Well•come, kin. Pause, and take a deep, calming breath with me. In... and out... As you breathe, remind yourself of your innate wisdom and wholeness. With each breath—be here. Fully present, as we embark on this journey together.
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LaShaun
Here to help you feel good & function well in the most meaningful areas of your life. Because being stressed, striving and stuck in survival mode was never the goal.
#whensciencefeelslikemagic
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28 went.
Twenty-eight human beings strapped themselves into a metal capsule pointed at the moon and went. They left the atmosphere. They left everything familiar: gravity, ground, the smell of spring gardenias, the sound of rain on a window. They orbited. They witnessed. They floated in the dark halo of something so enormous.
And 12 of them walked on it.
(a moment of silence, please.)
For the ones who didn't make it to the surface. And for the ones who did, and the specific, terrifying fact that they only did because someone, somewhere, in an ordinary room on an ordinary day, had a thought.
A thought they didn't dismiss.
Before the missions. Before the math and the metal and the engineers arguing over tolerances at 2am. Before hidden figures. Before the funerals and the press conferences and the footage that made the whole planet hold its breath...
Before.
Before.
Before the Artemis astronauts could crew to the moon. There was a thought in held in mind.
We could go there.
A flicker of imagination that somebody (some specific, nervous, brilliant, possibly underpaid somebody) refused to extinguish.
Thoughts become matter. Thoughts turn into form. Thoughts, tended carefully, become the thing that makes your grandchildren say: someone actually did that.
You have a dream, or an ideal, or a rebellion quietly building against the life you're currently living, Reader.
Surely.
Maybe it's been living in you so long: just there. Maybe you've named it seventeen different things trying to find the word that finally makes it feel real. Maybe you've opened a document and closed it. Maybe you've told one person, measured their reaction, and decided to wait.
But.
There are names for the shape of what you're carrying:
MOONSHOT. A monumental, 10x reach past the incrementally possible — not 10% better, but ten times braver.
Maybe you do't have a name for it but its an ancient itch toward more than this that feels closer to rightness. The sense that there is a shape your life is trying to become.
The one you told yourself was too big. The one you intellectualized into a someday. The one that hums, faintly, behind everything else you're doing.
Here is what the research says about that thought you keep having￬
On the brain and the big vision:
When you imagine a desired future — not vaguely, but with sensory specificity, with felt detail, with the texture of it — your brain activates its default mode network (DMN) in ways that are functionally indistinguishable from memory. You are, in the most literal sense, rehearsing reality. The prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus collaborate on what researchers call "episodic future thinking" — constructing scenes that haven't happened yet as if they have, laying down grooves that orient your behavior toward them whether you consciously try to or not.
A 2022 study published in Nature Human Behaviour found that people who engaged in detailed, emotionally vivid mental simulation of future goals showed stronger functional connectivity between the DMN and the executive control network — meaning the dreaming brain and the doing brain were actually talking to each other more fluidly. (PMID: 35449407)
The vision is not separate from the work. The vision is early-stage work.
On why your brain resists the big thing:
The threat-detection system in your amygdala cannot distinguish between a lion and a life-changing idea. Both register as exposure. Both trigger the orienting response — the quick scan for danger, the pull toward the familiar. This is not weakness. This is the architecture of a brain that kept your ancestors alive long enough to have you.
But your ancestors didn't need to launch a business, write the book, build the thing, declare the vision out loud in a room full of people who might say no.
You do.
Research in positive psychology consistently shows that what buffers the amygdala's hijack — what allows the prefrontal cortex to stay online in the presence of ambiguity — is something called psychological safety as an internal state: the felt sense that you can survive the attempt. Not the outcome. The attempt. (Edmondson & Bransby, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology, 2023. PMID: 36948574)
You don't have to be certain you'll walk on the moon. You have to be certain you can survive the leaving.
On the neuroscience of naming:
Language is structure. When you name your vision: BHAG, LEAP, moonshot, magnum opus, whatever your word ism you activate the left inferior frontal gyrus, the region responsible for meaning-making and narrative coherence. Naming quiets the amygdala. Naming recruits the network.
A 2023 paper in Psychological Science found that articulating a goal in specific, identity-consistent language (not "I want to do X" but "I am someone who does X") increased goal-pursuit persistence by a statistically significant margin, even when controlling for initial motivation levels. (PMID: 37249003)
I am someone who _____________________________. Fill in that blank. Write it somewhere you'll see it before you look at your phone in the morning.
On nourishing the moonshot mindset. the conditions:
You don't force a moonshot into being. You tend it.
Every living thing (every audacious, terrifying, privately held vision) needs specific conditions to survive.
Conditions.
The way a seedling needs particular soil, particular light, a particular quality of attention before it will consent to grow.
Psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci spent decades asking what those conditions actually are. Not what people think motivates them. What the evidence, across thousands of studies and dozens of cultures, shows actually sustains human beings in the direction of something that matters to them. Three things emerged. Reliably. Consistently. Every time. (Ryan & Deci, Psychological Inquiry, 2000; meta-analytic support: Ng et al., Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2012.)
They called them basic psychological needs. whole + well calls them the three conditions your moonshot cannot survive without.
the first condition: autonomy
Is this goal genuinely yours?
Not your mother's version of your best life. Not the ambition you inherited from a mentor you admired so much you forgot to check if it fit. Not the goal that sounds impressive in a room full of people whose approval you're still, quietly, trying to earn.
Yours.
The one that embarrasses you a little with its specificity, its strangeness, its refusal to be sensible.
Research is unambiguous here: goals pursued for autonomous reasons because they align with who you actually are, not because of external pressure or internal guilt, produce dramatically better outcomes. More persistence. More creativity. More wellbeing during the pursuit, not just at the finish line. Conditions supporting the individual's experience of autonomy are argued to foster the most volitional and high quality forms of motivation and engagement, including enhanced performance, persistence, and creativity.
The moonshot that belongs to someone else will exhaust you. The one that belongs to you will, on the hardest days, somehow still pull.
Check this condition honestly. Then check it again in six months.
the second condition: competence
Do you believe the attempt is survivable?
Not that you'll succeed. Not that it will be easy or clean or anything like the version you imagined. But that you can survive the trying. That the risk of failure will not finish you.
This is subtler than confidence. Confidence is about certainty of outcome. Competence — as Ryan and Deci mean it — is about the felt sense that you have what it takes to engage, to learn, to recover, to keep moving through the inevitable humiliation of being a beginner at something enormous.
If this condition is starved, the brain's threat-detection machinery takes over. The amygdala, ever vigilant, reads the big vision as danger and routes your energy into vigilance instead of creation. Survival mode is not neutral, it taxes imagination, starves aliveness, and quietly reroutes everything meant for the moonshot into managing fear.
Feed this condition deliberately. Do the small version of the thing. Finish something adjacent. Let your nervous system learn, through accumulating evidence, that you are someone who attempts and recovers. Someone who begins.
the third condition: relatedness
Does someone else know?
Not everyone. Not the whole internet. One person, maybe two (where one or two gather + agree) who holds the vision with you. Who asks about it. Who will notice if you go quiet about it for too long.
This is the condition people most often skip, for understandable reasons. Declaring the moonshot feels like exposure. And exposure without the right witness can be genuinely harmful, the wrong audience at the wrong moment can extinguish something still fragile.
But relatedness: felt connection to even one person who takes your vision seriously is not optional equipment. It is, the research argues, as fundamental to sustained motivation as food is to sustained energy. Self-determination theory maintains that an understanding of human motivation requires a consideration of innate psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. All three. Not two out of three.
Find your witness. The person who doesn't need you to be further along than you are. Who can hold the earliest, most unformed version of the thing without fixing it, dismissing it, or accidentally making it about themselves.
Tell them.
The practice:
Sit somewhere quiet. Give yourself twelve minutes.
Three questions. .
Is this goal genuinely mine or am I still performing someone else's version of my best life?
Do I believe the attempt is survivable (not the outcome, just the trying)?
Does someone else know: one person, the right person, who can hold this in agreement with me?
Write what comes. In whatever mode your nervous system uses to imagine. See it, feel it, narrate it, map it, know it. Your way.
Then go find your witness. Tell them.
That's it. That's the beginning of a moonshot.
A thought, declared. A condition, tended. A vision, witnessed.
Thoughts held in mind produces after its kind.
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p.s. Someone held the vision of the moon, and the 28/12 moonshot changed everything. What happens when you stop extinguishing yours Reader?