I love this conversation so much because it goes beyond self development as a means to an end. It's not about changing yourself in order to get something, but as Jo Kelly says - its choosing how you want to experience life.

Do you find the coaching world says "do this and get that?" I do. And I am tired of it. That's why the work - the DECONDITIONING - that Jo teaches is such a refreshing perspective on how to just BE MORE HUMAN in this messy, challenging, beautiful and heart breaking experience on earth.

Jo's story started somewhere between working corporate, falling out of love with her partner and thinking - if I just move back to Europe, leave him, change this circumstance, then I will be fulfilled. So she made it all happen, and then got smacked in the face with a breast cancer diagnosis. She says she needed this lesson or she would not have gone into her actual healing journey - which is not dependant on circumstances, but created by how to experience life - especially when it is life or death.

Jo was a single mum, going through cancer treatment, with a child with complex medical needs, fresh out of a separation. And, in the middle of facing it all…she chose to DANCE.

Every single day for 30 days.

She danced on the way to the hospital. She danced in the hallways. She danced in front of the radiation machine.

At one point, she caught herself dancing naked in the mirror, half her hair gone, and instead of seeing a woman who was sick, she saw something else.

A woman who was alive.

And that became a documentary. It became part of her story. And it became a living expression of the work she had already been exploring for decades.

Jo has a background in HR and systemics, studying how groups, cultures, and institutions shape human behaviour. She moved into acting, then into somatic practice, breathwork, voice, energy work, movement, EFT, neural rewiring, and the many pathways that can help a person come home to themselves.

Because Jo isn't interested in giving us another set of rules for becoming a better, more productive, more healed version of ourselves.

She's interested in what happens when we start removing all the conditioning that taught us to disconnect from our bodies, our emotions, our instincts, our joy.

As a "deconditioning companion" she brings us back to something I think so many of us have forgotten: We already know how to be. She says, “I won’t teach you what to do. I will remind you how to be.”

She doesn't talk about joy as something we earn after we've fixed our lives.

She talks about joy for the sake of joy.

And this conversation talks about what it means to actually feel our feelings instead of managing them, how early we are taught to abandon our instincts, and what might become possible when we stop trying so hard to become someone else…

And remember the woman who was already there.

https://tobeornottoact.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jokellyofficial/

https://www.facebook.com/tobeornottoact/

https://www.instagram.com/tobeornottoact_jokelly/?hl=en

* Thanks for joining me for another episode of startup stories. I am honoured to share this space with you. Subscribe to stay on the journey with us and grab my freebie "powherfull daily check in" at www.powherfullinc.com