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...

There is a version of bullying that does not happen on a playground. It happens in meeting rooms, on performance reviews, and in the quiet moment after you raise your hand and watch the room decide how to receive you.

For millions of women in the workforce, especially Black women and women of color, this experience is not an exception. It is a pattern. And it carries real consequences, not just professionally, but in the relationship a woman has with her own voice.

This week on the DaliTalks Podcast, I sat down with London Reid, transformational coach and founder of Her Law of Growth, and she described something that stopped me in my tracks. She was sitting in her director's office. She was four months pregnant. She had just returned from losing her father. She was in tears. And she was being told that agreeing to cooperate with her supervisor was somehow combative.

That moment is not unusual. That is the problem.

What Workplace Bullying Actually Looks Like for Women

Most anti-bul...

Okay, friend. Pull up a chair. I need to talk to you about something.

Every March, we celebrate Women's History Month. We post the quotes, share the throwback photos, maybe catch a documentary or two. And then April rolls around and we move on.

But here is what keeps me up at night: the women who changed this world never stopped being relevant just because the calendar flipped. Their stories are not a once-a-year moment. They are a daily reminder of what is possible when we stop deciding in advance who gets to dream big.

And right now? We still have a lot of deciding to undo.

These Women Existed. The World Just Did Not Amplify Them.

When I was writing my 2017 book "Embracing Differences: 21st Century Women Debunking Stereotypes," I kept running into the same gut punch over and over again. Women who had done absolutely extraordinary things, quietly, without the fanfare that their male counterparts received for doing far less.

Olga Custodio became the first Latina to complete U.S. ...