THIS IS ALSO A PODCAST EPISODE!

This one’s a little different.

I’m recording from Montpellier, France, where I’ve been spending a few weeks with my two favorite people — my husband Josh and my sister Sam, who has officially made southern France her new home. We’ve been having the kind of conversations that make you want to hit record, so that’s exactly what we did.

No set agenda. No structured interview. Just three people who care deeply about life transitions, new business identity, intuition, AI, community, and what it actually means to build something that feels good from the inside out.

If you’ve been in a season of reinvention — questioning your work, your direction, or who you’re becoming — I think this one will land.

Meet Sam and Josh

Sam Parvin has spent nearly a decade running her own business as a music supervisor, working with global brands. After six and a half years living between Mexico City and Playa del Carmen, she followed an intuitive pull to Europe and surprised even herself by landing in the south of France. Now, with a home base finally established, she’s finding that the energy she was spending on logistics and uncertainty has freed up into something more interesting, new projects, new possibilities, and a new version of herself she’s still getting to know.

Josh Harty is a lifelong professional musician who has spent the last several years uncovering — his word, not finding — a new direction in addiction recovery coaching. He describes recovery not as something with an endpoint, but as a lifelong practice of becoming. He’s also deeply into what he calls ancient and alternative ways of living healthier — cold exposure, breathwork, somatic practices — and is starting to share that with others.

Both of them are in the middle of something. And that’s exactly what makes this conversation worth listening to.

The Identity Shift Nobody Warns You About

One of the through lines of this conversation is the disorientation that comes with becoming someone new — especially when the people around you have known you as someone else.

Sam put it simply: “I’m just working through accepting that maybe who I’m going to be in the future is not who people have known me to be in the past.”

That’s the identity work. And it doesn’t come with a roadmap.

What struck me in our conversation is how often a change of place catalyzes a change of self. Moving to a new country, a new city, even a new neighborhood — there’s something about physical distance from your old context that creates permission to try on a different version of yourself. The old identity doesn’t follow you quite as loudly.

Whether you’re changing careers, stepping into a new kind of work, or just sensing that something needs to shift, the invitation is the same: who do you want to be, and are you willing to let go of who you’ve been to get there?

The New Paradigm of Work and Community

We kept coming back to this idea of a shift — from the old top-down, authoritative model of work and expertise to something more circular, peer-to-peer, and community-driven.

Josh made the point beautifully in the context of recovery: the model he’s drawn to isn’t one expert dispensing wisdom to people below them. It’s community. Shared experience, strength, and hope. Walking alongside each other. That’s very different from the guru model — and yet the guru model is what a lot of people default to because it feels safer to outsource your knowing to someone who seems certain.

This shows up in coaching, too. I’ll be honest, I get frustrated when I see the word coach used to mean expert with all the answers. Real coaching is walking beside someone, asking the right questions, and trusting that they have the answers inside them. The strategy matters, yes. But the mindset and energy piece? That’s 80% of the work.

The new paradigm, as we see it, isn’t about dismantling expertise. It’s about distributing it. One peer who happens to be two steps ahead. That’s it.

On AI — Where It Helps and Where It Doesn’t

We had a lot to say about AI. And probably our most honest take is this: it’s a tool. Not the idea. Not the creative force. Not your intuition. The tool.

Josh said something that really stuck with me: “Humans are end-to-end. AI is middle to middle.” The beginning — the idea, the vision, the creative spark — that’s yours. The end — the human insight, the lived experience, the relational nuance — also yours. AI can handle the messy middle. Research, formatting, organizing, translating, and structuring a to-do list when your brain has fifteen things firing at once.

What it shouldn’t do is replace your intuition. It shouldn’t be the thing you turn to when you don’t trust yourself. Because when you outsource your inner compass to an algorithm, you don’t just get generic output, you lose the muscle of trusting yourself.

Sam put it well: discernment is the key. Knowing what AI is actually useful for, and what it isn’t. Keeping your creativity, your coaching, your real conversations with real humans — those stay human. The rest? Let it help.

Tools for Navigating a Season of Reinvention

We wrapped up by asking each other: what are the actual tools keeping you grounded right now?

Sam is in the inquiry. She had a somatic therapy session the day before we recorded, and came away noticing how much of her professional energy goes into reaching and pulling, and how much she wants her next chapter to be about receiving. About being present in the process rather than rushing toward the finish line. She’s building in rhythm — movement, rest, sleep — and learning to design her days with space for both action and stillness.

Josh has a full toolkit — cold exposure, breathwork, sauna, and hundreds of push-ups a day. But what he shared that I loved most was this: he’s been on the road for weeks, the routine has slipped, he’s eating croissants and drinking too much coffee, and he’s completely okay with it. Because he made that choice deliberately. Compassion and flexibility are part of the practice too. Discipline matters. Rigidity doesn’t.

And the through line for all of us comes back to a Stoic principle Josh has been sitting with: “Decide who it is you will be, and do what you must do.”

Be. Do. Have. In that order. Embody the version of yourself you’re becoming. Take action from that place. Trust that what you’re meant to have will follow, even if it looks different than you imagined.

A Few Questions to Sit With

• Where are you outsourcing your intuition — to AI, to experts, to external validation — when your inner knowing already has the answer?
• What identity are you ready to release to make room for who you’re becoming?
• Are you building from the energy of I want to do this or the energy of please just work? And what would it take to shift that?