WITH ANDREA CRISP
“
Courage taught me how to survive. Alignment is teaching me how to live.”
What if faith isn’t about getting it right… but about coming home to yourself?
In this episode of The Couragecast, I’m sharing my journey through spiritual deconstruction and into embodied, faith-led leadership. This is a conversation about self-trust, nervous system regulation, intuitive decision-making, and redefining faith after religious conditioning.
For years, faith felt like performance.
Responsibility.
Making sure I didn’t disappoint God.
Making sure I didn’t get it wrong.
Fear disguised itself as leadership.
Control disguised itself as devotion.
But embodied faith feels different.
It feels grounded.
Regulated.
Active.
Aligned.
In this episode, we explore what it means to trust divine timing without collapsing into passivity — and how to lead from self-trust instead of fear.
In This Episode We Explore:
Spiritual deconstruction and reclaiming authority
How fear can disguise itself as responsibility in leadership
The difference between controlling outcomes and trusting divine timing
Why waiting is not passive — and how active faith actually works
How to stop outsourcing your intuition
What embodied faith feels like in the nervous system
This episode is for women who love God but are untangling religious conditioning.
For leaders who are healing fear-based faith.
For women learning to trust themselves again.
This conversation explores faith-based leadership, self-trust, spiritual growth, embodied leadership, intuitive business decisions, and nervous system safety.
Subscribe & Share
If this conversation resonates, follow The Couragecast so you don’t miss future episodes on embodied leadership, spiritual awakening, and aligned success.
Share this episode with a woman navigating her own faith journey — and leave a review to help this message reach more intuitive, powerful women.
-
What if faith isn’t about obedience or even religion, but deep soul alignment?
In this episode, we explore what faith in the context of embodied leadership can look like — not religious performance, but deep spiritual integrity. A way of leading in your divine purpose, your values, your leadership, and nervous system safety, but most of all, deep trust in something that is greater than yourself.
Leadership and building a business is not about control. It’s about listening and tuning into what is meant for you. It’s about creating alignment that serves you, your community, and about being divinely led.
Hey there, welcome to The Couragecast. I’m so glad that you’re joining me today. My name is Andrea Crisp, and I’m an intuitive empowerment coach. I’ve had the honor and privilege of coaching many women across the globe, helping them step into their personal power and create self-trust in their lives and businesses using energetic work, spirituality, mindset, somatics, Human Design, and more.
Today we’re talking about one very hot topic — one that I have not really explored from this perspective before. So we’re going to talk about faith, but not in the way that you might expect.
Let me just start here. We are not talking about religion or dogma. We are not talking about obedience, and there will be no fear-based morality here. If you have experienced spiritual trauma or spiritual abuse, I want to encourage you to stick around, because I want to share my heart on what faith leadership can look like.
Because the way you relate to God, Source, the divine — however you understand something greater than yourself — is often how you relate to power.
I started my own faith deconstruction around 2018, and I have been doing the inner work since then to heal and to create a new way of being that allows me to have a relationship with the divine, but not in a rigid religious context.
Now, if you know my story, you know that most of my life was spent in church. I grew up in the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, and when I was living in the United States, I was part of the Assemblies of God. Much of my adulthood was spent in full-time church ministry as a youth pastor, young adult pastor, and music and worship pastor. I did all the things.
And I have to admit, there was a lot of good there, but there was also a lot that wasn’t great. One of the areas I really had to navigate was the belief that I had to always follow all the rules.
Now admittedly, I have always been a rule follower, so this was kind of right up my alley. But the way I learned to move in the world was to be a good girl, to be obedient, to listen to authority. This started in my family. My parents weren’t super rigid, but I really liked getting people’s approval by doing what I thought they wanted, not necessarily what I actually believed was right for me.
Even though I am a very discerning person, I was taught to listen to authority. And that meant I would self-abandon much of the time. I didn’t really listen to what I wanted. My desires were buried underneath all the rules and expectations about how I was supposed to show up in the world.
Underneath the obedience was fear. The fear was that if I didn’t do the right thing, I would not go to heaven, I would not have favor with God, and I would not have the life I dreamed of. So everything revolved around: Am I doing the right thing? Am I following biblical principles?
Even in later years, even when I didn’t consciously think I was that rule-bound, the pattern was still running in the background.
Maybe you can relate. Maybe you have struggled with fear of being wrong, fear of disappointing others, fear of missing the right path, or fear of doing something wrong and being punished for it — especially in religious contexts where punishment or separation from God was emphasized.
All of those things can really shape how we relate to faith.
For me, I wasn’t always in a spiritually abusive environment, but I was in a few spiritually abusive environments. When I left the church and started my deconstruction, I thought I had left that mindset behind. I thought, “Okay, I left — now it’s over.”
But it actually took many years to unpack what had happened and to heal from it.
I didn’t realize how much fear was driving my leadership, how I showed up in my business, and how I related to myself, to others, and to God. The pattern just changed forms.
Instead of fearing God’s punishment, it became: What if I make the wrong business decision? What if I misread my intuition? What if I fail publicly? What if I lose credibility online? What if I completely fall apart in front of people?
I was always trying to control outcomes because I didn’t want to experience public failure or be seen as someone who got it wrong.
But living like that is not faith. It’s fear dressed up as responsibility.
True faith feels different. It feels like living in integrity with who you are, with your values, with your authenticity. It allows you to truly tap into what is right for you — slowing down, listening, discerning what you need, where you want to go in your business, how you want to show up, and feeling safe in your body.
For me, that was something I had to learn in a completely new way.
Maybe you have been wanting to lead from a space of faith — not necessarily religious faith, but that “something bigger than me” kind of faith. Maybe you feel connected to God, Source, the Universe, the divine. Or maybe you are still figuring it out, like I was.
When you lead like you have to control everything, you show up in a certain way. But when you lead without needing to control the universe, it is incredibly freeing. You release the need to have everything happen on your timeline. You trust divine timing and divine order.
You are not driven by the fear that things must happen in a specific way or order. There is less urgency because things can unfold as they are meant to unfold. You don’t feel like you have to prove yourself all the time. You release the pressure you put on yourself.
That is divine alignment.
For me, this has been an ongoing process. Radical self-trust is something I am still learning. There are still moments when I think, “I don’t trust myself to make this decision.” I can feel scattered.
In those moments, I come back to center and remind myself: Even if this doesn’t go the way I planned, even if I mess up, even if things feel like they are spiraling, I can still trust that I will be guided to the next step.
Faith is not about believing God will fix everything so life is always perfect. It is about trusting that you will have the resources, guidance, and inner wisdom to take the next step when you need to.
Recently, I was talking to clients about an offer I was putting out, and I told them: This is an opportunity to practice self-leadership and decide if this is for you or not for you.
Faith becomes active when we are moving and taking action from that place of trust. Faith is not just sitting around waiting for something to happen.
For a long time in church contexts, I heard “wait on God,” and in my experience, that sometimes meant sitting and doing nothing. But I brought that pattern into my business too. I would wait so long that I would become frustrated when nothing was changing.
Now I understand that waiting and trusting can still include small, intentional actions that are aligned with where you are going. You just have to pause long enough to discern what feels right.
I have been practicing this more and more. Even when I move forward on something and later realize it wasn’t quite right, I don’t beat myself up. I just learn and move forward.
Faith without embodiment can become bypassing. Faith with embodied leadership means listening to your body’s wisdom, moving away from urgency, and choosing what feels safe and grounded.
Community matters too. You were not meant to do this work alone. Healing can be dysregulating if done in isolation. You need safe spaces where you can be held, supported, and regulated.
That doesn’t mean someone gives you all the answers. It means you are supported while learning to trust yourself.
Faith doesn’t have to look like religion. It is a way of being. It is living in alignment with purpose, identity, and spiritual truth — not blind trust, but supported trust.
When I look back at my journey of leaving the church and deconstructing, it took courage. There were many moments I questioned what I was doing because I didn’t have community that fully understood.
But as I kept doing the healing work, I found people who created safe space for me to grow. I hired a therapist first. Then I worked with a coach who had also left a high-demand religious system. Then I surrounded myself with women who allowed me to be myself and heal.
That is how I grew in faith, leadership, alignment, discernment, and trust.
So I want to encourage you to ask yourself: Where do you need to deepen your trust? Where do you need to deepen your faith-led leadership?
If I can support you on that journey, whether through coaching or community, I encourage you to reach out. Or simply find people who can walk the journey with you.
I really believe in you. And I know that learning to lead from faith outside of a religious context can feel tricky and sometimes disorienting. But it is possible.
Until next time, remember: You have everything you need to live bravely.
If you liked this episode of The Couragecast, make sure to like, follow, and subscribe on your favorite podcast player. Original music and production by Stephen Crilly.
Listen Here:
If something here touched you, that’s the invitation. Let’s work together to help you feel supported, embodied, and aligned with what you’re here to create.
