We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kalen Olson a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kalen, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s kick things off with a hypothetical question – if it were up to you, what would you change about the school or education system to better prepare students for a more fulfilling life and career?

While the education system teaches essential skills like reading, writing, and mathematics, nurturing a student’s innate gifts can be one of the greatest contributions to learning itself.

Helping people connect with and live from their natural talents is something I’m passionate about—something I first discovered while teaching in the classroom.

Too often, we separate students from their gifts, both in school and at home. The artist sketching in the margins of their notebook, the budding geologist digging in the backyard—these are powerful curiosities, ways of engaging with the world that deserve to be encouraged, not overlooked.

In large classrooms, it’s easy to rely on repetition and textbooks as the primary means of instruction. But the creativity needed in today’s world isn’t always found in a book; it emerges when students’ unique abilities are recognized and nurtured.

As a new teacher, I relished the chance to set the books aside, even briefly, to sing, engage, and interact. I reflected on my own experiences in the early 2000s Spanish classrooms, expecting similar enthusiasm as a new teacher. But to my surprise, students weren’t eager to sing, dance, or take notes.

After reflecting, I realized we’re in a different era. With so much information accessible at the tap of a screen, the teacher is no longer the sole authority or gateway to knowledge. The students are.

As times shift, I’ve come to see that education should move away from a top-down approach and toward something more collaborative—something I also explore with my own clients. The answers aren’t just handed down; they already exist within us, waiting to be uncovered.

Many matriarchal societies rely on gathering in circles, co-creating a shared vision of life. I believe students, too, should be included in shaping their own learning experience.

When I shifted and began starting each day in a circle with my students, inviting students to decide how they wanted to learn, everything changed. Some wanted to design maps and label them with Spanish words. Others took to the whiteboard to create comic strips. Some wrote and performed their own plays. I radically accepted no student learns the same. It was terrifying to let go of control, but even more liberating to see a joint vision of learning painted so vividly.

There’s a fear in education that if teachers relinquish control, chaos will ensue. But in my experience, the opposite happens. When students are given the freedom to navigate their own learning—guided by their innate gifts—they develop a stronger sense of direction, engagement, and purpose.

As a result, the students’ grades improved, along with higher cooperation, collaboration, and autonomy in the classroom.

Each of us carries gifts within, waiting to be encouraged and expressed.

The times we are in call for these gifts—not just in children, but in all of us—to emerge.

When we tap into the gifts lying dormant (perhaps for a long time), we are also given the opportunity to build a more fulfilling life and career.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

In 2012 I discovered I started realizing it felt like I didn’t know which direction to pursue in order to feel successful. I didn’t know how to listen to my own inner knowing – it had been shut down. After discovering meditation and guided visualization techniques rooted in ancient wisdom, I started living a life of my heart’s desires and really trust myself and my choices.

For the last seven years I have been guiding mainly women on how to listen to their own inner wisdom in order to live a life that lights them up. We can feel pulled in a million directions and can be out of touch with our own gifts that are not only a gift for us but those around us. It is truly meaningful for me to show others how they can unlock their own heart’s desires and see them manifest. I dream of a world where everyone is radically expressed in their own joy, power, and presence.

Have you ever had to pivot?

There’s a well-known graphic that illustrates how building a business isn’t a straight line pointing upward but rather a tangled, squiggly path that seems chaotic—until it eventually trends upward.

The mind, however, tries to convince us that life should be a straight, upward-moving line. Yet, I have yet to meet anyone whose journey looks like that.

So, which one is lying—the mind or life itself?

If life were lying, that would be a pretty cruel joke played on every person on earth.

But if the mind is deceiving us—misinterpreting the present moment as a verdict on our success and goals—then we have a much kinder, more accurate representation of both our individual and collective lives.

Life, like each moment within it, is cyclical.

The seasons.
Time.
All of it.

When we nurture our relationship with cycles, we allow the wisdom of life to seep into our consciousness.

This perspective builds resilience and makes space for our heart’s desires to crystallize.

As you can probably guess, my own business journey has not been a straight line.

Why would it be?

Where’s the fun in that?

I am unaware of the lessons I need to learn.

But life isn’t.

I made a conscious decision—I didn’t want to learn business through an MBA program. Instead, I wanted to learn how to run a business through the “business” of life itself.

So, when I decided to take a sales job, I learned how to do sales in my own business. My teaching job helped me know how to coach people in an authentic manner. So, I “pivoted” a lot. But when you step back and look, it’s actually a beautiful constellation that leads to something bigger. If we stick with it, I believe this same constellation is true about everyone’s lives.

Everything can be a teacher—if we know how to look.

Or, we can create a story that devalues our experiences and ourselves.

The mind often tries to do just that, give a disempowering story. But when we listen to our inner wisdom, our heart, a more empowering story emerges.

And suddenly, instead of resisting when life asks us to pivot, we learn to embrace the ride.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

This is a funny question because I feel like I’m always unlearning.

When I think I have something completely figured out, life throws a paradox my way.

Lately, I am unpacking the difference between women’s spirituality and men’s spirituality.

My experience with dismantling the ego was to be softer, kinder, etc.

However, what I am uncovering is that most of the time, women actually need to take up more space from a spiritual lens and self-realization.

Do women need to be softer at times? Absolutely!

However there are some subtleties here that I think are important to note.

For example, sometimes in puberty women are told to be quiet or just listen to authority. Women are easier to manipulate in this way. And so the journey for a woman can be to actually take up more space, share their opinion, that sort of a thing.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.kalenolson.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kalenolson/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@KalenOlson