Voices of Courage with Ken D Foster Life Purpose, Intuition, and the New Hollywood with Brianna Brown Keen Ken D Foster sits down with actress, producer and philanthropist Brianna Brown Keen, founder of The New Hollywood and Manifesting Your Mission, for a wide-ranging conversation on finding life purpose, trusting intuition, facing fear, and healing the body and mind. A Show Built Around Life Purpose Ken D Foster opens the Voices of Courage broadcast the way he often does, asking listeners to consider what might still be missing even after they reach a hard-won goal. He tells his audience that the answer, for many people, is a clear sense of life purpose, and that fear is usually the force keeping that purpose from surfacing. Foster explains that without a defined mission, a person tends to end up living everyone else's agenda instead of their own. He then welcomes his guest, actress, producer, entrepreneur and philanthropist Brianna Brown Keen, introducing the episode under the title The New Hollywood: Changing Lives With Purpose. Keen immediately connects the title to her own nonprofit, The New Hollywood, which she founded more than twenty years earlier, and the two agree the alignment was unplanned. From the first minutes, the conversation is framed less as a Hollywood career story than as a discussion of mission, intuition and service, setting up everything that follows. From Minnesota Suburbs to Screen Credits Keen describes growing up in the suburbs of Minnesota with no family history in the arts, moving to Los Angeles at nineteen after landing representation, and being told by her parents to sink or swim. She says she never chased fame for its own sake and would have taken a more strategic route if she had, and that acting drew her instead through a love of character and psychology. Over more than 350 film and television credits, she found the work increasingly self-focused compared to theater, which pushed her toward community with other artists who wanted more than a solo spotlight. That search produced The New Hollywood, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its sister project Manifesting Your Mission, which now includes a coaching practice, a guidebook, a podcast and retreats. Keen tells Foster the organization's current focus is the TNH Accountability Program, which pairs formerly homeless single mothers with schooling grants and mentorship, turning what she calls gifts and hard circumstances into something constructive for others. Journaling, Intuition and Slowing Down Foster and Keen turn to how purpose is actually located day to day. Keen calls herself faith-based in a non-religious sense, describing a still small voice she has learned to trust, and credits her Reiki Master training with sharpening that intuition. She explains the structure of her Manifesting Your Mission guidebook, which walks readers through annual goal-setting, quarterly check-ins on what worked and what did not, and journaling exercises for moving through emotional triggers. Foster shares his own experience nearly passing over Keen's publicity materials before an instinct pulled him back to read them closely, calling it a live example of the intuition they are discussing. He tells listeners he has preached slow down to succeed for years, citing Paramahansa Yogananda's line that stillness is the price of greatness and Leonardo da Vinci's remark that isolation is the price of greatness. Keen agrees that consistency, not motivation, is what most people actually lack once they identify what they want. Facing Stage Fright and Naming Fear The conversation shifts to courage, which Foster defines as an energy that only appears once someone steps into the unknown. Keen answers with her own history of severe stage fright as a middle schooler, so crippling she could not finish a line and was cut from a school play cast as a tree; bullying around age thirteen or fourteen later pushed her back toward performing, and she says the anxiety persisted into her twenties even as a working actress. She frames overcoming it as simply getting repetitions and doing the thing despite the fear, so long as there is no real physical danger. Foster matches the story with his own childhood fear of speaking in front of a room and a memory of standing at the edge of Half Dome in Yosemite while a hiking companion panicked on his behalf. Both agree that naming a fear precisely, rather than staying vague about it, is the necessary first step before anyone can decide to work through it. Health, Healing and Staying Grounded Keen connects purpose to physical health, saying that fatigue and chronic illness are often the real reason people cannot sustain a long-term goal, which is part of why she built the Wellness Babes program with a functional nutritionist around testing, mindset and recipes. Foster responds with memories of grandparents whose rheumatoid arthritis and weight gain slowly took away their mobility, and says he set staying pain-free as a personal life mission, crediting Reiki and a functional-medicine doctor who told him disease progresses through stages, from self-healing to needing a practitioner to needing more. Both hosts argue for combining Western and Eastern approaches rather than choosing one, with Keen citing acupuncture that helped heal her back during a period on disability. Foster mentions witnessing what he describes as roughly two hundred unexplained recoveries at a chapel in Arizona over three years, a claim he offers without further evidence. Keen adds that unmanaged stress and poor boundaries, especially for women, often drive autoimmune illness. Community, Family and Giving Back As the hour closes, Foster and Keen discuss reactivity learned from performing and reality television, and how conflict avoidance through addiction of any kind stalls emotional development. Keen says most of the women in the TNH Accountability Program lack a consistent parental figure and lose the social connections that keep people housed, echoing a San Diego shelter founder Foster once interviewed who told him isolation, not substance use, is the true root of homelessness. Both stress that family, more than clients or colleagues, has been their sharpest teacher. Keen closes by directing listeners to manifestingyourmission.org, wellnessbabes.org and thenewhollywood.org, mentioning her September 19 Pouring Into Yourself retreat in Sonoma, a six-week Wellness Babes transformation program, and an October 2 fundraiser for the nonprofit reachable through faith@thenewhollywood.org. Foster thanks her warmly, mentions a future speaking connection with his wife's Women's Wisdom event in San Diego, and signs off encouraging viewers to subscribe on YouTube so they do not miss future episodes.
