What I Learned in 2025: The Five Lessons That Changed Everything for Me

2025: The Year I Stopped Negotiating with the Past

Each year teaches you something but 2025, the year of the snake, a 9 year, was a year of shedding and endings and it TRULY felt like a masterclass in understanding the invisible patterns that shape how we think, act, and grow. If I had to name the biggest shift in my growth this year,  personally and professionally,  it’s this:

My mind became my biggest ally.

I started unlocking my subconscious mind and accessing a new level of myself. I finally learned how to work with my mind, instead of constantly pushing against it.

Throughout my work at Powercube, building amazing partnerships, creating longevity programs and supporting female founders and adivisng my portfolio of businesses I kept coming back to the same realization: the most powerful transformation starts in the mind. Not the conscious, willpower-driven mind but the subconscious systems running quietly in the background. This is true for absolutely everyone.

So much of what we call "discipline," "motivation," or even "luck" is really about whether your brain is optimized for protection or progress. Whether it’s stuck replaying survival patterns, or being guided by an aligned vision or story of your potential future.

This shift didn’t just change how I think. It changed how I show up in my work in coaching female founders, in designing systems in my businesses, in my own longevity positioning and in how I lead myself into what’s next.

Here are five of the most powerful neuroscience insights I learned in 2025 and how they’re shaping the way I move into 2026.

1. The Brain Is Wired for Familiarity, Not Fulfillment

This one took time to fully sink in. The subconscious doesn’t care if you’re thriving it cares if you’re safe. And to the emotional part of the brain (hello, limbic system), familiar equals safe. Which means it will keep nudging you toward the same habits, emotional loops, and behaviors even if they’re outdated or limiting simply because they’re known.

In my work with founders, I saw this play out again and again. A breakthrough strategy or next-level opportunity would be right in front of someone but if it felt too unfamiliar, the subconscious would quietly pull back. Safety would win out over expansion. Same for me. When I would want to move quickly in some way, even if I was able to at first move ahead, I felt like a boomerang would pull me back to where I was before. 

So how did I start finding my way through the discomfort and fear that comes with something new? What really shifted for me this year was realizing that the answer isn’t more discipline. It’s clarity. A vivid, emotionally anchored vision gives the brain something new to hold onto. It creates a direction that feels unfamiliar, but still safe enough to move toward.

Entrepreneurship constantly puts you in the new. You learn to live in the unknown, to get familiar with that feeling of uncertainty. And over time, that exposure actually helped me rewire how I respond. Now, no matter what’s happening in my life or work, my brain expects unfamiliarity. I’ve trained it to understand that it’s still safe even when things feel uncertain. I’ve proven to my subconscious that safety doesn’t only live in the familiar. It can exist wherever I decide to build it. By doing new things regularly and recognizing that you feel safe you build the neural network to believe that the next thing you want and safety can go hand in hand. 

2. Your Beliefs Are Editing Reality

One of the systems I became obsessed with this year is the Reticular Activating System, the RAS, which acts like a filter between your inner world and everything happening around you. It decides what gets through to your awareness and what doesn’t and helps you reach your goals.

Here’s the wild part: it doesn’t filter based on what’s possible. It filters based on what you believe.

If your internal beliefs are out of date, shaped by past failures, old identities, or unprocessed narratives, then your RAS will keep directing your attention toward the same kinds of outcomes. Same problems, same limits, same patterns.

I saw this so clearly in my own transition from finance to wellness and in my leadership position at Powercube. The moment I got radically clear about the kind of work I want to do I found the right people and opporunities to transition into wellness. Simultaneously, when I began to have faith in my ability to provide value for partners, for founders, for future-facing brands the kinds of conversations and opportunities that started showing up were completely different. It wasn’t that they didn’t exist before. I just wasn’t filtering for them or their possibility. 

This is why vision isn’t about fantasy, it’s functional. It teaches your brain what to notice, and what to ignore. Start telling your brain what you want and being clear on what opportunities are coming next for you, believe in their possibility and you will find your brain will work overtime for you to find and direct you to EXACTLY what you are looking for. 

3. Identity Is the Operating System

You can’t build a new future if your subconscious still thinks you’re someone from your past.

One of the hardest and most liberating realizations I had this year is that identity not strategy, is often the biggest bottleneck. We try to “push through” into new behavior, but if we haven’t updated the identity underneath it, we’ll self-correct back to whatever our state of being is currently. Happy, healed, miserable, struggling with money, or whatever state that might be. 

This insight changed how I coach founders and how I upgrade myself. Instead of starting with tactics, I now start with a question: “who do you see yourself as, and is that identity aligned with the future you’re building?” If you are transitioning into becoming a mother, becoming an entrepreneur or from becoming a new entrepreneur to a succesful multi-business owner, what identity shifts actually need to happen behind the scenes for you to live that reality? That’s something everyone needs to consider as they aim to evolve into their next version. 

Once you answer those questions you have to  CHOOSE that identity. For me, the shift came when I stopped trying to earn a new identity and simply decided to claim it. Once I made that internal declaration  “this is who I am now” my actions started aligning naturally. Not out of force, but from congruence and alignment. You are who you believe yourself to be and then your outer reality shifts to reflect that version naturally. 

4. Logic Doesn’t Change Behavior. Emotion Does.

We all know what to do but that doesn’t mean we do it.

This year taught me that the subconscious isn’t persuaded by logic. It responds to emotion. That’s why we can have all the data, all the reasons, all the smart plans… and still sabotage the result.

Emotion is what creates momentum. And it’s also what creates memory, which is critical for behavior change. This showed up in everything from how I coach and advise businesses, to how we structured experiences and brand storytelling at Powercube. When people feel something, their brain starts wiring the behavior to match.

That’s also why visioning works. When you take time to emotionally engage with a future version of yourself, create the why for the actual reason why it’s important to you and create an emotionally persuasive reasoning for its pursuit then your whole self will want to engage in the achievement of your goals. Once the vision is so clear that you can see, feel, and almost taste the emotion created around it, the brain starts getting to work on making it real. Emotion isn’t a side-effect. It’s TRULY your fuel.

5. The Brain Moves Toward the Future You Can See

If there’s one thing I’ve learned this year, it’s that you can create and become literally anything as long as you have the courage to see it first. The brain doesn’t respond to instructions. It doesn’t get activated by checklists or generic goals. It moves toward images, toward the vision you hold of who you’re becoming and what life gets to feel like.

This year, I worked with some of the most forward-thinking partners I could have imagined, global partners like Ultrahuman, SoulSyncBody and Sanne Vloet, Soho House, amazing local Geneva partners like Granola, Geneva Polo Club, Frame by Sarah Battika, Forever Institut, Anagen and so many others through Powercube who gave me perspective and passion. BUT this would have never happenned if I could not have imagined it first, I remember creating a list of all my dream partners for Powercube and our clients and reading back at the end of the year they all came true. Every single one. Because of my initial vision. 

In my business and adivsory, I got to support incredible female founders through coaching and advisory. I traveled to places that changed my perspective. I built partnerships that felt aligned and expansive. I had conversations that stretched me. And I met people who inspired me to see more for myself and actually believed it was possible.

If you had told me three years ago that this would be my reality… I wouldn’t have believed you. But this is exactly why vision matters. Why intuition matters. Why self-belief, even when it's shaky, matters.

Every step of the way, I followed what I felt pulled toward. I allowed myself to shift direction. I let the picture evolve. I stayed close to the future version of me I was creating, even when I didn’t have all the answers. And slowly, things began to click. People showed up. Paths opened. The right conversations found me. And I kept saying yes.

This is how change happens. You don’t force it. You feel it. You keep refining the vision. You surround yourself with people who reflect it back to you, people who challenge and expand you, not because they’re telling you who to be, but because they remind you of who you already are.

The brain needs that picture. Without it, you’re just guessing. But when it’s clear, the path forward starts to reveal itself one choice, one shift, one connection at a time.

And that’s when it all starts to change.

Looking Back — and Forward

2025 taught me that clarity isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a biological advantage. One that reorients the brain, restructures identity, and gives your subconscious mind the guidance it’s been waiting for. 

Across my work, at Powercube, in coaching female founders to develop resilience and move beyond limiting beliefs, and in exploring the intersection of food, longevity, and high performance, I’ve come to see one principle as foundational: lasting change begins when you learn to speak the language your brain understands.

Not force or hustle. But vision + emotion + identity (which) = REALITY

2026 doesn’t feel like a leap of faith. It feels like a direction I’ve already started walking toward, on purpose, with eyes open.