Events
Upcoming Event
Book Release: The Heart of Success
Dr. Nancy Vanderheide is a contributing author to The Heart of Success: Living, Loving, and Leading with Purpose, a collaborative book featuring insights from leaders and professionals exploring the deeper meaning behind achievement, purpose, and personal growth.
Book Launch July 16, 2026.
From The Heart of Success
Excerpt from “Life Is the Classroom”
When I began my career as a psychologist, I adhered to the firmly sanctioned syllabus of the time. Science was acceptable in psychology. Spirituality was not.
Working with altered states, imagery, and intuition was permissible, but only if you characterized it as purely psychological. We spoke of hypnotherapy as “the relaxation response,” and never as consonant with meditation or prayer. We didn’t speak of spirit or God. We certainly didn’t speak of transcendence.
So, I cloistered my relationship with Source and spoke the languages of psychodynamic and systems theories. I showed up as my professional self, competent, grounded, credible. My internal, private self, deeply aware of another reality, was relegated to relative silence.
Looking back, I see those years as early schooling, providing necessary structure. As I worked my career path, I learned how to hold space, how to listen, how to regulate emotion, and help clients connect to meaning.
But I also became increasingly adept at hiding parts of myself in service of credibility and belonging. Essential as that was, I sacrificed authenticity in favor of compliance.
Compliance is not the royal road to wisdom…
