Most of us were never taught the difference between surviving and living. We were just taught to get through things. Be strong. Keep going. And when we made it out the other side, we called that love for ourselves.

Janice Claire DaCosta wants us to look at that more closely.

Janice is a global logistics leader, Mind-Shift Advocate, Reiki Master, TEDx Curator of TEDxMallardCreek, one of Influential Women's Most Influential Women of 2026, and the author of Pay Yourself First: The Blueprint to Emotional Wealth, a book that spent its first three weeks at number one on the bestseller list. She joined me on the DaliTalks Podcast this week for one of the most honest conversations I have ever had on this show.

And she said something I have not been able to stop thinking about since.

Survival is not self-love.

What That Actually Means

Janice describes her own pattern with the kind of honesty that only comes from having really done the work. She was resilient. She survived through experien...

When a child bullies another child, our first instinct is often to focus on the behavior itself. The name-calling. The exclusion. The aggression. We want it stopped, and rightfully so.

But what if we asked a different question first? What if, before we addressed what the child did, we asked what the child was feeling and whether they even had the words to tell us?

Marcelle Waldman, certified teacher, founder of FeelLinks, and Teen Wise coach, joined the DaliTalks Podcast this week and said something that stopped me in my tracks. When kids cannot name what they are feeling, they act it out instead.

That one sentence reframes everything.

Emotional illiteracy and bullying

Bullying behaviors do not appear out of nowhere. They grow in environments where emotions go unnamed, unvalidated, and unprocessed. A child who has never been taught to identify frustration, fear, jealousy, or shame does not suddenly find healthy ways to express those feelings when they show up at full force on a Tu...