The RISE Experience
It’s not always about becoming someone different.
Sometimes it’s about realizing you’ve been disconnected from yourself for longer than you thought.
The RISE Experience is a podcast for the woman who can handle everything — except herself. The one who shows up, gets things done, keeps things together… but quietly feels like something isn’t landing the way it should.
Shannon Denniston is a behavior change coach and the founder of RISE. What she talks about here isn’t behavior on the surface. It’s what sits underneath it — patterns, beliefs, and identity-level disconnects that make consistency feel harder than it should.
A lot of what gets called “starting over” isn’t starting over at all. It’s noticing what’s been running in the background for a long time, and learning how to move differently from there.
Not forced. Not rushed. No reinvention, no reset, just more aware, more honest with where things actually are, and returning to yourself in a way that holds.
The RISE Experience
When Control Starts Costing Your Authenticity.
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If you’ve been managing every word, every reaction, every part of you just to keep things “okay,” there’s a good chance control is costing you more than you realize. We’re getting honest about what happens when that managing starts to shrink who you are and your authenticity quietly disappears.
Episode Summary
There comes a point where control stops feeling like something you reach for and starts to feel like the only way you know how to be. In this conversation, I’m talking to the woman whose laugh has gone quiet, who rehearses before she speaks, who can feel the gap between who she really is and the version she keeps performing for everyone else. Together, we name the subtle, exhausting ways control chips away at spontaneity, connection, joy, and, over time, your sense of self.
Through the lens of Galatians 5 and the language of nervous system and lived experience, we look at the environments, relationships, and roles that ask you to be smaller than you were created to be. If you’ve been wondering where you’ve made yourself small to fit, and whether it’s actually working for you, this is a gentle but clear invitation to start paying attention to what’s happening to your freedom and your authenticity.
Key Takeaways
You’ll learn:
- Control is a coping strategy your nervous system uses to keep you safe, not evidence that something is wrong with you.
- Staying in control mode for too long turns managing yourself into an identity instead of a tool.
- Constantly filtering your words, reactions, and feelings slowly erodes spontaneity, connection, and everyday joy.
- You can be surrounded by people and still feel alone when they only know the managed version of you.
- Hyper-vigilance and low-level monitoring keep your nervous system running high until it feels “normal.”
- Those small, clear moments when you felt fully like yourself are proof that the truest version of you is still there.
- Galatians 5 points to freedom as part of how you were designed to live, not a luxury for when life calms down.
- Any environment that requires you to shrink who you are is asking for something that is not actually yours to give.
Episode Chapters
01:15 When control stops being a strategy and starts feeling like who you are
02:40 The slow shrinking: managing every word, reaction, and feeling
04:59 What control costs: spontaneity, connection, and everyday joy
07:20 The growing distance between your real self and your performed self
09:44 Using moments you felt fully like you as data that she’s still there
11:10 Honest questions about where you’ve been making yourself smaller
13:05 Galatians 5 and what real freedom feels like in your body and life
14:36 Prayer for courage to see clearly and come back to who God created you to be
Memorable Quotes
“When the coping strategy stops being something you do and starts being who you are, that’s when you start to lose yourself inside of it.”
“You can be surrounded by people and still feel completely alone, because they know the managed version of you — not you.”
“The drift away from the woman you actually are into a woman the environment is asking you to be is the real cost of control.”
“That moment where you felt fully like her is data. It’s proof she still exists. She’s always existed. She’s just been buried under a lot of management.”
“No relationship, no job, no environment, no version of keeping peace is worth that. Not one.”
Resources Mentioned
Galatians 5:1 – “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”
About the Podcast
Welcome to The RISE Experience — a podcast for women who are finding their way back to themselves. This is a space to slow down when everything feels loud, to lead from steadiness instead of urgency, and to finally hear yourself think again. Here we talk about identity, faith, and the quiet inner wisdom that gets buried under all the doing. A place to pause, reflect, and rise from clarity instead of pressure.
Listen & Subscribe
Follow The Rise Experience and share this with one friend who’s been beating herself up for the thing she reaches for when life gets loud.
Your next step: https://msha.ke/risewithshannon
Read the blog: https://www.risewithshannon.blog/
Come hang out:
FB: Shannon Bell Denniston
IG: @risewithshannon