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There was a version of me — years ago — who made a decision that cost her something real. She made it because she believed it would lead somewhere. She trusted that the person who arrived on the other side would do something with what she had built.

I am that person. I am the one who arrived. And I have been wondering lately whether I kept the promise.

This episode is about the debt between who you were and who you are. Not a debt of gratitude — we talk about that one all the time. A debt of fidelity. The one we almost never name. It's about what happens when you get so absorbed in maintaining the life she built for you that you forget what it was for. When the destination quietly becomes the default. When choosing becomes maintaining, and you don't notice the shift until years have passed.

She didn't take that risk so you could be careful. She didn't leave the safe thing so you could find a different kind of safe thing and call it ambition. She did it so you could be free.

The question she would ask you — if she could sit across from you right now and ask you one thing — is not whether it worked out. It's simpler than that, and harder.

Was it worth it?

Soul to Soul, Lisa.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

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Not role to role. Soul to soul.

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Somebody described me to someone else recently. The description was kind. It was generous. And I didn't feel recognized — I felt maintained. Like someone had looked at a photograph of me and described the frame.

This episode is about what happens when someone else's words for you become the house you live in. Not because they're wrong. Because they're fixed. The compliment that quietly becomes a job description. The admiration that hardens into an expectation you are not allowed to stop meeting. And the strange cost of being so well-described by the people who love you that you stop updating the description yourself.

We don't talk about this. We talk about performing — the version of ourselves we put on deliberately. But this is about the version of you that lives in someone else's sentence without your permission. The version that was accurate once and became architecture.

The question at the center of this episode is one I'm still sitting with: what if the most generous thing you can do for the people who love you is to disappoint their sentence about you?

Soul to Soul, Lisa.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.

Send us Fan Mail

Envy is the emotion we skip past — too ugly for public consumption, too petty for someone who has built a life she chose. But what if envy is the most honest compass we have?

In this episode, Lisa explores the one thing she envies — and it's not a title, a trip, or a career milestone. It's the ability to rest without guilt. Starting with the gendered double standard around unplugging, she traces the thread from a system that rewards women for overavailability, to a postdoc praised for being always on the grid, to a girl in school who learned that stillness meant falling behind. And then she tells the story of a woman she met on the Nile who changed how she thinks about all of it.

This is an episode about the phone you check before your feet hit the floor, the fear underneath the checking, and what happens when you stop treating envy as a character flaw and start treating it as instructions.

Soul to Soul with Dr. Lisa Carter-Bawa is a podcast for anyone who is in the middle of becoming — doing the inner work, asking the harder questions, and learning to live from the inside out.

New episodes drop every Monday.

Follow the journey: 📍 Instagram: @lisacarterbawa 📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisacarterbawa/ 📍 Website: www.lisacarterbawa.com

Follow me on Substack: https://soultosoulleadership.substack.com/

Enjoyed this episode? Leave a review, share it with someone who needs it, and subscribe so you never miss a Monday.

Not role to role. Soul to soul.