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A Spark Of Awareness

A Spark Of Awareness

Written by: Sophie Vo
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About this listen

 A Spark Of Awareness is a weekly 15-minute reflection practice for conscious leaders to practice self-awareness. Your time to pause, and sit with yourself. No distraction, just self-listening. Every week, Sophie Vo will offer a human prompt — drawn from real transformation work with tech and gaming founders, executives, and leaders — to help you step out of old scripts, reconnect with your truth, and lead from integrity, presence, and self-mastery. Sophie is a leadership guide for high-achieving and conscious leaders. With 17 years of leadership experience in the tech and gaming industry, Sophie has built and led 30+ global teams across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, and has mentored over 200 executives across VC-backed startups and public companies. A four-time founder, her most recent venture scaled to six figures in its first year and evolved into ORIN — a curated global network redefining leadership for women.

riseandplay.substack.comSophie Vo Economics Leadership Management & Leadership Self-Help Success
Episodes
  • Self Sabotage #2: Being A People Pleaser

    Self Sabotage #2: Being A People Pleaser
    Jan 20 2026

    In this episode of 'A Spark of Awareness,' the focus is on the second self-sabotage pattern: being a people pleaser.

    Sophie Vo, explores how people pleasing manifests in various behaviors such as avoiding conflicts, difficult conversations, struggling to say no, or over-explaining your boundaries.

    Through personal anecdotes, she highlights the cultural and psychological origins of people pleasing and its detrimental effects on both personal and professional relationships.

    Sophie offers actionable advice on how to recognize these patterns and practice setting boundaries by delaying responses and learning to say no.

    Leaders are encouraged to practice these skills and reflect on their experiences, with more on self-sabotage patterns promised in future episodes.Extra resources recommended:

    * Boundaries (by Henry Cloud)

    * Boundary Boss (by Terry Cole)

    * Attached (by Amir Levine), to understand more the origins of your people pleasing patterns.

    Enjoy this Self-Awareness practice 👁️

    Thanks for tuning in to a Spark of Awareness. Subscribe for free to receive your weekly dose of consciousness.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com
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    18 mins
  • Self-Sabotage #1: Shutting down your Intuition

    Self-Sabotage #1: Shutting down your Intuition
    Jan 13 2026

    In this coaching reflection episode of ‘A Spark of Awareness,’ we dive deep into the vital role Intuition plays in creative leadership.

    In a world saturated with technology and external validation, it's easy to lose touch with our inner authority and self-mastery. This first episode highlights the #1 self-sabotage pattern: ignoring intuition.

    Many leaders today operate solely from the mind which is 20% of their full potential, by disregarding the body's inherent wisdom. The episode offers practical steps to reconnect with intuition through creative practices and daily self-awareness exercises.

    Every episode closes with a short guided meditation designed to help listeners connect with their breath and bodies, creating space for intuitive feelings to surface.

    Additional resources:

    * The Pathless Path

    * The Creative Act: A Way Of Being (by Rick Rubin)

    Enjoy this Self-Awareness practice 👁️

    Thanks for tuning in to a Spark of Awareness. Subscribe for free to receive your weekly dose of consciousness.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit riseandplay.substack.com
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    19 mins
  • Introducing A Spark Of Awareness

    Introducing A Spark Of Awareness
    Jan 5 2026
     Dear listeners, I am evolving The Rise and Play Podcast. Time has come.Over the past four years, your support, feedback, and presence have meant very much to me and through this work, we’ve explored the leadership lessons of more than 150 founders, CEOs and leaders in the gaming industry, and the podcast reflected the journey.I was living myself as a gaming executive and leader, learning alongside my peers, and now I am evolving, and so is this podcast. Last year, if you have followed my journey, I fully crossed a threshold in my own life and identity, and I stepped away from the role and the structure of gaming leadership and into my full path as an entrepreneur and conscious leadership guide where I support leaders as we cross their own threshold from confinement, old scripts, duty identity into self-mastery, freedom, and truth.From this work. I have also founded ORIN, a sisterhood of conscious women leaders who are crossing the threshold and are doing this in group and in beautiful awareness. And I also now accompany many CEOs and leaders in one-on-one through that deep transformation. So the podcast will now become a reflection of this path and of the evolution I am witnessing in the leaders I work with.To reflect this transition, the podcast is shifting into a new format. And let me be clear here. I wanna respect your time and mine and offer something that is meaningful, grounded, and truly valuable of this time. There’s already so much content competing for our attention. And I don’t wanna add more noise, distraction, or information to consumer.And instead, this podcast will become a practice, a weekly discipline. A pause, a moment to step back, reconnect, and ask yourself the right questions. The same questions I work , with the founders and leaders I coach. And each episode will be between 10 and 15 minutes, what I call a “human prompt”, where I share what is alive in my work with leaders, the patterns I’m observing, because they are repeating over and over again across hundreds of leaders I’ve worked with.In the end, it is about being human and its human patterns, and you will get the wisdom that emerges from real journey of transformation. Maybe you are in yourself and need support, so this content will not be preplanned. And it’s definitely not an AI prompt. It is a human to human conversation and drawn from everything that I’m learning with my clients and with my own experience as an entrepreneur.It’s an invitation to cross your own bridge. From a legacy expectation, maybe a legacy of company or your story to more agency and your inner freedom and truth. And the first series I will open next week is about self-sabotage, patterns in leadership. The patterns I’ve identified across more than 200 leaders I’ve worked with. It’s so funny because they appear again and again, and I thought it is time that I actually reveal them because it’s going to make my work easier as we can start from the same basis, and you can also benefit from them without having to go through this yourself, which will help develop your self-awareness, which is the first step of transformation.So the first pattern. We will explore in my first episode is a disconnection from intuition because many leaders are externalizing the wisdom, living primarily in the intellectual mind and losing more and more of a connection to their inner voice. I hear every week. I would say even every day, people who are outsourcing the authority to chat GPT, they can’t even think for themselves.They don’t even know how to listen to themselves. And they’re, I would say, letting that muscle die by outsourcing it more and more to a machine or to others. And when intuition is discarded, distrusted businesses and the leaders as one with in them become flat. And we see businesses that are built from trends comparison.Imitation instead of authenticity. Conviction, something that is true and original. And this is what is going to emerge in an era where everything is mostly likely produced by an ai.And in this era, people will not seek for more information, but they will seek for what is real. They’ll seek truth. So in each episode, I will share concrete experiences from my work with clients from my own journey and other reflections and practices you can use to transform your patterns at your own pace into self-mastery.The main thing I’m asking from you is discipline. You don’t need more knowledge. You need commitment and discipline, and that’s the work I do in my coaching. This is my invitation. So if you feel you’re standing at the edge of a threshold, something needs to change. You are entering a new chapter of your life, asking yourself whether the way you are living, leading, and spending your time still true to you.The space is for you and you are not alone. If you here to continue to consume content, , without accountability, this podcast is evolving to a place that, it’s not going to be aligned. It ...
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    9 mins
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