THE REGAL EDIT

👑 HELLO, REGAL ONES

Welcome to The Regal Edit, your curated digest for living and leading in full alignment. Each edition distills five essentials in business, health, spirituality, lifestyle, and social impact — designed to elevate how you think, feel, and move through the world.

I want to start this week with a longer intro, and something that’s been on my mind.

I want to start by talking to you about something that changed how I see my own life, and I think it could shift something for you too.

You know how we've been conditioned to plan everything? Five-year plans. Vision boards. SMART goals. And yet we're still standing at the crossroads wondering how we got here or how to get there from here?

I've been sitting with this book called Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans—two Stanford professors who teach design thinking. And the one thing they say that stopped me cold was this:

Designers don't think their way forward. Designers build their way forward.

Let that land for a second.

We have been thinking. Analyzing. Overthinking. Waiting until we're certain. But certainty is not the goal—movement is.

You Can't Analyze a Future That Hasn't Happened Yet

Here's what they teach: you can't figure out your next life chapter by sitting in your head and trying to logic your way to clarity. The future hasn't happened yet. You can't analyze it.

What you can do is prototype it.

What's a prototype? It's a small, low-stakes experiment that asks a question. Not a full commitment. Not a leap of faith off a cliff. A conversation. A shadow day. A weekend project. A decision to say yes to one invitation that feels slightly terrifying but also right.

Burnett and Evans call this building your way forward—and the most regal thing about it? You stop waiting for permission to try things. You just... try them. Iterate. Learn. Try again.

This is not hustle culture. This is design culture. And there's a difference.

Prototyping Conversations

One of my favorite concepts from the book is the Life Design Interview—what I'd call a prototyping conversation.

Find someone who is living a version of a life that intrigues you. Not someone you want to be. Someone who has done something that you're drawn toward. Then ask them to tell you their story. Not for advice. Not for a job. Just to learn.

Ask questions like: How did you get here? What did a regular Tuesday look like when you started? What surprised you most? What do you wish you'd known?

You are not asking them to validate your dream. You are visiting a possible future before you commit to it. No cost. No contract. Just curiosity.

And here's what I know about us—as women who hold so much—we often skip this step. We either stay stuck or we leap before we're ready, because nobody taught us there was a middle path. One where you get to gather information, move at the pace of your own wisdom, and build a life on purpose.

A Mirror Moment

Try something small this week.

Think of one version of your life that keeps quietly knocking. Now think of one person who is living something adjacent to it.

Reach out:

"I've been thinking about [this path] and I'd love to hear your story. Would you have 20 minutes to share how you got where you are?"

That's it. You're not committing. You're prototyping. You're learning your way forward.

Because a regal life isn't one that you figured out all at once. It's one you designed, piece by piece, with intention.

Business

YOUR BEST MEETING EVER

How to Design Meetings That Actually Work
Inspired by Rebecca Hinds' Your Best Meeting Ever

You feel it the moment it hits your calendar. That visceral dread. Another meeting. Your jaw tightens. You're already calculating how much real work you won't be getting done.

That reaction isn't irrational. It's learned. But here's the uncomfortable truth: the problem isn't meetings. The problem is that almost nobody treats meetings like the serious, expensive, consequential tools they actually are.

Rebecca Hinds, in Your Best Meeting Ever, cuts to the heart of this: meetings are the most expensive tool in your organization. Treat them like it.

The Real Cost

A one-hour meeting with twelve senior professionals doesn't cost one hour. It costs twelve hours of concentrated human capital, plus the cognitive load that lingers long after everyone logs off. When you calculate meetings this way—as a cost center, not a free resource—the question of whether to hold one becomes much more serious.

The 48-Hour Calendar Cleanse

Here's the most powerful intervention any organization can make: cancel everything.

Delete all recurring meetings from every calendar, then rebuild from scratch. When everything is gone, the burden of proof flips. Now you have to justify why a meeting should exist, not why it should be eliminated.

Each meeting request must answer: What is the purpose? Who must be there? How long is needed?

The Two-Part Test: Does This Meeting Need to Exist?

Before anything goes back on the calendar, it must pass two filters.

Part One: The 4D Test

A meeting earns its place only if it's designed to:

• Decide — a decision requiring collective input

• Debate — competing perspectives need real-time discussion

• Discuss — complex nuance requires back-and-forth

• Develop — coaching, mentorship, team building

An update? Send a Loom video. A status report? Use a dashboard. The 4D filter forces clarity before consuming anyone's time.

Part Two: The CEO Test

Even if it passes 4D, it must meet at least one of these:

• Complexity — too intricate for async communication

• Emotional intensity — requires human emotional intelligence

• One-way door decisions — high-stakes, irreversible choices

If it meets none of these criteria, spare your team's time.

Designing the Meeting Itself

Once you've earned the meeting, design it intentionally:

Think in verbs and nouns. "Marketing update" has no place on an agenda. "Approve the Q2 marketing brief" does.

Sequence with cognitive load in mind. Lead with lower-stakes items. Reserve high-stakes decisions for the middle when energy is present but the group has settled. End with lighter items that create forward motion.

Consider context. If this is the fifth consecutive meeting for attendees, they're arriving depleted. Schedule high-stakes meetings earlier or after breaks.

Always close with clarity. Not "we'll follow up." A specific action, owner, and timeline.

The Bottom Line

The companies that thrive will not be the ones with the most meetings. They'll be the ones whose meetings are so well-designed that people leave feeling more capable and more aligned than when they walked in.

That doesn't happen by accident. It happens because someone decided meetings were worth designing with the same rigor they bring to everything else that matters.

Health

How to See the World with Awe — Even When It's Falling Apart

There is a version of you that used to stop mid-sidewalk because the light was doing something extraordinary through the trees. That version didn't go anywhere. You just got busy. And the world got loud.

Here's what science is confirming: wonder is not a luxury. It is a biological necessity—one most of us are chronically starving for.

What the Research Shows

Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychology professor and the world's leading researcher on awe, has spent decades studying what happens when we encounter something that stops us in our tracks.

When we experience awe, the brain's default mode network—the region of endless inner monologue about me, my problems, my to-do list—goes quiet. Your sense of self shrinks relative to the vastness you're perceiving, and with it, the weight of your daily stressors feels lighter.

The effects are significant:

• Awe reduces anxiety, loneliness, and depression

• Brief awe interventions improve psychological health in people with chronic stress

• Daily awe experiences during COVID-19 correlated with sustained improvements in well-being and reductions in physical pain

But here's the finding that changes everything: it's not the size of the awe moment that matters. It's the frequency.

You don't need the Grand Canyon. Small, brief, consistent encounters with wonder produce the greatest cumulative benefits.

The Eight Places Wonder Lives

Keltner's research across 26 cultures identified eight universal sources of awe:

1. Moral beauty — witnessing courage, selflessness, or integrity you didn't see coming

2. Collective movement — being in a crowd moving together: a concert, a march, a standing ovation

3. Nature — not just the grand stuff. A particular quality of afternoon light. The architecture of a single leaf.

4. Visual design and art — a painting that makes you feel accused. Architecture that takes your breath.

5. Music — the song that gives you chills. The one you had to pull over for.

6. Spirituality and transcendence — the felt sense of something larger than yourself

7. Big ideas — the moment a concept reshapes your mental map of the world

8. Life and death — the primal awe of new life. The sacred weight of loss.

Wonder is already everywhere in your life. The question is whether you have the glasses on to see it.

3 Practices for Staying in Wonder

1. Take an Awe Walk Walk with your attention deliberately shifted outward. Look for vastness—the expanse of sky, a long sightline. Look for beauty—light on a surface, color, texture. Research found that informal, open-attention practices outdoors outperform structured meditation for generating awe.

2. Keep an Awe Journal At the end of each day, write down one moment that caught you. This trains your attention to scan for wonder during the day and creates a personal archive you can return to during hard moments.

3. Let Yourself Be Unfinished by a Big Idea Read outside your field. Watch a lecture from a discipline you know nothing about. Wonder lives at the edge of what you understand. Stay curious about the edge.

Try This Today

Go outside. Look up. Not at your phone. Stand somewhere and look up. Stay there for two full minutes. Notice the scale of what's above you. Let your sense of yourself get a little smaller.

The world will keep being chaotic. It always has been. Wonder is not the absence of chaos—it is the capacity to find something magnificent inside of it.

Put the glasses on. They were yours all along.

Source: Dacher Keltner's research at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center and his book "Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life"

Lifestyle

The Quick Reset, because we love regulating ourselves to deal with a chaotic outside world

Our life and lifestyle is made up of our habits, rituals, routines, and actions.

Here’s one to help with regulation in chaotic times, and it’s so simple.

Wash your face with cold water. Actually cold—the kind that makes you gasp a little. You can even make a little ice bath for your face and dunk it in for a few seconds.

Splash or dunk three times. Let the shock wake up your nervous system. Pat dry slowly.

Look at yourself in the mirror for ten seconds without fixing anything.

That's it. That's the practice.

Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is interrupt the spiral and remind your body: you're here. You're alive. You can start again.

Social Impact

When the Hive Activates What a group of Minnesota women just showed the world

Nobody called a meeting. Nobody drafted a charter or applied for a grant. Nobody waited for permission.

They just knew—and they moved.

In Minnesota, thousands of ordinary women snapped into extraordinary action in a matter of days. Not in a building. Not under a banner. Inside encrypted chats, in school parking lots, at kitchen tables at midnight, in the quiet architecture of trust that women have always known how to build when the moment demands it.

Alerts came in. The colony unified. Attorneys were called. Spreadsheets materialized. Observers appeared on scene. Groceries were quietly delivered. Children were picked up. Some women rearranged their entire lives—not for recognition, but because a human being needed protecting. And that was reason enough.

This is what it looks like when care becomes infrastructure.

There is no queen in this hive. No one posturing for a peace prize. No ego waiting to be fed. Just cell after cell coming online—each woman finding her function and locking in until the whole ecosystem is humming at full capacity.

We talk a lot about reimagining social support systems. About the broken trust in institutions that were supposed to show up for us. About the need for something new.

Maybe this is it. Maybe these women—bone-tired, unglamorous, magnificent—just proved the concept.

When formal systems fail, community doesn't wait. It builds.

History has a habit of recording the wrong people. The ones who held press conferences instead of the ones who held the line. Let's not make that mistake here.

These heroines deserve the standing ovation they'll probably never take a bow for. They deserve the big Minnesotan bear hug they can finally collapse into.

And the rest of us? We deserve to ask ourselves what it means that ordinary people—with no authority, no budget, no infrastructure—built something this extraordinary this fast.

Because if the hive can do this… what else is it capable of?

The honeycomb is just getting started.

Spirituality

Before you move on, a request

The world is chaotic. You've just read about everything demanding your attention. Before you click away, before you jump into the next task, before you let this information become just more noise—

I need you to pause.

Right here. Right now.

Take 10 deep breaths. Count them. Feel your nervous system regulate. Let your body remember it's safe enough to exhale.

This isn't optional self-care. This is survival. Your body has been holding tension you didn't even know was there.

Breathe.

TODAY’S MANTRA

^{Stay tuned for updates & Regal announcements coming soon!}

Con Mucho Amor,

Tanyette

Smart. Soulful. Aligned.