with more soul and less attachment to outcomes and society's definitions of success.

Nov 21, 2023

Get your free audition meditation and stay in the loop with Analisa and A Balancing Act HERE.

This week’s solo episode is an interactive inner exploration. You’re invited to be an active participant, grab a journal or sit and close your eyes. You’ll pause and check in, without judgment, how you’re currently doing and feeling. Analisa guides us on this journey & asks us deep questions to find the answers within by tapping into our inner wisdom.You’ll leave the episode feeling deeply empowered and connected to yourself, feeling inspired and lit up from within! 

 

Time Stamps 

0:00 Analisa’s Intro: An Invitation to Pause

3:43 Of Course We’re Gonna Get Knocked Out of Alignment

5:15 How Is It Feeling, Right Now?

7:17 Am I Getting Caught in Busywork?

9:20 Are You Acting From High Vibe? Milk it!

11:36 Are You Called to Just Be?

13:10 The Quality of Seeking External Validation

15:00 Let Me Give Myself Space to Say It Out Loud

17:07 I Don’t Want to Create From Here!

19:39 Mind, Can You Soften?

22:06 An Invitation Home

24:10 I Want My Body to Sing that Song

26:19 This Deep Trust 

27:45 What Do I Know Now that I Didn’t Know Before?

28:57 Being Able to Receive Means Slowing Down Enough to Listen

31:00 You Really Do Have All the Answers Within

Soul Nourishment mentioned in this episode:

Wanna find out your enneagram number before next week's podcast with an enneagram coach? Here are two tests we recommend: 

Riso Hudson Enneagram Test

Narrative Enneagram Test

 

A Balancing Act is hosted by Analisa Leaming, Broadway actor +  soulful coach. This season is designed to inspire performers and creatives to journey towards their dreams with more soul and less attachment to outcomes and society's definitions of success.

Nov 14, 2023

Grab a limited time 1:1 session with Analisa here.

Get your free audition meditation and stay in the loop with Analisa and A Balancing Act HERE.

Episode Highlights: 

    • How trauma can make it hard to go after big dreams

    • How our big dreams can inspire healing 

    • What is trauma?

    • Brain- and Body-based healing modalities

    • The role of feeling our feelings

    • The stories we tell ourselves and how to rewrite them

    • Neuroplasticity and the science of memory

In this episode, Analisa invites Marissa Ghavami, Iranian-American, queer artist, advocate and creator to the podcast.  This is a rich and vulnerable discussion about Marissa’s experience healing from trauma, and how it has been fundamentally intertwined with their journey towards big, ambitious dreams.

Marissa and Analisa share their thoughts and experiences with “getting comfortable with the discomfort of this business,” and they engage with a wide range of questions: 

How can folks healing from trauma engage with their feelings and body sensations safely–something we’re asked to do every day as actors?  What’s the difference between brain-based and body-based healing modalities and practices?  How does having these skills show up in our daily lives and careers? 

It’s a beautiful conversation between two smart and soulful creatives—listen as they marry the ideas of trauma-informed emotional resiliency with the neuroscience behind memory and grief, and share how diving deep into these ideas is further enriched by their spiritual practices.  Come back to this episode anytime you need a reminder that the stories we tell ourselves about our feelings can be rewritten! 

Topic Shift Time Stamps

0:00 Analisa’s intro and invite to a 1:1 session

4:27 Welcome, Marissa! 

6:19 Acknowledging the role trauma plays in taking action towards our souls’ longings

10:22 Marissa’s journey (big dreams, what got in the way, coming back to themself)

17:59 Engaging with trauma and experiencing stress as an artist

20:00 Brain- and body-based healing modalities: going beyond “just change your mindset”

25:01 Fawn responses: your “survival-brain” is a protector

28:30 “What if we allowed ourselves to feel whatever we were feeling, fully?”

33:33 Our feelings vs the stories we tell about them (and what we make them mean)

36:24 “It’s not magical thinking – it’s neuroscience!!”

38:40 Having a spiritual practice

43:51 Brain science! Memory, grief, and trauma

50:26 An example: Marissa’s current process for managing a trauma response

54:40 Post-traumatic growth – being the author of your own story

56:16 “This skill is needed for the craft of acting” - feeling deeply and creating space for healing

 

Soul Nourishment mentioned in this episode:

Marissa Ghavami

Healing TREE

Marissa’s Healing Trauma Focused Coaching for Artists (Virtual; $75/hr or $75/mo for weekly, 1 hour group sessions): www.marissaghavami.com/coach
 
Marissa will be playing Jessie in Divine Riot’s Cry It Out on 11/9 7PM (Invited Dress), 11/12 7PM and 11/18 2PM in NYC. Learn More & Tickets: www.divineriot.org/cryitout

Marissa’s Instagram

Healing Tree’s Instagram 

 

A Balancing Act is hosted by Analisa Leaming, Broadway actor +  soulful coach for creatives.  This season is designed to inspire performers and creatives to journey towards their dreams with more soul and less attachment to outcomes and society's definitions of success.

 

Nov 7, 2023

Sign up for a 1:1 Session with Analisa! 

Episode Bullet Points

In this short solo episode Analisa helps you love on your Little Self. She also opens up the conversation to you, the listeners: is there anyone out there with the research know-how to look at these universal struggles from a social sciences perspective? Topics covered in this episode include:

  • Offering one-off 1:1 session in Nov/Dec 2023
  • The need for “Little Self” to be witnessed

  • The unique wounds of high performers

  • Letting go of the need to fix

  • Loving the part of yourself that wants love

Episode Summary

This week’s solo episode is a powerful exploration of an expansive question: what if your human aspects (fear, self-doubt, anxiety) aren’t a problem to be fixed? Analisa brings her wild and silliest self to guiding you through choosing to love those Little Self expressions. This episode can be used as a meditative guide to finding that love for yourself. There is also a beautiful meta thread of how Analisa chooses to share and create the podcast itself. 

Topic Shift Time Stamps 

0:00 Analisa’s Intro: different ways to play

2:48 Behind the curtain: two episode ideas

5:10 Analisa’s Love Bomb

7:04 Questions from Little Self & the need to control

9:09 Pause & Love the Fear

11:23 Toddlers: Before “Not Good Enough”

13:39 Enneagram Episode Sneak Peek 

14:43 A Question for the High Performers

17:02 Can you feel a softening?

 19:35 Love instead of fixing

20:50 Wrap Up

Soul Nourishment mentioned in this episode:

Riso Hudson Enneagram Test

Narrative Enneagram Test

A Balancing Act is hosted by Analisa Leaming, Broadway actor +  soulful coach for creatives.  This season is designed to inspire performers and creatives to journey towards their dreams with more soul and less attachment to outcomes and society's definitions of success. 

Get your free audition meditation and stay in the loop with Analisa and A Balancing Act HERE.

 

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