Capacity Conversations | One Year Anniversary Episode Hosted by Raquel Sands & Sarah Liljegren | Season 2, 2026 We almost did a song. We were this close to writing something and performing it for you, because — can you believe it — it has been one full year of Capacity Conversations. One year of two women, one from each coast of the USA, having honest, sometimes uncomfortable, always real dialogue about self-trust, transformation, and the reality most modern Millennials are navigating right now. Do we actually have the capacity to do all the things we want to do? That’s the question this podcast was built around. And one year in, we’re still asking it — but with more texture, more lived experience, and more willingness to sit in the complexity of the answer. For those joining for the first time: I’m Raquel Sands, clarity and work strategist, certified yoga teacher, and graphic designer, supporting freedom seekers, freelancers, solopreneurs, consultants, and anyone in a nine-to-five who is committed to sovereignty and self-sufficiency. My goal is to help you create and sustain peace, purpose, and prosperity. And my co-host is Sarah Liljegren — a rewilding real estate agent, certified yoga teacher, clinical herbalist, naturalist, and one of the most thoughtful people I know when it comes to the intersection of land, community, wellness, and work. More on her in a moment. This episode? It’s about our Work stories. Capital W — not the job title, not the salary, not the LinkedIn headline. The deeper Work. The thing we’re planting and harvesting. The thing that provides for us and that we nourish in return. The thing that, over time, actually writes who we are. Here’s ours. My Work Journey: From the Library to Corporate to Cacao I didn’t come into this world knowing what I wanted to do. I don’t think most of us do, despite what the college application process implies. What I did know early: I wanted to get to the heart of things. Literally. I remember telling my parents I wanted to be a heart surgeon or a brain surgeon — because those are the organs we can’t live without. The heart keeps us here. The brain keeps us us. I wanted to work with what mattered most. Then came the high school biology dissection. I couldn’t do it. There went the surgeon career. So I turned to the next thing that felt like the heart of everything: words. Books, writing, journaling, thinking about thinking. I lived in language. And eventually I got the degree to match — an English degree, after trying nutrition, global affairs, and a few other paths that didn’t quite fit. My logic at the time: everybody needs someone who can communicate. Writers, editors, communicators — that’s a need that never goes away. (And then AI arrived. But that’s a whole other episode.) I always worked. Even before my first official job, I was helping my dad with his business in middle school. He ran a trade school, teaching men air conditioning, heating, and refrigeration — getting up to 20 or 30 men certified at a time. I was his after-school secretary, unofficial and unpaid, but I was working. I learned what it looked like to build something from the ground up. And watching both of my parents shaped how I understand work to this day. My mom has a master’s degree. She went the institutional route — steady, structured, working for the school district for years. My dad pieced it together differently — teacher, handyman, maintenance worker, school founder. Two entirely different approaches. Neither one was purely about money. They were both, in their own way, about meaning. About finding a path that fits their hands. That got into me early. Money was necessary. Money was not the point. My official first job was at the library — because I loved books and the kind of people who also loved books. After that: kindergarten STEM teacher (bubbly energy, genuinely exhausting), yoga teacher, yoga studio manager, dog walker, front desk at a physical therapy clinic. Health kept showing up in my life even when I wasn’t the practitioner — just someone in the room where healing happened. The majority of my career, though, has been in corporate communications — writing, editing, designing, and being the jane-of-all-trades communicator in organizations. Ten years across the government sector, nonprofits, and private companies. I’ve been an employee, a contractor, a consultant, and a freelancer. (And yes — contractor and consultant are two distinct legal and financial structures with different benefit implications, which matters a lot if you’re navigating independent work right now.) I’ve worked alongside multinational giants like Deloitte and Uber, and also inside tiny nonprofits with 13 people. And what I’ve learned across all of it is that I don’t thrive in enormous spaces — the bigger the machine, the more invisible the human. I’m a suburban person: I like access to the city, but I need a sense of intimacy and proportion. I like being able to see the whole room. And what I’ve carried with me into everything I now teach and talk about is this: the corporate structure, whether nonprofit, for-profit, or government, is a system that may or may not be built for you. The ladder exists. The question is whether climbing it is actually taking you somewhere you want to go — and whether the ladder is even still there. Recently — and Sarah knew this was coming before most people did — I launched a small batch cacao blend business. I know. It sounds like a pivot. And it is. But it’s also the most direct line between everything I’ve ever cared about: health, ancestry, plant medicine, community, and nourishment as a form of sustainability. I’m 50% indigenous from Central and South America (23andMe confirmed what I already felt in my bones), and 8 to 12% West African. Cacao is Central American. It was used by the Mayans, the Olmec, the Aztec — not as a treat, but as medicine, as currency, as spiritual practice. Stepping into this work feels less like a business decision and more like a homecoming. There’s also a practical need I kept bumping into: corporate coaching, career strategy, income sovereignty work — it’s all in the head. It’s conceptual. You can’t hold a mindset shift in your hands. And I was craving something that could meet people in their bodies, not just their brains. Cacao does that. It’s grounding. It’s tangible. It’s nourishing in a way I can actually pass across a farmer’s market table and watch someone receive. My relationship to work has always been a question mark. When I graduated from college, it was survival mode: pay off the student debt, pay off the car, save money. That was the work. Concrete, pressing, legible. As I’ve built capacity — and it has taken years — the questions have shifted. What do I want to be known for? What do I want to plant? What does work mean in this season of my life? Capital W Work is about meaning. Lowercase w work is about money. We need both. But only one of them, I think, is the foundation. Sarah’s Work Journey: From Bait City BBQ to Rewilding Real Estate She grew up in Napoleon, Missouri, a small population. The closest town was Bait City, four miles from the highway. And Bait City had a barbecue restaurant, and that barbecue restaurant was my first job, and she was there for eight years, on and off, starting at 16. Bait City BBQ is having its 50-year reunion this summer. She’s going back to Missouri to be there. Some places just stay with you. She started working because that was what you did. She started paying for her own gas in high school — that was the culture she was raised in. Work wasn’t optional. It wasn’t even really a conversation. And one of the first lessons she absorbed about work came from that restaurant. They were staffed mostly by women, and the message received was clear: a bad period is not a reason not to come to work. That is a complicated inheritance. On one hand: resilience. On the other hand, the erasure of the body. After Bait City BBQ, her job history reads like a tour through American labor. She worked in her mom’s printing warehouse. She worked at a Scantron Testing Center for a summer, manually entering all the tests the computer couldn’t read. She had wrist surgery and had to leave the restaurant, so she went to work at a commercial bank in a small town. That bank job taught her something I think about often: when you work around a thing long enough, its value shifts. In restaurants, she was surrounded by food. The abundance of it changed how I related to it. In banking, she was surrounded by money. The first time she carried a stack of cash, she was floored — this was big-money energy I’d never experienced. And then months later, it was just paper. Both experiences loosened something in me about what we think things are worth. She cleaned houses. She became a server and then a shift manager at Cafe Verona in Independence, Missouri. Then accepted a manager position at Lulu’s Thai Noodle Shop in downtown Kansas City. Lulu’s happened to be right next door to the yoga school she started attending in 2017. That proximity was not accidental. It was that particular flavor of serendipity where you realize the path was already laying itself out while you were busy managing lunch service. She started studying herbalism around that same time, 2016. And started experimenting: making products, giving them away, making more, giving those away too. And then she thought: what if I sell these at the farmer’s market? That was the moment everything shifted. Selling plants woke her up. She became a bulk dry goods department manager at Tarot Health and Wellness, managing medicinal and culinary herbs in little jars — keeping them stocked, learning to love even the smallest quantity of something rare or beautiful. Plants kept teaching her: value is not fixed. Value is felt. She launch
