Titan Pulse
Kerry Speyers has a way of saying complicated things simply.
Ninety minutes into our first backyard interview together, she’d already handed me four lines I haven’t stopped thinking about since:
Emotions are information, not weakness.
Your body keeps score even when your mind won’t.
Ninety seconds tells you if something’s real.
The worst of times become the best of times.
This week, we decode what those four lines actually mean for a body already carrying enough.
This Friday, Sessions From the Edge airs a first for me locally: recorded on a guest’s own back deck rather than in the usual setup, with emotional intelligence coach Kerri Speyers joining me overlooking the Brisbane River.
It’s a conversation over twenty years in the making, tracing back to a primary school pickup line.
Across the week we’ll unpack what Kerri shared about the nervous system, the four trauma responses, and what it actually takes to move from survival to something more.
Free subscribers get this week’s Cipherline and Notes; paid subscribers get the full ReadersKey breakdown of the research behind it.
Session Review
I’ve done a lot of interviews for Sessions from the Edge, but never one in someone’s own backyard until this one.
Kerri Spears and I go back to a primary school pickup line, decades before either of us knew we’d end up here, on her back deck by the river, talking about the thing that quietly runs the whole show: emotional intelligence.
What struck me afterward wasn’t any single technique Kerry shared. It was how much of what she said could be boiled down to a handful of plain lines, the kind you could scribble on the back of a hospital appointment card and actually remember later. Four of them, in particular, are worth decoding properly.
“Emotions are information.”
Kerri said this almost in passing, but it undoes a lifetime of being told to just get over it, toughen up, stay positive. If we don’t understand our emotions, she said, we can’t make informed decisions off the back of them. An emotion isn’t a flaw in the system, it’s the system telling you something. Anger, for Kerri, usually means a boundary got crossed.
Guilt, when it’s internal rather than someone else’s manipulation, is often a nudge to do better next time. None of that is noise. It’s data your body is handing you for free.
“Your body keeps score even when your mind won’t.”
A few days before we sat down, something had triggered an old wound of Kerri’s, rejection, and her heart rate spiked to 102 almost instantly.
She recognised it, named it, and used box breathing: four counts in, four hold, four out, four hold. Ten breaths later her heart rate was back down to 76. That’s not a wellness anecdote, it’s a body doing exactly what nervous systems do when they read a moment as danger, whether the danger is a sabre-toothed tiger or a comment that lands wrong in a meeting.
I recognised a version of my own pattern in it too, the one where I don’t get angry at people, I just internalise it, for years, in leadership roles, until my heart told me the bill had come due.
“Ninety seconds tells you if something’s real.”
This is the line I keep coming back to. Kerry says most emotions run their course in about ninety seconds on their own. If something is still firing after that, there’s a thought underneath it worth looking at, not just the feeling itself, but the story your mind has built around it.
That’s the difference between an emotion passing through you and an emotion setting up residence in you, sometimes for twenty, thirty, forty years, quietly colouring every reaction that comes after it.
“The worst of times become the best of times.”
Kerri didn’t say this to be glib. It came up when we talked about caregivers, about the people absorbing everyone else’s emotional weather while rarely being asked how they’re holding up themselves, and about what she called compassion fatigue.
It’s a hard line to hear in the middle of a diagnosis. It’s also, she’s found, one of the truest things she knows.
None of these four lines fix anything on their own.
That’s not what decoding is for. Decoding is just the first honest look, naming what’s actually happening in your body and your relationships before you try to manage any of it.
This week we’ll spend real time on what comes after that look: the tools Kerri uses with her own clients, what a healthy boundary actually sounds like, and how a caregiver protects their own nervous system while they’re protecting someone else’s.
Deeper Dive
If any one of these four lines landed for you, Wednesday’s ReadersKey goes deeper: the research behind the vagus nerve, why unprocessed emotion shows up as physical symptoms years later, and a practical walkthrough of the tools Kerri uses with her own clients, including the one she used on herself mid-interview. If you’re a Firestarter, there’s a companion angle worth your time too how emotional regulation shapes the way your clients receive care. Join us inside to see the full picture.
Fama’s Sidebar
I loved this one, because Kerri didn’t just tell us what emotional intelligence is, she handed it to us in lines short enough to actually remember on a hard day.
Here’s my own line to add to hers: you don’t have to decode your whole life today.
You just have to notice one thing that’s true right now.
That’s it.
That’s decoding.
Key Insight
The four lines Kerri gave us aren’t a finished philosophy, they’re a starting point. Decoding means naming what’s real before you try to fix or align anything.
Reflection Prompt
If you had to sum up what your body’s been trying to tell you lately in one line, what would it say?