What I Know Now
Nine things I learned from nine certifications — and the one thing none of them taught me
I’m writing this from Paris.
I wanted this to feel like something. Like a place you’d remember. Because this show — this newsletter, this body of work — has been a place for me. Somewhere I came to think out loud, to share what I was learning, to trust that my voice alone was enough to fill the space.
That last part took me a while.
I spent a long time thinking I needed credentials to make this worth reading. Experts to cite. People with bigger platforms, more letters after their names, more certainty about the answers. And then I realized: I have nine coaching certifications. I have an MA. I have fifteen years of living in another country, building things from nothing, getting sober, becoming a mother, burning things down and rebuilding them quieter and stronger.
I have lived this material.
I am enough to carry this.
And so are you. Whatever you’ve been waiting for permission to do alone — the project, the pitch, the trip — you are enough to carry it.
Nine Things I Know Now
One — IIN Health Coach: Your body is the first business you ever ran. Treat it accordingly.
Most of us learned to override the body early. Ignore hunger, push through fatigue, numb discomfort. And then we wonder why our businesses — the second thing we tried to run — feel the same way. Depleted. Reactive. Always one crisis away from shutdown.
The body doesn’t lie. It just gets louder when you won’t listen quietly.
Two — Detoxification Expert: What you remove matters as much as what you add. This is true for your plate, your calendar, and your relationships.
We are obsessed with optimization. With adding the right supplement, the right habit, the right person to the team. But half of my most meaningful transformations — my own and my clients’ — happened through subtraction. The relationship that was leaking energy. The commitment that had already run its course. The supplement stack that was costing two thousand dollars a year and changing nothing.
Addition is easy. Removal requires courage.
Three — Alcohol-Free Life Coach: The thing you think you need to get through the hard moment is usually the thing keeping you in it.
I have eight years sober. That’s not a flex — it’s context. I know what it is to reach for something that promises relief and delivers avoidance. And I know that the version of the hard moment you face without the crutch is almost always smaller than the version you built up in your head.
The escape route and the trap are often the same door.
Four — NLP Practitioner: The story you tell yourself about what’s possible is the ceiling. Change the story, raise the ceiling.
This one sounds like a poster. I know. But I’ve watched it happen too many times to dismiss it. The founder who believed she couldn’t demand more — until she did, and nothing broke. The woman who was certain she wasn’t a leader — until she stopped saying it. Language is not decoration. It’s architecture.
Five — Trauma-Informed Integrated Hypnotist: The body keeps the score. And it keeps trying to pay it back. Let it.
Unprocessed experience lives somewhere. In the jaw, the shoulders, the nervous system’s threat response that fires when nothing threatening is actually happening. I’ve sat with enough clients in hypnosis to know: the body wants to complete what the mind wants to skip. Give it the room to do that. The things you’ve been carrying that aren’t actually yours to carry are the heaviest.
Six — Breathwork Facilitator: The fastest way to change your state is already in your body. You just keep forgetting it’s there.
In nine years of coaching and eight years of sobriety and fifteen years in Mexico and all the protocols and all the programs — the most consistently effective regulation tool I have is the exhale. The long, deliberate, full-lunged exhale that tells your nervous system it is not in danger. No app required. No subscription. Just the breath you were born with. My fave is with a heavy ‘shhhhhhhhhhh’ sound… calms the kids, calms the dogs, calms you…
Seven — Success Coach: Define success before someone else does it for you.
This is the one I wish I’d gotten earlier. I spent years building toward a version of success I had absorbed from other people — from culture, from comparison, from the metrics that were easy to count. Followers. Revenue. Recognition. And I arrived at some of those things and felt — nothing. Or worse, the low hum of knowing they weren’t mine.
Define it yourself. In writing. Revisit it every year. The version that’s true at 35 is not the version that’s true at 45.
Eight — Ashtanga Yoga Instructor: The advanced version is not the hardest version. The advanced version is the most honest one.
You can seek the insta-wow poses, likely pull something in the process or you can go back to basics, time and time again. Three poses in a hotel room post flight is a practice worth celebrating. The second version — the honest version, the version that shows up in the actual conditions of the actual day — is harder to do and more valuable to develop than the version that waits for the perfect conditions that may never come.
Perfection is a form of avoidance dressed up as standards.
Nine — Mindset Coach: What you believe about your capacity becomes your capacity. And you are almost certainly underestimating yourself.
Not in a toxic-positivity way. In a here-is-the-evidence way. You have done hard things. You have adapted, rebuilt, continued. Your track record of getting through things you thought might break you is actually quite good. Look at it. Trust it. Use it as data.
The One Thing None of Them Taught Me
Nine certifications. And the most important thing I know now — the thing I’d put on a wall if I had to choose — didn’t come from a curriculum.
It came from living long enough to notice a pattern.
You already know.
Whatever decision you’ve been circling. Whatever chapter you’ve been afraid to close. Whatever version of yourself you’ve been performing while a quieter, truer version waits. You already know. Your body has already told you. You’ve just been very busy overriding it with logic and good reasons and the fear of what it would mean to trust yourself completely.
I’m writing this from Paris because I wanted the moment to feel like something.
But the thing I’m most certain of, sitting here — is that the place doesn’t make the knowing. The knowing was already there. The place just made it easier to hear.
Megan Swan is the founder of Megan Swan Wellness, a platform for female founders built around nervous system science, and co-founder of Altavita, a Calgary-based medical wellness travel company. She is the host of the Wellness Infrastructure Podcast, launching September 2026. Find her on LinkedIn or at altavitahealth.ca.
→ If this landed: The work behind this essay — the framework, the somatic tools, the actual practice of building a life and a business from a regulated nervous system — is what we do inside Babies & Empires. DM me or follow along as the Wellness Infrastructure Podcast launches this fall.