“Healing Is a Daily Choice” — And So Is Inclusion

What Dr. Nicole LePera’s book 'How to Do the Work'  Taught Me About Changing Systems, One Brain at a Time

Some books give you information. And then there are books that give you language for what your nervous system already knew.

Dr. Nicole LePera’s How to Do the Work is one of those books.

It isn’t your typical self-help read. It’s part psychological manual, part healing manifesto, and part unapologetic wake-up call to stop outsourcing your transformation. It blends clinical psychology with somatic awareness, neuroscience, epigenetics, attachment theory, and trauma-informed practice, all in a way that makes deep healing doable, not just desirable.

But here’s the bit that made me sit up straight (and scribble in the margins):

"You cannot create a new reality while operating from old patterns."

That, my friends, is also the entire point of BARDO’s Neuro-Inclusive Maturity Model (NIMM).

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From Inner Healing to Institutional Change

At first glance, LePera’s work may seem purely personal. Childhood wounds, nervous system regulation, reparenting, boundaries, the usual therapy bingo.

But here’s the thing: organisational culture is nothing more than a collective nervous system.

If individuals are operating from survival mode, looping in threat responses, control patterns, or shame, so are our teams, our policies, and our boardroom dynamics.

BARDO’s NIMM exists to bring that same healing insight to systems.

Where How to Do the Work helps you recognise your conditioning, NIMM helps leaders, teams, and institutions recognise their behavioural conditioning, the unconscious patterns that reinforce inequity, exclusion, and performative change.

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How Dr. LePera’s Work Aligns with NIMM’s Neuroscience Principles

LePera’s Healing Work	NIMM’s Organisational Application
Recognise your childhood conditioning	Recognise your organisational bias loops and “cultural autopilot”
Regulate your nervous system to shift patterns	Build psychological safety to reduce threat responses in teams
Rewrite your story with daily practice	Rewire culture through repeated nudges, rituals, and reflection
Awareness isn’t enough; habits must change	Awareness ≠ rewiring. Real inclusion is behavioural.
Healing isn’t linear, and neither is growth	NIMM scaffolds change across the Delta, Alpha, and Gamma stages

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Where NIMM Expands the Conversation

What I love about How to Do the Work is how it honours the complexity of the human brain — not just cognitively, but emotionally, physiologically, and relationally. It invites us to see that the stories we tell ourselves aren’t always true; they’re often survival scripts.

NIMM takes that same insight and scales it up.

🔹 What if your workplace isn’t resistant, it’s dysregulated?

🔹 What if exclusion isn’t malice, it’s autopilot and nervous system blind spots?

🔹 What if policies keep failing because the people they depend on haven’t felt safe enough to change?

NIMM says: let’s stop pushing inclusion through logic, guilt, or policy alone. Let’s build it the way the brain works.

With safety. With habit. With space for messy, beautiful rewiring.

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Healing and Inclusion Are Both Rewiring Projects

There’s a gorgeous honesty in LePera’s book; she never pretends the work is easy. She just makes it possible.

That’s exactly what NIMM is here to do, too.

Not to guilt organisations into action.

Not to shame individuals for bias.

But to say:

“You’re not broken. Your brain is doing what it was wired to do. And now, we get to choose what to rewire.”

Healing and inclusion aren’t different projects.

They are the same biological, emotional, and relational rewiring, just playing out on different scales.

So, whether you're building better boundaries or rewriting your boardroom culture:

The work works when we work with the brain, not against it.

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TL;DR

Read How to Do the Work if you want to understand yourself.

Use NIMM if you want to understand (and transform) your team, your culture, and your collective impact.

Both are about wholeness.

Both are about healing.

And both start with this question:

What if the thing we need to change… is how we’re wired to change?

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