Interview with Samka Keranovic, Co-Founder, Desert Roots Wellness LLC

This interview is with Samka Keranovic, Co-Founder, Desert Roots Wellness LLC.

For readers meeting you on Connectively, how do you introduce what you do as Co‑Founder of Desert Roots Wellness in the realms of authentic living, mental clarity, and healthy boundaries?

I’ve been doing this work for a long time — sixteen years, actually. I just wasn’t doing it out in the open.

For most of my corporate career, I quietly coached on the side — under confidentiality agreements, traveling to companies and working with people on burnout, indecision, and the kind of boundary erosion that happens when you’ve spent years saying yes to everything except yourself. That work felt real to me, and what mattered most about it was that it helped people. However, since the most joyful part of my profession was behind closed doors, I felt I was hiding the most authentic part of who I am.

That’s the piece that always felt hollow. It wasn’t the corporate job itself — it was that I was doing the work I loved most in the shadows, as if I had to keep it separate from who I was “officially.”

Desert Roots Wellness isn’t a reinvention. It’s me finally saying out loud what I’ve always been.

I help people understand what’s actually happening across all three levels — mind, body, and soul — because working on just one piece rarely holds. You can intellectualize your way through every boundary conversation and still feel it collapse the moment you’re in the room with someone who triggers a reversion to old patterns of compliance.

Looking back, what’s the throughline from your years leading finance and operations in transportation to co‑founding Desert Roots Wellness that shaped your approach to authentic leadership and boundaries?

I had every marker of success. Good money, real recognition, a title that made sense on paper. And I held onto all of it longer than I needed to because I was afraid.

Not afraid of the work. I knew I could coach. I had been doing it quietly for years, weaving it into the edges of my corporate life, never quite claiming it out loud. The fear was simpler and more embarrassing than that: what if I stepped out publicly and it didn’t work? What would I have left?

So I stayed. I kept the safety net spread wide beneath me.

Then in January of 2026, something shifted. I made a deal with myself: give it a real shot. And if it falls apart, you go back to what you know, and at least you tried. That framing changed everything. It turned the leap into something survivable.

I was still in my corporate role when I started. From February through May, I transitioned slowly, deliberately. I was not burning anything down. I was building something real alongside it and making sure it could hold my weight before I let go of the other side.

By May, I was fully in. And it was working.

That experience lives in how I lead and how I coach now. I understand the cost of waiting. I also understand that courage rarely looks like certainty. Sometimes it just looks like trying.

Bringing that perspective into your client work, when you coach high‑pressure operators or HR leaders, what is the first Desert Roots practice you use to create mental clarity in a chaotic week?

The first thing I do is ask one question: What is actually on your plate right now, and what is draining you most?

Not because I need a task list. Most high-pressure operators I work with are so far inside the chaos that they have lost the ability to tell the difference between what matters and what just feels urgent. That distinction is where clarity lives.

From there, I guide them into what I call a Mind Dump and Triage. It takes about ten minutes. You write down everything in your head — every open loop, every worry, every decision sitting unresolved. Then we sort it together into three buckets: what needs action now, what needs to be scheduled, and what you are carrying that is not actually yours to carry.

That last bucket is usually the heaviest one.

I learned this from my own experience. When I was in corporate, I thought my mental overload was a time-management problem. I tried every productivity system. None of them worked, because the real issue was that I had no internal filter. Everything felt equally important. Everything felt like mine.

The Mind Dump and Triage does not solve the week. It interrupts the spiral. It gets things out of the nervous system and onto paper, where you can actually see them. And once a client can see what they are dealing with, we can start working with it rather than being run by it.

That is where real clarity begins.

Staying with structure, how do you apply your budgeting and KPI experience to help clients “budget” their energy and set measurable boundaries that actually stick?

When I managed a $5.2 million P&L, every dollar had a job. We tracked what was coming in, what was going out, and whether each line item was actually moving us toward the goal. If something wasn’t performing, we cut it or redirected resources. I use almost the same logic with my clients now — except instead of dollars we’re working with human energy and time as currency.

Most high performers I work with don’t necessarily have a financial resource-allocation problem. They have a boundary problem. They’re spending energy on things that drain them and calling it commitment, when really it’s just unmanaged personal overhead.

So we start by doing what I call the energy and time audit. We look at where their time and emotional bandwidth are actually going week to week. Then we identify the drains — the commitments, relationships, or habits that are costing more than they return. That’s the budget side.

The KPI piece is where most coaching falls short. Good intentions don’t stick without a way to measure them. So we build simple, trackable markers — not vague goals like “set better limits,” but actual observable behaviors. Did you leave work by 6 p.m. three out of five days? Did you say no to one non-essential request this week? That’s data.

The Boundary Blueprint was built around exactly this framework. It gives clients a practical structure to return to, not just a mindset shift. Mindset shifts fade, but accountability systems build habits through daily measurements you can see in real time.

For readers who want a simple starting point, if they have only 10 minutes a day, what mind‑body‑soul ritual would you prescribe to build authentic self‑connection and clarity?

Ten minutes is actually enough — if you stop trying to do too much with it.

1. Two minutes of intentional breath. Not deep breathing as a performance, just slow, deliberate exhales. Your exhale activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Your body begins to down-regulate. For high performers running on adrenaline all day, this is not relaxing — it is regulating. There is a difference.

2. Five minutes of writing — three prompts only:

   • what am I carrying right now
   • what do I actually need
   • what am I avoiding

   You are not looking for answers. You are creating a witness for your own inner experience. That is the Mind piece — bringing conscious attention to what is already happening beneath the surface.

3. Close with one minute of stillness and one minute of gratitude. Not a list. One real thing. Something you can feel in your body when you name it. That is the Soul layer.

Seven to ten minutes, done before you open your phone. That one constraint matters more than the ritual itself.

But what about when things fall apart mid-day? When a conversation goes sideways, or you are sitting at your desk and you can feel the panic coming on?

I have been there. I know what it is like to hold it together in a conference room while your nervous system is screaming.

Here is what I teach for those moments: physiological sighing.

1. Take a normal inhale.

2. Add a short second inhale through your nose right on top of it.

3. Release it all in one long, slow exhale through your mouth.

4. Repeat two or three times. No one will notice. It takes under forty-five seconds.

What you are doing is deflating the small air sacs in your lungs that collapse under stress. The extended exhale re-engages the vagus nerve and down-regulates your heart rate faster than any other voluntary breath pattern we know of. This is not a wellness trend. This came out of Stanford research on stress physiology.

After you breathe, plant your feet flat on the floor. Name five things you can see — not a meditation exercise, just a forced redirect of your attention out of the threat loop in your head.

You will not be calm. You will be functional. And functional is enough to get through the next ten minutes, which is all you need.

On the body side of clarity, what is your go‑to breathwork or somatic micro‑practice for shifting from decision fatigue into presence before a tough conversation or the commute home?

The one I keep coming back to is what I call a “5-5-5” reset — five counts in, hold for five, exhale for five. Slow, extended exhale. That’s it. You can do it in your car, in a bathroom stall before a hard conversation, or standing at a crosswalk. No one knows you’re doing it.

Here’s why it actually works. When your exhale is longer than your inhale, you activate the parasympathetic nervous system — your body’s brake system. Decision fatigue lives in the sympathetic state. You’ve been running cortisol and adrenaline through your system all day, and your prefrontal cortex — the part that weighs trade-offs and sees clearly — starts going offline. The extended exhale sends a direct signal to your vagus nerve that the threat is over. Your heart rate variability shifts. Your nervous system physically downregulates.

I used to do this before walking into difficult conversations — a tense meeting, a confrontation I’d been dreading all week, or a talk with someone I loved that I didn’t know how to start. Not because I needed to calm down — I was usually composed on the surface. But I learned that composed on the surface and grounded underneath are two different things. The 5-5-5 helped me get underneath.

For the commute home, I layer in one thing: I pair the breath with a body scan. Three to four cycles of the breath, then I move my awareness slowly from the top of my head down through my shoulders, chest, and belly. Not analyzing anything — just noticing. Where am I holding tension? Jaw tight? Shoulders up? That awareness itself loosens it.

The commute version is actually more forgiving. You have the time. You’re not about to walk into anything. So you can fully let the day discharge before it follows you through the front door.

Two minutes. That’s all it takes to come back to yourself.

Values often require firm lines; what is one boundary you set because of your “people over profit” value that a reader could model in their own business?

There is one boundary I set early on that I still hold without exception: I do not take on a client who is not yet ready to be honest.

That sounds simple. It is not always easy.

When you spend sixteen years coaching, you learn something about what actually creates change. It is not the framework you use, the guide you give them, or the number of sessions on the calendar. It is whether the person sitting across from you can tell you the truth—about what is happening in their body, what they have been avoiding, what the persona they have built is costing them. Without that, nothing moves. And I have sat with enough high performers to know that the most successful people are often the most practiced at performing wellness too.

So I added a clarity call before I work with anyone. Not a sales call. A real conversation.

I ask hard questions, and I listen for what the answers do not say. I listen for deflection, for the well-rehearsed version of the story. I listen for whether they are ready to look at what is underneath the burnout or whether they want someone to hand them a productivity system with a spiritual coating and call it healing.

When I sense the latter, I say so—kindly and directly. I decline the engagement, and I tell them why—not because I am judging where they are, but because taking their money for work that will not reach them is something I am not willing to do.

I’m aware that saying no costs me revenue that I could use. It costs me regularly. If I compromise on who walks through the door, I compromise the work itself. That is not a trade I am willing to make.

The flip side is equally true. When someone comes in genuinely ready, I don’t count the minutes during the first paid session; I realize that we have a human ready to break through. Some first sessions run two and a half hours, some three; one went nearly four—because those clients carry years of things they have never said out loud, weight that has been holding them under. When they finally land somewhere safe, they use it.

That also costs revenue. But watching someone set down what they have carried alone for years is one of the most fulfilling things I do. People over profit works in both directions: turn away the ones who are not ready; give everything to the ones who are.

The modelable version: before you take on a client, a partner, or a customer, add one honest question you actually listen to the answer to. Let that answer mean something.

Zooming out to measurement, how do you borrow from acceptance testing and financial reporting to run small experiments in a wellness journey?

When I was managing a $5.2M P&L, I never touched a financial report without first establishing a baseline. Before any change hit the books, we knew exactly what normal looked like. In software quality work, acceptance testing taught me something equally powerful: you define what “passing” looks like before you run the test, not after. That distinction matters enormously.

I bring both of those disciplines into how I work with clients on their wellness journeys.

Most people approach wellness like they’re throwing things at a wall. They try a new supplement one week, meditation the next, and a completely different eating plan the week after that. They’re changing five variables at once and then wondering why nothing sticks — or why they feel worse. That’s not an experiment. That’s noise.

So here’s what I do instead: we pick one variable—just one. We define what success looks like before we start, and we run it for a defined window, usually two weeks.

Let me make that concrete. Say a client is exhausted every afternoon. They’re convinced it’s a sleep problem, but we don’t actually know. So we design a micro-experiment: for the next two weeks, we change only one thing — afternoon sunlight exposure for fifteen minutes after lunch. Before we start, we agree on what we’re measuring. We measure energy level at 3 p.m. on a simple one-to-ten scale. That’s the metric. We’ve set the baseline, we’ve defined what a “pass” looks like, and we’ve isolated the variable.

At the end of two weeks, we look at the difference. Did that number move? If it did, we keep the practice and add it to the foundation. If it didn’t, we cut it and try something else — no guilt, no drama. The experiment passed or it failed. We move on.

What this does is remove the all-or-nothing trap that makes wellness feel so overwhelming. You don’t have to overhaul your entire life. You run one test. You read the result. You decide.

And because I use a Mind-Body-Soul framework, the observation phase isn’t just about the body metric we agreed to track. I’m asking clients to notice what shifted across all three dimensions. Did your thinking feel clearer? Did you feel more at ease? Did something in how you were showing up change? Those observations are data too. Sometimes the most important finding isn’t the one you measured — it’s the one you noticed along the way.

Discipline and rigor belong in wellness. We just have to apply them with a little more warmth.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you'd like to add?

First things first: Thank you, Connectively, for the invite! I feel honored to share my story on your platform. When I first moved to Scottsdale, it was supposed to be temporary for a medical treatment, but it turned into a permanent move from the Midwest, and every day I get to count my blessings like this. I’m truly grateful to be recognized here and to be able to share my journey and expertise.

To close this interview, the thing I keep coming back to is how much this work asks of you before it ever asks anything of you professionally.

You can be exceptional at your job — good with strategy, good with people, good under pressure — and still have no idea how to be in a relationship with your own limits. That was me. I think a lot of high performers are quietly running on empty and calling it discipline.

The truth is, you do not have to have figured it all out to start paying attention. The audit, the body scan, the closed-container hour — none of it requires you to already be well. It just requires a willingness to get curious about what is actually happening in your body and your mind before you decide what to do next. And it is okay to ask for help. That is the hardest part, but it matters more than most of us let ourselves admit.

And if you are reading this and you are in a difficult place — please write to me. I want to hear your story. I will help in whatever way I can, and if I cannot be that help directly, I will point you toward something that once helped me. And no, it does not have to cost thousands of dollars. No one should feel like they cannot reach out because they lack resources, feel embarrassed to have a conversation, or have never attempted to establish a safe space before. That is not a reason to stay silent. It is a reason to send the message.

Samka, Co-Founder, Desert Roots Wellness

www.drwmbs.com

samka@drwmbs.com