I scrapped my prepared questions about four sentences in…That’s not unusual for me when I’m speaking with an incredible woman in business, but it happened faster than normal with Serin Silva, because within minutes of our conversation she had introduced herself as a psychic, a medium, an energy healer, and a ceremonialist who also spent 25 years as a corporate advertising executive at MSNBC and Hearst, helping launch the MSNBC network, bringing the first robot to market, and overseeing a $40 million book of business.
I just needed a minute with that.
What followed was one of the most wide-ranging, layered conversations I’ve had on this podcast. We talked about nervous systems and Silicon Valley and AI and kaleidoscopes and what women have been quietly asked to leave at the door for decades. We barely skimmed the surface of everything Serin knows.
But the things we did land on? I’m still carrying them.
The Bridge. The Voice. The Pivot.
Serin grew up in the Bay Area, worked in the Bay Area, and for a long time commuted across the Bay Bridge to get to work every day. She was successful by every visible measure. She was running teams, leading strategy, getting results. She had no obvious reason to blow it all up.
And then one morning on that bridge, a voice asked: how much longer are you going to do this?
She went into the office. Told her boss she was thinking about moving. Expected a question mark. Got a yes instead. Within six months, she had sold her house, relocated her whole family to Boulder, Colorado, and traded her Pradas for Birkenstocks.
“My life went from being this hard-driving, stiletto-wearing, advertising, image-centered exec woman to: I think I’m gonna learn Reiki, and I think I’m gonna hike.”
And from there, everything that had been quietly running beneath the surface of her entire career started to become the work itself.
The Secret Sauce She Didn’t Know She Had
Here’s the thing about Serin’s intuition: it was always there. Her colleagues noticed it before she did. They’d say things like, “You seem to know when we’re going to lose the contract. You seem to know how to get the deal back.” She filed it under “hard work” and “fairly intelligent” and kept moving.
What she understands now is that what she was calling work ethic was actually something more. A hyper-awareness that had been with her since childhood. A way of reading people and situations that let her move fast and get to the crux of what was actually happening, usually before anyone else could see it.
That’s still the core of what she does today. Just with different tools, and finally a name for it.
The Nervous System Is the Business
One of the things Serin is most focused on right now is nervous system regulation, and she has a certification specifically in applying it to business contexts. And if that sounds abstract, let me give you the version that landed for me:
When someone is activated, when their stress response is running the show, their reaction brain is in charge. Not their thinking brain. Not the part that can weigh options, see clearly, make good decisions, have hard conversations well. The lizard brain. The part that just wants to survive.
You cannot coach someone out of that state. You cannot talk them into a solution. You have to slow the nervous system down first.
“If I can slow someone’s nervous system down, their thinking brain comes forward as opposed to their reaction brain. That’s where clarity lives.”
This is why Serin doesn’t arrive at every engagement with a point A, point B, point C framework. She meets people where they are. Sometimes that’s somatic work. Sometimes it’s energy. Sometimes it’s just creating enough safety that a woman leader can finally say out loud what she’s been holding for months.
And then they move. Fast.
The Old Model Is Dying. Good.
Serin came up in a world where, as she put it, they didn’t even know she had a child for a while. That’s how much of herself she had to suppress to get where she was going. She was in rooms where she was the only woman. She was told to play the game when clients behaved inappropriately. She was expected to leave her heart somewhere outside the building.
She’s honest that she played by those rules, at least for a while. She’s not proud of all of it. But she also understands the world she was navigating.
“The old model is dying.” And she means it. That model, the one that applied automotive production logic to human beings, the one that rewarded suppression and speed and stepping on whoever was in the way… it’s losing ground.
What she’s seeing now, especially at the mid-size company level with women founders and CEOs: leaders who want to care for their employees differently. Who want to bring their whole selves to work. Who are finding a new way, something between the hard-driving old model and an overcorrection into avoidance of any difficult conversation.
Serin helps women find that middle ground. The place where you can lead with heart and still put someone on a PIP when the business needs it. Where wholeness and accountability coexist.
AI, Ideas, and the Coming Era of Heart
I asked Serin about AI because I knew she’d have a take, and she did.
She’s not afraid of it. She never has been. Her perspective: the machine will outperform us on execution and efficiency. That’s fine. That frees us up to do the thing humans actually do best, which is think, connect, create, and lead.
“About 15 years ago, it came to me intuitively: the future is going to be about ideas. Ideas are going to be the capital.”
She thinks handmade things, art, human-to-human connection, all of it is about to go up in value significantly. Not down. And for women leaders especially, who have spent years being told to leave their emotional intelligence and intuition at the door, this is an opening. The things we were asked to suppress are the exact things the next era of work is going to need most.
Stand at Your Full Height
This is the line I knew immediately I was going to carry out of this conversation.
Serin said it to a client. She says it often. And when I heard it, something in me recognized it instantly, because I spent years making myself smaller, literally, physically hunching my shoulders as a girl who developed early and didn’t want to be noticed, and then metaphorically, for a long time after that.
“Stop contorting yourself into all these little shapes to fit. Part of your energy, part of your power, part of your genius is getting left behind because you’re busy trying to guess what shape you need to fit for the day.”
The kaleidoscope analogy she shared is the other one I’m still thinking about. She sees each of her clients as a different color, a different piece, and her job is just to shift the lens so the pattern can come through. Not to make them into something. To reveal what’s already there.
What if that was the whole point? What if you didn’t have to move heaven and earth all the time? What if you were already good enough as you are?
Find Serin
You can find Serin and learn more about her work at serinsilva.com. She offers a free 15-minute business reading where she uses both her intuitive gifts and her traditional business expertise to give you a quick, honest assessment of what’s happening and what’s possible.
And if this episode resonated, share it with a woman in business who’s been holding herself a little smaller than she needs to be.
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