7: The Hidden Power of Love in Leadership: How Understanding Yourself Transforms Business with Annie Paraison

Most of us are caught in a cycle of emotional reactivity, misunderstanding our own biology and mistakenly equating accountability with self-blame. Annie Paraison, founder of Love Before All, reveals how understanding your brain, body, and cultural norms can dramatically transform your relationships—at work and in life.In this illuminating conversation, Annie shares the real power of love as action—caring deeply for others and reducing harm through self-awareness and intentional communication. You'll discover how our early experiences shape our stories, why emotional cycles last just 90 seconds (if you don't anchor them to stories), and how unlearning authority-driven behaviors can unleash your confidence and resilience. Annie explains the neuroscience behind relationship-building, practical ways to modulate your nervous system, and why compassion is the true antidote to triggers and shutting down.We break down:

• How to recognize and rewrite the stories holding you back
• The key to emotional cycles and releasing long-held pain
• Building neural pathways for consistent self-control and accountability
• The role of cultural norms in shaping trust and authority
• Simple but transformative tips for deepening self-love and extending love outward

This episode is essential listening for anyone tired of emotional turmoil, feeling disconnected from themselves or others, or looking to level up their relationships with authentic love and understanding. If you’re ready to lead from a place of clarity, compassion, and power—this conversation is your guide.Annie Harrison is a leadership coach and early childhood development expert dedicated to helping adults harness the science of love and the brain to create healthier, more resilient communities. Her work bridges brain science, cultural norms, and real-world application to foster genuine connection and repair.Perfect for entrepreneurs, leaders, parents, and anyone committed to personal growth—this episode will challenge your old beliefs, inspire new habits, and remind you that love in action starts with knowing and loving yourself first.Visit www.lovebeforeall.com to learn more and access free leadership tools—your journey toward more loving, intentional relationships begins now.

Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Welcome back to the Randy Lynn Show. Today's conversation is one I'm really excited about. I'm sitting down with Annie Harrison, founder of Love Before All, and someone who's redefined what leadership actually looks like. She's not just talking about performance, she's talking about people, about how we lead, how we show up, and how success doesn't have to come at the close of burnout or losing yourself. Annie helps leaders bridge a gap between high performance and the human side of business. And honestly, this is a conversation that everyone needs to hear. So Annie, I am so excited about having you on. How is your day going so far?

SPEAKER_01 0:39

It has been really well. I'm uh back in Nashville and I've been gone for a while. Had breakfast with a friend, and I'm doing wonderful. It's been a great day.

SPEAKER_04 0:49

So you're in Nashville. Yeah, I forgot about that. We're in Illinois and it's freezing here. So you've got good weather there today.

SPEAKER_00 0:54

Oh, it's beautiful. Yeah. And I'm heading back to the northeast. So if you said it's cold, yeah, it's cold. Hopefully it's not too cold.

SPEAKER_04 1:03

Okay. So let's start this. For anyone who is listening and doesn't necessarily know who you are, um, what do you stand for? I guess I would say. Instead of going exactly all you'll do, because again, I'll drop that at the end. But what do you stand for? What does love before all even mean?

SPEAKER_01 1:18

Exactly what it says. It's a life. I like to I like to think for me, it's a lifestyle in that everything that I do, every choice that I make, every decision that I get to, I decide like I put love ahead of that, and I'm making the decision out of love. So if I can sum myself up in one word, it would be love altogether.

SPEAKER_04 1:42

Love. Okay, and what does love mean? That's a tricky question, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Yeah, it is.

SPEAKER_04 1:49

What does love mean to you? What is love?

SPEAKER_01 1:52

For me, love means many things. Love is action more than anything else. I I like to think, or I find that my experience has taught me that love is probably one of the missed most commonly misused, misinterpreted experiences.

SPEAKER_04 2:17

Yeah, people say I love you, and it's like love about me, or what is love? Do you love everyone?

SPEAKER_01 2:24

So for me, if I can sum it up in one sentence, love is about is about caring for others, and by others, I don't just mean human beings, I mean everything, caring about everything and honoring humanity and reducing harm. Those are the three things, the three buckets where I would put and I say reducing har reducing harm because when we're human beings come together, is bound there, there's bound to be miscommunications. We inherited oppressive systems. So because of that, I don't think the idea is to eliminate it. I think it's to reduce it and repair it when it happens. So I think for me, love in action, love in practice is showing up as the full human being that I am. Okay. And being willing to repair and reduce the harm that because I'm a human being, that I'm inevitably going to cause.

SPEAKER_04 3:29

Okay. So what do you do? What exactly then do you do with the love before all? Explain what that is.

SPEAKER_01 3:35

Mm-hmm. So love before all love is the idea of increasing relational skills for people by introducing them to the human biology, brain science, and then cultural norms. With the two, when you blend the two together, it increases your relational skills because the more you I feel like the more you understand your body, your biology, the more you start to realize that people do things for them and not because of you, which reduces the likelihood that you start to take things personally. So when you stop taking things personally, you start to see things for what they actually are. And when you can see things for what they actually are, you have the clarity to make decisions and choices that are grounded in clarity and love, and you don't target other people or harm them because you're you're realizing that when Annie does something, Annie does it because of internal triggers and internal needs that she may or may not be conscious of. And because I know that, then I I I just it creates distance that okay, this is not personal. And then I can focus on my goal. And if I can focus on my goal and know that what what Randy's doing is not personal, then I just communicate what I need to communicate with you so I can get to my goal.

SPEAKER_04 4:57

See, I feel like everyone needs it in their life because everyone is so ultra sensitive because everything that someone says or does they take they just take personally. It's just by default. Um get into this space because my mind goes to everyone needs to hear about this. This is why I'm so excited to have you here because people aren't even aware that they do this, right? That they will say something, they're having a bad day, and someone's like, or someone drives past you and like flicks you off, and you're like, I don't even know what happened, but all of a sudden, by default, you're like, you turn into like a slump. You're like, you're just like, I don't know what I did. Maybe I did something, right? Does that resonate? That is what happened.

SPEAKER_01 5:43

Oh, absolutely, absolutely. That's exactly what happened. So, and I think for me, what it what is what is morphed into is I now always have control of myself. I always have power is in me, and I recognize the only person I have power over is me. I love it. I'm not disillusioned into thinking like I can control other people's behavior, and my stress level goes significantly down because the goal for me is never to try to control you, to have power over you because I know that's an illusion.

SPEAKER_04 6:14

Yeah, so my original, I think I told you this, my original podcast title was I was the problem. It wasn't exactly what you said, because there's again, I would be not saying I was playing the victim, but there were things in my life that I was like, I didn't do that because I was in this situation. But you have to dig deeper into like why did I allow myself to stay in that situation and why so long, right? But it's all about taking accountability and taking like the power over yourself.

SPEAKER_01 6:50

We don't know how to, we're not trained to take accountability for ourselves, and it's a practice, it's a practice because because biologically, it's very hard for me to hold myself accountable because the it doesn't feel good in your body to do that, it's uncomfortable. So naturally, your brain is gonna be like, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want to do this. It doesn't feel good. We don't do things that don't feel good naturally. That's where your body is. So if your body is like working against it, that's an that's another reason why it's just very difficult to lean into the dis like leaning into the discomfort. I wouldn't say it ever gets easy, but it gets familiar enough that your body response, your body response starts to change because you've practiced it, you've you've done it, you're you're and what I like to say is like that you you building these these neural connections in your brain, and the the stronger they are, the more comfortable, or I should say the more familiar it gets in your body, and the more familiar it is, the less scary it is. So it's like, okay, for me, who I'm comfortable, and and it's it's a matter of like disconnecting you doing something wrong with you being wrong. And I think sometimes it's hard for us to take accountability because we think if I did something wrong, then I am wrong. And we start to connect it to our identity ourselves when it's really not the case.

SPEAKER_04 8:25

Yes, and I think it's people too, like they'll do something wrong, and instead of like taking accountability for it, they push it under like under the rug type deal. And then they're like they have to look for someone else to blame instead of taking accountability.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

Yeah, and it's it's from I can say even familiar if I don't think like from childhood that we take the time to have conversations because like miscommunications happen so often, and a lot of times that's where they stem. And and when I say miscommunication, I even want to go as deep as to say you lying to yourself is miscommunication.

SPEAKER_04 9:07

And when you're lying to yourself, it can be like literally texting our form. We don't pick up the phone and call people or have direct conversations anymore. We've got email text, right? So that's a lot of the miscommunication right there.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

Yeah. And and I just know if in and I'll give an example from my own life. I had a conversation with a friend last night. Uh, it was one of those courageous conversations. Something happened. I took responsibility, we talked it out, and I realized if I hadn't spoken to you, I wouldn't have realized that a lot of the information that I got from third parties were embellished, elaborated on. And then now that I'm speaking with you, we're like, oh, let me clarify this is what this looks like. And with the conversation, we were able to clear a lot of things up that I'd just been holding. So it's not, it's it's really a matter of going to the individual who can give you the answers you're looking for. Because sometimes I think if I have an issue with you, I'll go talk to everyone around you instead of just the source. Right? Yeah. I mean, if something happened with me and you, there's no one else that can give me a better answers for the questions that I have than you because it happened between the two of us.

SPEAKER_04 10:24

Why do you think people do that?

SPEAKER_01 10:26

It's uncomfortable. I think everything goes back to the discomfort that we feel in our bodies when we're not familiar with, like when we're not used to having a conversation. And I'll even go a little deeper. Sometimes I think we avoid it because we don't, we might not want to lose that relationship because we don't know how that conversation is gonna end. And that would be a big, and I get it, it's like if I love this relationship, there are things that I let, like you say, I sweep it under the rug because I don't want to lose this relationship. So I'm gonna sweep it under the rug. And what I like to say, the more you sweep things under the rug, eventually we're gonna start to notice that there's something under that rug.

SPEAKER_04 11:06

I was gonna say, the more you sweep it under the rug, and because you don't want to lose that relationship, don't you think the relationship suffers subconsciously? Like it does. It's right.

SPEAKER_01 11:14

Not just the relationship, you also suffer because you're holding on to you're holding on to things that um you're holding on to things that are that are stuck in your body. And like I like to say, they say your issues are with your tissue, and your issues are in your tissues. Oh, I love that. So when you hold on to it, it stays in your body until you release it. I uh recently read a book, um, Come as You Are, and one of the things that I learned from the book is like we don't complete our emotional cycles. So because we don't complete our emotional cycles.

SPEAKER_04 11:50

What is the emotional cycle?

SPEAKER_01 11:52

It's really so another uh neuroscientist that I follow, I forget her name is Emily Bolt. I can't remember the exact name, but emotions have about a 90 second lifespan in your body. 90 seconds that's all without anything else. 90 seconds, that's all they will stay. But what what we do, we anchor the emotion to a story. And when we anchor that emotion to a story, it stays stuck instead of just completing it. Exactly.

SPEAKER_04 12:32

Wow. So now we hold on to it. How often, but how long do people hold on to it?

SPEAKER_01 12:37

Oh, as long as possible as long until they they they are brave enough to deal with it. It will stay in until you're brave enough to deal with it. Or you break. Or you or you blow up, yes. Yeah. And some of the um I I there's uh studies that are showing, of course, the connection between physical and emotional, how some of the some of the hard hit issues that we have are stress and anxiety related. And stress and anxiety is connected directly to how much we're holding instead of just releasing a lot of these things.

SPEAKER_04 13:12

Yep. No, I love it. Okay, so tell me your background. How did you even get into this? And what is your like for for me sitting here? I'm like, okay, I've read well, I literally said the same thing already. People need this, everyone needs you in their life because people don't know. Maybe they're held back and they're holding themselves back. They are personally holding themselves back, but they don't know what to do to get out of it. They don't know how to change their mindset. Like, how did you get into this? What do you coach on? Like, tell me about all of that. Like, what does that process look like? Because I'm pretty sure that 90% of my clients, like not clients, clients too, people listening this are like, okay, Annie, yes, true. I'm afraid to admit it. I don't want to admit it, but this is me. What do I do now? How how do I change it?

SPEAKER_01 13:54

I'll start with I contact Annie.

SPEAKER_04 13:57

Start now.

unknown 13:57

No.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

I'll start with my background. I have always loved children, like always loved children. And after I graduated college, I started teaching, and that's what got me interested in I guess child development, but child development really is human development because the um the way our brain takes like the the the our earliest experiences shape the way that we think and the what we learn from the first like five years, 90% of your brain, your brain volume is in it's already formed. So while the brain continues to change over this span of life, those early experiences really have a very strong influence on on you. So I, in this being in a classroom, I learned that, got really interested in brain science, then became obsessed with human behavior, continued to get into the science, and I transitioned into coaching. And coaching was when I realized, oh wow, this is this is where I live. And I transitioned into coaching, and I think that's where I leave because I realized as much as I love children, it's the adults that love on them and care for them that need to know. Yeah. They are the ones who need the skills to support them if they're going to be successful. And that's why I transitioning to coaching, just really like okay, this is where we live.

SPEAKER_04 15:37

I mean, what you do is so powerful. I know you know it's powerful, but I don't know if you realize how powerful it is. And I think people are gonna listen to this and be like, this is so accurate.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yeah. It's um it's yeah, it's it from those early experiences, though. I don't think we often realize that the stories that we're telling ourselves are stories that we created when we were like eight.

SPEAKER_04 16:02

So I'm I'm So you go and you get people out of those stories when they are so young. Like, what is the age group that you work with? Do you work with young kids? Do you work with adults? Who do you work with?

SPEAKER_01 16:13

I love working with anybody who has children in their lives. So mostly my work directly connects. I transitioned to working with organizations because I realized organizations had large amounts of adults and most of them no children.

SPEAKER_04 16:27

Large amount of children. So you can hit more people at once. You can eat more than a lot of people.

unknown 16:32

Right.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

A greater impact because if I can teach you how to self-how to regulate your nervous system, then you can hopefully, even if you can't teach it to a child, you can model it with and and they will unconsciously pick it up. So the idea is. Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 17:35

What's something that you personally had to unlearn? So something that you were struggling with, that you had to unlearn to get through this.

SPEAKER_01 17:44

I will share the most recent one because it's an ongoing journey. It never stops. Yeah. The most recent thing I think I learned was I was born and raised in Haiti. I moved to New York when I was 13. And the culture in Haiti is to respect authority. So it's ingrained in me, respect authority. So when I transitioned to doing my business full time, I didn't realize that I still was asking for permission, even though I was the CEO of my own company. Even though I was, I was, I had all the answers. I made all the decisions. And I was still, there was a part of me that was still asking for permission. Oh, should I do that?

SPEAKER_04 18:31

Who are you asking permission from?

SPEAKER_01 18:34

And it's it's not a direct asking for permission. It's just the behaviors that I was engaging in were hesitant. They weren't confident, like decision making. And because of that, I'm like, oh, we have we're gonna have to unlearn that authority that doesn't have your best interest at heart should be questioned.

unknown 19:00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:00

You shouldn't just blindly just follow authority because not all authority has your best interest at heart. So now I'm unlearning what are the what are the stor the the the authoritarian stories that are in my head that are keeping me that are making me stand in my way.

SPEAKER_04 19:18

Yep. Yeah, that's super powerful because it is it's just so it's just I got I think it happens like a day-to-day basis. Like you said, it's a mindset shift that you learn and you have to practice over and over. I have a question for you. Because I feel like personally, with me, I don't take things to heart anymore. People say things to me, I'm but that's happened, but I full disclosure. The reason why I don't do it is not the right way. I'm listening to I'm like, that sounds a lot more effective and efficient than the way I'm doing it. I just kind of like block off and become a hundred percent emotionally detached from everyone. That's sad, but it's true. So, um how do I unwind all of that? I get like afraid.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

Yeah, it's I don't think it's about unwinding. That is, it's and I will say that's a natural response because when that happens, yeah. When that happens, the natural response your body wants to say, nope, I want I don't want that because it doesn't feel good. I think the what's helped me is having compassion. Like there's a level of compassion that I extend everyone that I'm with. And the other side of that is also there's a trust that there's nothing that anyone can throw at me that I can't handle. So I tr I like I'm I trust my resilien that I'm resilient. And yes, it'll hurt, but that is only temporary.

SPEAKER_04 20:42

So do you put yourself in people's other people's shoes when they're talking to you?

SPEAKER_01 20:46

Absolutely. Okay. I think compassion requires that you do that. And I think sometimes we confuse compassion and empathy. Empathy is like, I can tell that you're in pain, and because I know pain, I empathize. So I want I can sit with you, I can be with you. And I think sometimes some of us go into empathetic distress. And that's when you you think the other person's story is your story, so your body doesn't know the difference, and you start to break down as well. So that's empathetic distress. Okay, compassion is I know pain, I'm empathizing with your pain, and I want to help you. So there's the there's an action piece to compassion. So for me, what that might look like is if somebody if somebody says something, I don't know, off off the cuff. I will take a breath because I am human because I my instinct is to sometimes. And yeah. I don't and and again, think about love and love being reduced. The harm that I cause other people, I'll take a break. And then what I will ask them, and uh sometimes I'll just uh can you repeat that again? Because I'm not sure I I'm fully understanding what you're saying. Okay. And that's be and I think the compassion is I understand that when you're triggered and you don't have the skills, you lash out.

SPEAKER_02 22:22

Or you shut down. You either lash out or you shut down.

SPEAKER_04 22:26

I shut down and I live in my bubble. I live in my bubble and I let people in, but most people come in, they bounce right off. I don't let them affect me.

SPEAKER_02 22:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 22:38

And that's not really healthy either, right?

SPEAKER_03 22:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 22:41

And and it's like I know I should be crying, like you know, sad, but I'm not because I just don't have any feelings. That's what I think.

SPEAKER_01 22:48

And there there are the feelings, but I think sometimes through life, we've we have just learned that I can't hold all of it right now, to your point. If you're a mom and you my children, and I was just speaking to a friend, she's like, well, I don't have time to break down right now. The kids have to eat, I need to do this, I still have deliverables, I still have this, I just don't have the time. And it's not about having the time, it's about and this is and I'll go back and I'll say 90 seconds is literally how long the emotion lives. And then if you give it a story, and what I like to tell my clients specifically, that story, yes, is in your head, but you have the power to rewrite what the story says. Love it. It's your it's your story, which means you can rewrite it at any point to say something that is more helpful than the one that you currently have that is it that is making you the prop. I am my own problem because I didn't realize that I can rewrite that story to something that is more supportive for me.

SPEAKER_04 23:48

I love this so much. I'm smiling because I literally on my story of Instagram today, I was like, you are in control of your mood today. So go have an amazing mood. You got this, and what you just said right there, I was like, yeah, it's true. Like you are in so much control, and people need that reminder. So it is nuts though, that is 25 minutes into this already. Yeah. Um, I don't even know how we talked for 25 minutes because I'm like, we just didn't even start. Like this conversation just started, and it's almost like like I record for 25 to 30 minutes. So, question though, if someone wants to get or learn more about Annie and learn more about your coaching, where do they go? What do we do? Because I know for me, I'm already like, I need more and more. Like, I know that my listeners are gonna be like, okay, that was not long enough. Where do I learn about her? I need to like dive into like her culture.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

And I would say just to shorten the information, the best would be on my website. It's www.lovebeforall.com. And you can you have the option to schedule appointment with me from the website, and you can learn a lot more. You also have access to all the social media from my website. And my social media has a lot of free leadership uh skills. I do like three to five minute short videos that are that are directly connected to leadership skills that support you at home and at work because we don't realize because we're humans, what works at work also works at home.

SPEAKER_04 25:19

So whatever we surround ourselves with just by default forms who we are.

SPEAKER_02 25:25

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 25:26

So it is that powerful to have that mentality of like, how do I protect myself so I can be a better person and human all around? And here's the thing, guys. Listening, if you are not going, you need to go to her website and follow her because like any information like that she can give you that is free of even like socialist sites, you just need to surround yourself around. Like it's so powerful. Like, I wish we live closer. I'd like to want to get coffee. Like, I would be always asking Annie to be in my corner. Um, but no, I appreciate you so much. What is one tip of advice that you'd like to end this recording with? Something that you feel can benefit our listeners.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Um deepen your self-awareness. Like that relationship with yourself should be the most important relationship for you because as you get to know and love and deepen the love you have for yourself, you start to extend those same skills to the people around you and to the world. So get to know yourself on a on a deep loving level. And the best way to do that is to engage with people and to see as you're engaging with them what is what's happening in my body. Like, where is that coming from? Oh, is it connected to this thing that happened when I was younger? So I feel like the best way to best advice, or I would say for in my experience, I've found that the more I get to know myself, the more I love myself, and the more I love myself, the easier it is for me to extend love to the people around me.

SPEAKER_04 27:04

Yeah, I I love that. I can't even end on a better note because of course I want to continue to talk to you and say, but that is so powerful. So many times people go and they invest in other things, other relationships, but you've heard it before, but you cannot do anything good in your life until you work on yourself and get to know yourself first. So um powerful. Well, there you had it, you guys. That was literally the most exciting conversation we've had on here. That literally time flew by within it feels like I just started talking to you. Um, but if you guys feel the way I felt listening to this, make sure you share this episode with someone who can use a little Annie in their lives as well. And subscribe to this podcast. And thank you for listening to another episode of the Randy Lynn Show. Diannie, thank you so much.