PERSONAL SIGNAL
I am in my second year of coaching with a woman named Elizabeth. The investment has been real: in money, in time, and in the willingness to show up without knowing the answers.
That is what this requires. Showing up every other week to a 90-minute workshop where the subject is me. Virtual, in person, at mastermind retreats where the room is full of high performers and the only agenda is truth. There is no way to stay comfortable in it. That is exactly the point.
I remember arriving at a retreat on day two and standing up in front of the room to say something I had never said out loud before. I told them I had realized the night before that I was falling in love with myself. The room went quiet the way rooms do when something true has just landed. That moment lives in me. I return to it often.
What has come from showing up that way? The answers I am most proud of did not come from a boardroom or a spreadsheet. They came through during relaxation. One of them arrived in a session and has grown into something I believe could change an entire industry.
I run a multi-million dollar last-mile delivery company called Santosa Delivery. Workers' compensation claims and insurance costs are crushing logistics organizations across the country. I believe that a structured relaxation and intention-setting practice, delivered to drivers in two focused minutes, can reduce injury, improve decision (making, and change the trajectory of a person's day) and over time, their life. So I am building a program to prove it. Scientific methodology. Control groups. R&D tax credits funding the research. The kind of evidence base that lets this work stand in a boardroom, in an insurance conversation, in a courtroom if it ever needs to. If it works, and I know it will, this becomes a company of its own. A third integration of everything I know and everything I am.
That idea did not come to me at a strategy session. It came to me in stillness, under Elizabeth's tutelage, in a moment when I was finally quiet enough to hear it.
There is more of my story woven into what I am building here. I will share it in pieces, in the weeks ahead, the way signal always arrives. Not all at once. Exactly when you are ready to receive it.
What would open in you if you stopped needing to have the answer before you walked into the room?
THE NEXT LAYER
I hope you tried it last week. Whether it was the magnesium bath, the phone outside the bedroom, or stating your mantra three times before sleep, something shifted. That is the whole point. One true thing, done consistently, changes the texture of everything around it.
This week I am adding the next layer. Keep the one you chose. Now add this one:
Dim every light in your home thirty minutes before you want to sleep. Overhead lights off. Lamps at their lowest. Every screen dimmed or closed. Your brain reads light as a signal, the most primal one it knows, and when the light drops, your melatonin rises and your nervous system begins its real recovery work. This single change, layered on top of what you chose last week, is when the compounding begins.
Next week: the layer that most people skip entirely, and the one the research says matters most.
FOUNDER FIELD NOTES
You know Emily Weiss as the woman who turned a beauty blog into Glossier, a brand people tattooed on their arms and lined up around the block to enter. The part of her story that matters to Signal Edge readers is what happened after the hyper-growth years.
She stepped out of the CEO chair while the music was still playing. She moved into an executive chair role, had a child, and quietly reset the company around profitable stores and product discipline rather than the next funding headline. Most people called it a retreat. She understood it as a sharper operating principle. She noticed that the loudest version of success was producing diminishing returns for both the business and her life, and she made an edit.
She now operates more like a product editor than a show-runner, making fewer and cleaner bets that leave room for the rest of a life. The signal in her story is one I think about often. The moment you stop chasing the scoreboard and start picking the game you actually want to play is the moment your real edge begins.
HEALTH SIGNAL
This one surprised me and I wanted to share it immediately.
Antibacterial mouthwash kills the bacteria your body uses to produce nitric oxide, a molecule that relaxes blood vessels and keeps blood pressure in a healthy range. Several studies now show that regular use of antibacterial mouthwash can nudge blood pressure upward, which is the opposite of what most people expect from a "fresh" routine. The oral microbiome is shifting from a dental footnote to a cardiovascular conversation, and the research is moving fast.
If you use antibacterial mouthwash daily, this is worth researching for yourself. Nathan Bryan is the nitric oxide researcher worth following for the science. Berkeley Life makes consumer tools that make nitric oxide measurable at home. The American Heart Association has covered the mouthwash and blood pressure connection if you want to read the research directly. This is the kind of signal that takes five minutes to investigate and might change something you do every morning for the rest of your life.
This is not medical advice. Talk to your doctor before changing any health routine.
THE SIGNAL STACK
This week I want to go deeper on one I mentioned briefly in Issue No. 1: Stelo by Dexcom.
Stelo is a brand new over-the-counter continuous glucose monitor, no prescription needed, at $55 a month. What makes it a Signal Edge pick is not the device itself but what it just became. Stelo has partnered with Oura Ring so that your metabolic data and your sleep data now speak to each other inside a single app. You stop looking at two separate dashboards and start seeing one story: how what you eat shapes how you sleep, and how how you sleep shapes every decision the following day. When your body is regulated, your signal gets clearer. That is the whole reason this belongs here.
The nervous system category continues to expand. Pulsetto remains one of the cleaner entry points: a vagus nerve stimulator delivering four-minute sessions that measurably reduce stress and improve heart rate variability — the subtle variation between each heartbeat that tells you, more honestly than you can tell yourself, whether your nervous system is recovered and ready or still running on fumes. When your HRV is high, you are open. You receive more. You hear the signals that get drowned out when you are depleted. Simple. Targeted. Worth knowing about as this category matures.
PASSIVE INCOME PULSE
Four mornings this week, take a brisk 30-minute walk at a pace where you can hold a full conversation and breathe comfortably through your nose. That is it. That is the whole prescription.
This easy aerobic zone, what exercise scientists call Zone 2, builds mitochondria, steadies blood sugar, and lowers cortisol in ways that pay out for the rest of the day. Your sleep deepens. Your thinking sharpens. Your decisions become less reactive. I do this after my runs some mornings and with Mr. Douglas on others, and the return on those thirty minutes is the most reliable investment I make all week.
It is the most boring, consistent return on energy I know. Boring is underrated. Boring compounds.
A SIGNAL FOR THE WOMEN WHO BUILT
This pairs directly with what I shared last week about Required Minimum Distributions. For those of you still in the building years, here is the signal worth carrying now.
There is a sweet spot between when you stop full-time work and when RMDs and Social Security begin. In that window, each year, you can convert a slice of your traditional IRA into a Roth IRA up to the top of your tax bracket, paying the taxes from cash rather than from the account itself. It lowers your future forced withdrawals, shrinks your lifetime tax bill, and builds a pool of tax-free capital you can draw from when markets are down without triggering additional taxes. The window is real, it is finite, and most people do not know it exists until it has already closed.
If the women in your life are approaching 73, forward this to them. If you are still building, put this on your calendar for a conversation with your financial advisor this year.
Please work with a qualified financial advisor on the specifics of your own situation.
ONE MORE THING
Signal Edge is two issues old and something is already happening. Founding member spots are filling. If you have been meaning to share this with someone, this is the week. Forward it to one woman whose life would exhale reading it.
Stay curious. Stay in charge.
Holly
Everything in Signal Edge reflects my own research, curiosity, and lived experience. I am not a licensed financial planner, certified tax advisor, registered investment advisor, or medical professional. Nothing here constitutes financial, investment, tax, legal, or medical advice. It is personal opinion, shared openly and honestly from one thinking person to another. Please consult qualified professionals before making decisions about your money, health, or property.
© Holly Culbreth / Signal Edge. All rights reserved.