The RISE Experience
It’s not always about becoming someone different.
Sometimes it’s about realizing you’ve been disconnected from yourself for longer than you thought.
The RISE Experience is a podcast for the woman who can handle everything — except herself. The one who shows up, gets things done, keeps things together… but quietly feels like something isn’t landing the way it should.
Shannon Denniston is a behavior change coach and the founder of RISE. What she talks about here isn’t behavior on the surface. It’s what sits underneath it — patterns, beliefs, and identity-level disconnects that make consistency feel harder than it should.
A lot of what gets called “starting over” isn’t starting over at all. It’s noticing what’s been running in the background for a long time, and learning how to move differently from there.
Not forced. Not rushed. No reinvention, no reset, just more aware, more honest with where things actually are, and returning to yourself in a way that holds.
The RISE Experience
Rebuilding Trust With Yourself After Repeated Broken Promises.
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When the promise you keep breaking feels like proof that you are the problem, what if it is actually your body doing exactly what it was designed to do to keep you safe?
Welcome to The RISE Experience — a podcast for women who are finding their way back to themselves. This is a space to slow down when everything feels loud, to lead from steadiness instead of urgency, and to finally hear yourself think again. Here we talk about identity, faith, and the quiet inner wisdom that gets buried under all the doing. A place to pause, reflect, and rise from clarity instead of pressure.
Episode Highlights
In today’s episode, I get honest about the promises we keep making to ourselves around food, habits, and “starting over,” and how the story we tell after we break them can either bury us in shame or help us rebuild real trust with ourselves and with God.
Episode Outline
- The pattern of broken promises and why it feels so personal
- How repeated “failures” slowly erode trust with yourself
- The guilt and shame that show up after breaking a promise
- Why your body turns to old coping patterns when you are stressed or under fueled
- Rereading the “evidence” of failure through a different lens
- Naming the deeper promise underneath the habits: not abandoning yourself
- How one hard moment becomes a story about your whole identity
- Interrupting the shame spiral with a new question about what your body is trying to do for you
- Beginning to rebuild trust with compassion instead of self attack
Episode Chapters
00:00 Intro: Welcome to The Rise Experience
00:24 Rebuilding trust with yourself: monthly theme
01:32 Why we keep breaking promises to ourselves
03:10 Food, body, and the shame that follows “breaking the rules”
05:02 Your body’s real job: safety over perfection
06:28 How stress and under fueling trigger autopilot habits
08:05 Reframing “failure” as your body’s learned protection
09:35 The deeper promise: “I won’t abandon myself anymore”
11:02 How one hard moment rewrites your whole identity
12:20 Peter’s denial of Jesus and what fear does under pressure
14:08 Your story doesn’t end on your worst day
15:10 A new question: “What is my body trying to do for me right now?”
16:02 Practicing kinder self talk after you slip
17:05 Closing encouragement and prayer
17:55 Final send off: share with a friend and keep rising
Conclusion
Broken streaks, empty pans of brownies, missed workouts, the sharp words you wish you could take back, none of that gets to be the whole story about who you are. The real work is not never slipping again. The real work is what you say to yourself in the moment after you do. When you stop using those moments as evidence that you are too much or not enough, and start seeing them as honest signals of what you are carrying, you stop abandoning the woman you actually are. She has been there the whole time, under the pressure and the starting over, closer than it feels right now.
Action Taken
- Notice what you say to yourself in the moment right after you “break” a promise.
- Ask: “What is my body trying to do for me in this moment?”
- Check your inner tone against how you would speak to someone you deeply love
- Pay attention to where you have been reading, struggle as proof that you are failing, instead of proof that something real needs care
- Bring that honest need to God, asking for grace, strength, and a kinder way to see yourself
CTA
If this resonates, share it with a friend or a woman in your life who keeps calling her struggle a character flaw when it might just be her body doing the best it knows how to do.
Visit the links provided to stay connected.
- Instagram: @risewithshannon
- Facebook: Shannon Denniston
- LinkedIn: Shannon Denniston
- Business: https://msha.ke/shanden
- Coaching: https://msha.ke/risewithshannon
Thank you for listening and for being willing to look at yourself with more honesty and compassion instead of more pressure. You are not the sum of your hardest moments or broken promises. You are the woman who keeps getting back up, learning what you need, and choosing not to abandon the truest version of you.