164: The Good Listening To Show with Chris Grimes - Episode 164

164: The Good Listening To Show with Chris Grimes - Episode 164

What can we learn from those who have battled addiction? Here, the spotlight turns to personal reinvention, inner "alchemy", and the courage to step back into the light after years of keeping your head down. The Good Listening To Show with host Chris Grimes takes a storytelling-first approach: fewer fancy frameworks, more real-life tales.

In this founder-story edition, leadership coach Rachel Shelmuddin shares how her work, Alchemy Inside, grew out of a lifetime of upheaval, resilience and curiosity about what truly lives inside people. Rachel talks about once being highly visible in the design sector, working with major global agencies, and then choosing a quieter life while homeschooling her son and living between olive groves and Italian islands.

Now, she’s ready “to just get a bit more attention perhaps for the work that I do,” and to reconnect with the industry she loves. Her coaching philosophy will strike a chord if you’re rethinking your relationship with old identities, including those tied to alcohol, work or success.

She explains that her first company was called 2bu because she wanted the focus to be on the client: “I believe that everybody, everybody has the potential to be exactly what they want to be, to be happy, to be successful. On their terms.” Alchemy Inside builds on this belief that there is “magic and you can transform yourself,” moving from mere survival to feeling connected and having real agency.

Amid talk of Venice sunsets, Laurel and Hardy reruns, and a gloriously rebellious Irish mother, the conversation stays rooted in one key message: your story is allowed to change, and so are you. If you’re working on life after addiction, or any big reset, this gentle but honest chat might give you fresh language for your own next chapter. What kind of alchemy might be possible if you stopped hiding and treated your life as a story still being written?