Come Home to Your Sovereign Self

I originally wrote this as part of a TEDx application.

I didn’t get selected, but the story still needed to be told.

This episode is my personal path to sovereignty. The throughline that connects childhood exposure to power, a formative experience on Wall Street at fourteen, years spent working beside executives and founders, and a decade of experimentation, building, and searching for what actually works.

It is not just a story. It is a pattern.

And it leads to one question that matters now more than ever.

If power becomes decentralized, are we prepared to hold it?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

I'm Ashley, and this is Dear Sovereign Self, my audio journal on the way I walk through life, practicing sovereignty, living from truth, not wound, and choosing alignment over self-abandonment. Here's today's entry.

SPEAKER_02 0:17

This episode was supposed to be a talk. I originally wrote this as part of my application for uh TEDx Portland this year. And if everything had gone according to plan, it would have been filmed this weekend, which is why I'm choosing to record this this weekend, but I wasn't selected. So and for a moment I thought this meant that this just wouldn't be shared at all. Because what I wrote wasn't just an application, it was an articulation of this project, of this voice, of how I got here. So instead of leaving it on a page somewhere, I decided to do what I've been doing this entire time. Record it anyway and share it with you here. Because I think episode 34 is as good a time as any to tell you a little bit more about what you've been listening to. If you've been here for weeks, this is context. If this is your first episode, welcome. This is Dear Sovereign Self. And this episode is a little different because this is my personal path to sovereignty, and that's a question that I get a lot. Not necessarily like, how did you get here? More like, why are you even talking about this? What is sovereignty? And the truth is, this didn't start when I started this podcast, it didn't even start when I had language for it, it started long before that, and only recently have I've been able to trace it back, look back, and realize this was always where I was headed. There's actually a moment that I look back on, like very recently. Oh my goodness. Okay, looking back. So my last job when I was living in Los Angeles, and we'll get to that time, but my last job when I was living in Los Angeles uh was remote. So it ended up being my last job in LA, but my first job when I moved here to Miami, where I live now. And one of my final assignments before moving, before the physical move that was happening in the background of my life, was helping my executive at the time. Explain what that means later in my work experience and all that, uh, but was helping my executive prepare for a board position. And I was reflecting back on that assignment for like preparing for something else, right? Just like flashed in my mind. And I remembered that the name of that company was sovereign. And at the time, like it didn't, it didn't mean anything to me while I was working on it. Like that was just, you know, it was a name, it was just another task that I was doing. But now, after everything that's unfolded after this work, after this lens, I look back at that time, that assignment, that sort of synchronicity now in hindsight, um, and think, of course, this is just one of those like path signifier sort of things, if you're into that. Okay, so and that's what this episode is really about. It's not just my personal story, it's my personal pattern, a pattern of experiences, roles, and environments that kept pointing me in the same direction toward power, toward systems, toward the question underneath all of it: what does it actually mean to govern yourself? And that question matters now more than ever, because we're moving into a world that is talking a lot about decentralization, decentralized technology, decentralized organizations, collectives, shared ownership, less top-down control, more distributed power. But here's the question I kept coming back to. If the systems decentralize, but the people don't, what actually changes? How many people are prepared to hold power without outsourcing it, without distorting it, without recreating the same dynamics in a different form? That's the work. That's what this is. This isn't just a podcast or an audio journal. It's a real-time evolution, a way of making internal shifts visible. That's possible. Because these kinds of changes they don't happen cleanly, they don't happen in theory, they happen in real time, in decisions, in contradictions, in moments where what you know meets what you're willing to live. So this episode is the story of how I got here, not as a timeline necessarily, but as a lens, a lens that I've built over time and that now informs everything I do and create. So let me start earlier than most people would expect. Before I had language for any of this, before sovereignty, quote unquote, before power, before systems, I was being exposed to it. So when I was a kid, my mom worked at a bank. So every year on Take Your Daughter to Work Day, I couldn't go sit in a branch all day because that was illegal. Like, you can't have a kid there all day. So I would go with my great aunt instead. And she worked at New York Life Insurance Company, the one with the massive gold pyramid in Midtown, if any of you have ever seen it. And what I remember about those days is that they didn't treat us like kids. They didn't just like park us in a room and keep us busy. They had a full curriculum. They grouped us into cohorts, they walked us through departments, they showed us how the entire organism functioned, how decisions moved, how information flowed, how one part of the system affected another. And I did this go with her to take your daughter to work day uh year after year for from maybe around eight to maybe 10 or 11. And one year they took us all the way up, actually, to the roof of the building, to to the gold pyramid. And I remember standing there, looking out over the city, feeling something I didn't have words for yet, but I understood it inherently. That decisions made far above ground ripple all the way down. And I didn't know that what I was learning was power. I didn't know I was learning systems, I didn't know I was developing a lens, but something lodged. And I went on to practice that without even realizing what I was doing necessarily. So I was student body president for six years through elementary school, through middle school, year after year. And this was alongside that time that I was visiting New York Life Insurance and learning and absorbing from this curriculum that they had put together for all of the little eight-year-old, nine-year-old, ten-year-old girls who were coming through there on this day every year. So at the time, you know, doing that, leading at school and being student body president felt like leadership. It felt like responsibility. It felt like being the one people trusted. But looking back, it was something else. It was repetition, it was pattern recognition. It was learning very early what it means to sit at the top of something, even a small system, and feel how your decisions move through it. But that. And so the first time I had consciously chosen it back, I was about 13 or 14. No, actually, it was definitely 14 because back then, I don't know if you still have to do this, but in New York State, you have to get working papers when you turn 14 to say that you're of age to work. And I knew this and was it anticipated it for months because I was the kind of kid that loved working and loved having like a little side hustle that people paid me for, but just as a kid, but 14 and this paperwork meant that I was gonna be official. So I had my working papers, and at the time, New York had or New York City had this program called Summer Jobs Bank, I believe, and it basically created camp counselor work opportunities for New York City residents between the ages of I believe 14 and 17, something like that. You could do it for two or three summers, and it was for about 10 to 12 weeks in the summer, and you were a camp counselor and you could make a little money, and it was it was a set stipend amount hourly, right? And so I was very excited, this is gonna be my first job, and then orientation day comes, and so I go to the orientation and I see all the other 99 kids in the group who are going to become camp counselors in the Bronx, and then I noticed that the event was sponsored by a we'll say financial institution, right? We'll keep them anonymous, sponsored by a major financial institution, and they had sent, as part of their sponsorship of their of this program, they had sent their head of community development to be our guest speaker at this orientation. And so she gives her speech, and I'm just so in awe of her vibeslash remember it, right? Like she's she's activating that eight-year-old, nine-year-old girl that was walking through New York life insurance. And so when she comes off stage, I go up to her and I ask, like, could I would it be cool if I actually just went with you this summer? I think she was so taken aback that I asked her that that she agreed, and she kind of worked with the coordinators somehow to get me placed with her at the financial institution instead of as a camp counselor, which I'm sure I would have crushed, you know, if I'd spent the summer teaching the youth. But instead, I went to Wall Street, and I remember how surreal that felt. 14 years old, stepping into buildings I had only ever seen from the outside, like watching people move with urgency, hearing conversations I wasn't supposed to fully understand yet, and realizing very quickly, this is where decisions are being made. This is where things actually move. And my role in all of it was small. I mean infantismal. I was fetching coffee, running errands, sitting quietly, fetching water for boy kings, right, on Wall Street. And I say that line very intentionally because that's what it was. Power in its most visible form. So when I say kings, boy kings, young, ambitious, certain of itself, that kind of raw power. And me, like right beside it. Not as the one making the decisions, but close enough to watch them happen, close enough to feel the tone of the room, close enough to notice what wasn't being said. And that changed something for me because I realized very early that proximity to power is its own education. You don't learn it from the outside, you don't learn it from theory, you learn it from being in the room, by watching how people behave when something is on the line, by seeing what gets prioritized, what gets ignored, what gets said out loud, and what gets handled in silence. And I didn't have the language for it yet, but I recognized it, this pattern of being close enough to see the organization and its players clearly. And once you see from that perspective, you can't you can't stop seeing from that perspective. So that that ultimately is my point in this entry, is that I didn't just stumble into this. Because once I understood that that was how I wanted to see every day when I woke up, I know that sounds extreme. I don't even know how to describe it differently. But once I knew that that's how I wanted to see every day when I woke up from that perch, from that perspective, I started to uh see it everywhere. Because from that point on, from the financial institution at 14, it kept happening to me. No matter what role I was hired into, intern, assistant, coordinator, it didn't matter. At some point, I would find myself in a different room: an elevator, a hallway, a meeting, and eventually someone would say something like, You're with me now, right? And just like that, my position would shift, not on paper, but in reality. And it happened enough times that I stopped calling it luck and I started recognizing it as a role, a very specific one. Not the king, not the person at the top, but not outside of it either. Something else. The person just over the emperor's right shoulder. The one who sees everything, the one who understands what's happening without needing to be told what's happening, the one who can feel how a room is moving before anything is said out loud. I call it the king's brother. Because that's what it felt like, that's what it feels like. Proximity without title, influence without recognition, access without ownership. And that position teaches you things that no job description ever will. You see how decisions are actually made, not the version that gets documented in memorandums, the real version. You see how fear shows up in leadership, how ego moves quietly through rooms that are supposed to be rational, how power gets negotiated, redirected, protected, and how often the most important things are never said directly. And I lived in that seat over and over again, across internships, across roles, across industries, until eventually it became my career. I became an executive assistant professionally, which on paper looks like support, but in practice it's proximity, it's pattern recognition, it's being inside the system while understanding it from the outside. Actually, the one break in my work history, my professional history from the executive assistant title was immediately after college. I graduated and was working as a litigation paralegal, and I worked on a case. I don't know if I can say this, but I mean it was years ago. The DOJ Department of Justice versus American Express, and we represented American Express, and I worked my way up to being a leadership on this paralegal team for that case, which meant I wasn't just observing power anymore. I was helping to organize it, to translate it, to move it behind the scenes. And what all of those experiences had in common was the same vantage point. I wasn't the one at the top, but I could see the top clearly. And more importantly, I could see the limits of the top. Because when you sit that close to power for long enough, you start to realize something. It's not as stable as it looks, uh, it's not as clean as it presents, and it's not as in control as it claims to be. And once you see that, you start asking a different question. Not how do I get there, but what is this really?

SPEAKER_01 17:37

Power. And at a certain point, I left.

SPEAKER_02 17:44

Not because I didn't understand that world, but because I understood it enough. Enough to know I didn't want to spend my life only sitting next to power. I wanted to test it for myself. So I moved to Los Angeles. Uh and for almost a decade, my life looked nonlinear. Um on paper, it looked like a lot of different things: a lot of jobs, a lot of side businesses, a lot of starts and stops. That's not what was actually happening. I wasn't scattered, I was experimenting. I was taking everything I had learned from that seat and trying to apply it in real time. And an Airbnb business, that was one of my many starts and stops. One of the more successful ones, actually. I might do an entry just on that. That yeah. That was a time. If you were there, that was a time. The girls remember, okay. Uh, I had an Airbnb business. And so when the laws started changing, because we were in it early. I moved to Los Angeles, I think, in 2014. The laws started changing and it was starting to affect how we made money. I didn't just sit back and react. I used my spare time to join the Hollywood Real Estate Council. And obviously, I was at least 40 years younger than anyone else on this council, and very much felt like their executive assistant. I was there because I wanted to understand the system shaping the outcome. I wanted to be closer to the decisions again, but this time from a different angle. You know? And at that same time, I was still working in executive assistant roles, still in proximity, still in rooms, still reading how people moved. But now I had something else. Agency. The ability to try something, build something, walk away from something, to test ideas without needing permission. And underneath all of that, there was another layer for me. I found cryptocurrency early, again, quote unquote, relatively early. This was maybe 2016 now. Before it, it was what it is now for sure. And at first, it wasn't an industry to me. It was just something I was curious about. So I learned it on my own, trading, reading white papers, if you can believe it, trying to understand what this even was. I went to conventions. I remember being at the LA Convention Center, and was that 2017, 2018, maybe, uh, listening to people talk about things that sounded abstract at the time, the metaverse, digital land, decentralized systems, and something about it stuck. Not because I wanted to work in it, which I later went on to do, but because it connected to something I had already been thinking about. Who holds power? How does it move? And what happens when you try to redistribute it? Right. And what that gave me, the cryptocurrency learning how to trade and being curious and open about it at that time, was the ability to move, to not get stuck, to not have to commit to something just because it was stable. So from the outside, that time it might have looked like a lot of different lives were being lived in a short compressed time frame. But from inside of that experience, it was one continuous question. What actually works? Not in theory, not in systems that already exist, but in practice, in real time, across different environments, across different roles, across different versions of myself. And what I was really doing without fully realizing it yet was building a lens, a way of seeing that was no longer tied to one system or one role or One version of power. And that's what made the next shift possible. Because eventually all of those threads started to come together. And when those threads came together, they brought me to decentralization, to DAOs specifically, right? These decentralized, autonomous organizations. But more importantly, to this idea that we could redesign systems from the ground up, that we could remove centralized authority, distribute power, build organizations that weren't controlled from the top down. And on paper, it was everything I had been circling my entire professional life at least, but my entire life. Power redistributed, systems reimagined, structures rewritten. So I walked into that space open, curious, ready to see what it could become. And for a moment it felt like alignment. Like this is it. This is where everything I've been learning meets something new, something better. But then I stayed long enough to see it clearly. And that's okay. I want to say that. And that's okay. Because what I saw was familiar, different language, different tools, same dynamics. Because you can decentralize the technology, you can flatten the org chart, you can write the white paper, you can build the system from scratch. But if the people inside the system are still operating the same way, nothing actually changes. Power doesn't disappear, it adapts. Control doesn't go away, it finds a new channel. Hierarchy doesn't actually need titles, it just needs insecurity. And that's when the question shifted from how do we redesign systems to something much more, frankly, uncomfortable. Who are the people inside of these systems? Because if the people aren't self-governing, no system will save them, no structure will fix it, no amount of decentralization will hold. And that's when it became crystal clear to me the most important system isn't external, it's internal. The most consequential operating system is the one you're running within yourself. And that's what brought me here. Not to build better systems, but to understand what it actually means to hold power internally without distorting it, without outsourcing it, and without abusing it. Because that's the only version of decentralization that actually works. And that realization, or those realizations, I should say, are what turned this work inward. Because at a certain point it became clear to me that I wasn't being pulled toward adapting inside of any one system. I was being pulled toward something underneath them all, the thing that determines whether any system works at all. The individual, their capacity, their awareness, their ability to hold power without distorting it. And that's what I call sovereignty. Not dominance, not control, not isolation, something much quieter, much more demanding. The principled practice of living from your truth, not your wounds, shout out to my intro, and building a life that does not require your self-abandonment. Because when you really look at it, most of us didn't lose ourselves. We learned to leave ourselves. We learned when to shrink, when to perform, when to stay quiet to stay safe, when to betray what we knew to keep our place. And we got good at it. So good that we built entire lives around it. Careers, relationships, identities that function but don't feel like home. And sovereignty is the moment you stop calling that normal. The moment you realize you're not lost. You're just done leaving yourself. That's the work. That's why this exists. Because dear sovereign self is not a how-to podcast. It's not about collecting more insight. It's about what happens after you already know something is true. That moment where the real question isn't, is this true? It's what am I going to do now that I know this? And that's why I chose this format, this audio journal. Because this kind of change doesn't happen cleanly. It doesn't happen in perfectly packaged lessons. It happens in real time, in decisions and contradictions, right? In moments where clarity costs you something. So what you're listening to is not just a podcast, it's a record of someone choosing to live what they know in real time without editing out the hard parts and without pretending it's easy. Because if we are actually moving into a world where power is more distributed, where systems are more collective, where authority is less centralized, then the question is not whether those systems can exist. It's whether the people inside of them are ready. And that's what this work is for. Not to prepare you conceptually, but to invite you into the practice. Because freedom isn't a feeling to discipline. And home isn't a place. It's the moment you stop leaving yourself. So if you've been listening, now you know what you've actually been listening to. And if this is your first time here, again, welcome. This is dear sovereign self, and this is your homecoming. So I'll leave you with this. Are you operating in power or orbiting it? And do you trust yourself to hold authority without distorting it? Let me know.

SPEAKER_00 28:30

We'll close the page here for now. Until next time.