Mindset Is the Beginning: How Ashlieya Mariano Is Helping Women Lead From Within

Because becoming the woman you want to be starts with how you speak to the woman you already are.

 

Meet Ashlieya “Lieya” Mariano, a multifaceted actress, filmmaker, entrepreneur, author, and nonprofit founder who believes one of the most powerful transformations we can make begins within our own minds. As the creator of the Queen of the Mind movement, Lieya is encouraging women to challenge limiting inner dialogue, cultivate confidence and resilience, and become intentional leaders of their own lives. In this empowering conversation, she shares the journey behind her movement, the everyday practice of mastering your mindset, and why purpose, confidence, and joy aren’t simply discovered—they’re intentionally cultivated.

 

What experiences led you to understand the power of thought?

My mind went from being something I had to fight against, to something I can now genuinely say is my superpower. It can be our greatest asset or the thing that causes the most difficulty.

I’ve had moments both in real time as well as upon reflection where I entirely misinterpreted an experience or situation. This has happened both personally and professionally. I assumed something that was far from true. I was led by pessimism. Had I been more focused on optimism or actually been able to accurately perceive the truth of the experience, I’d have spared myself unnecessary discomfort and even embarrassment. Where did that misguided assumption come from? Our minds can quickly make things up that don’t always serve us. I’ve learned to have a lot more clarity over the years.

I came to understand that the mind is not merely where we experience our lives; it is one of the primary instruments through which we construct them. Two people can inhabit remarkably similar circumstances and experience entirely different realities because perception, interpretation, expectation, and either our conscious or unconscious meaning-making intervene between what happens and what we “think” happened.

My own life has given me ample opportunity to observe this. I have experienced extraordinary joy, ambition, disappointment, reinvention, rejection, achievement, uncertainty, and profound personal transformation.

Our thoughts become interpretations; interpretations influence emotional states; emotional states affect behavior; repeated behaviors become patterns; and patterns, over time, become our lives. That realization became foundational to Queen of the Mind. I don’t believe we control everything that happens to us. We absolutely do not. However, developing sovereignty over the mind radically expands our agency over what happens within us and what we choose to create next.

That which makes up our internal state inevitably designs our external reality. The mind is everything. I came to know mine, understand it, befriend it, love it, and know I govern it. In my own life, I have cultivated better personal relationships, a greater sense of joy and happiness in my passions and creative outlets, I have built a livelihood I love, all because I chose radical accountability and authority over my thoughts and feelings. I am queen of my universe because I am queen of my own mind. You can be queen of yours too!

How can women separate authentic desires from absorbed expectations?

Stop comparing. Pressure is self-inflicted.

Know Thyself. Truly. I speak about this often.

Women are subjected to an extraordinary density of cultural prescription: be accomplished but effortless, beautiful but apparently unaware of it and require no maintenance for it, ambitious but agreeable, independent but desirable, maternal but professionally formidable. The contradictions alone can become psychologically exhausting. And, they’re all just projections, conditioning, and someone else’s (however little we can see of it) life.

The danger is not simply pressure. It is the concept of introjection: typically an unconscious state, when external expectations become internalized so completely that we begin experiencing them as our own desires.

One of the most important questions a woman can ask herself is: “If nobody were watching, applauding, judging, envying, or being disappointed by this decision, would I still want it? How would I feel about it if no one else could ever know of it?”

Authenticity requires self-investigation, understanding your coherent states, and discernment in actions. We have to become sufficiently quiet to distinguish our own voice from the cacophony of inherited loudly shouted expectations. A meaningful life is not necessarily the life that appears most impressive from the outside. It is the life that feels most congruent from within. Women are sensitive to this. We can choose to put our wants, needs and preferences first while still ruling the world. We’d rule better for it.

Self-care is critical for women. Critical for everyone. Practice whole-self wellness: feed the body, mind and soul. You show up best for yourself and then give the rest only after that.

Learn how to be present with and identify what is right, real and true for you. Honor that with your actions.

Let other brilliant women’s lives inspire and motivate you–not define what you should want or who you are expected to become.

What does becoming the leader of your own mind look like?

It means understanding that an emotion may be information without being instruction.

I can feel rejected without concluding that I am unworthy. I can experience fear without automatically obeying it. I can encounter uncertainty without manufacturing catastrophe to relieve myself of the discomfort of not knowing.

That distinction is enormous.

Leadership of the mind is metacognitive: developing the capacity to observe thought rather than unconsciously becoming every thought we have. In difficult circumstances, I ask: “What is objectively true? What am I adding through interpretation? What remains within my agency?

What response would be congruent with the woman I am or intend to be?”

Self-leadership is not controlling every internal experience. It is developing enough consciousness so that every internal experience does not control you.

Also, it’s all so temporary if you allow it to be. Emotions are transient. I remind myself that upset is not my baseline. I find comfort in knowing how to purposefully change my state when and if I want to. I do allow myself to feel all of my feelings, even the uncomfortable ones. I then choose the ones that get to stay and those are always higher vibrating.

Why is mindset foundational to purpose?

Because purpose requires more than revelation. It requires self-permission, commitment and action.

A person can know precisely what she wants to create and simultaneously possess a self-concept that makes pursuing it almost impossible. She may believe she is too old, too inexperienced, insufficiently talented, undeserving, unrealistic, or somehow not the kind of person to whom extraordinary things happen.

Purpose therefore has an internal prerequisite: you must develop a mind capable of tolerating, or rather aiding in, the expansion your purpose requires.

I think purpose is less about discovering one predetermined occupation and more about recognizing the particular constellation of capacities, curiosities, values, experiences, and contributions that make you feel profoundly alive, and of course then having the courage and mindset to organize your life around them.

What are signs that internal dialogue is undermining someone’s life?

One of the clearest is pre-emptive self-rejection.

You don’t submit because you assume you won’t be selected. You don’t introduce yourself because you assume they won’t be interested. You don’t ask because you have already answered “no” on someone else’s behalf. You call yourself realistic when, in fact, you have simply become extraordinarily practiced at anticipating disappointment.

Another sign is absolutist language: I always ruin things. Nobody wants me. I’m terrible at this. Things never work out for me.

Language reveals cognitive architecture.

I encourage women to listen carefully to the way they narrate themselves. Your internal vocabulary can either preserve possibility or systematically foreclose it.

How can women experience fear without allowing it to lead?

I talk about this a lot in my Unbothered Blueprint, a practical framework for regulating your internal state and making intentional choices. There is a process for identifying fear and how to navigate life without making fear-based decisions.

I regularly practice separating state from actions or strategy.

Fear is a physiological and psychological state. It is a valid signal, but it should not automatically determine how we act.

I regulate first with breath, movement, meditation, physiological grounding, whatever allows me to return to sufficient nervous-system stability, and then I make the decision. I do not make any—let alone consequential—decisions from temporary dysregulation or stress responses.

I also ask myself: “What would I choose if fear were permitted to come with me, but not permitted to drive?”

Courage does not necessarily mean the absence of fear to me. Courage is fear losing its authority and veto power. Fear can be warranted. In certain situations, it’s an appropriate feeling to have. Women especially are born with a brilliant capacity to multitask with a multitude of simultaneous thoughts and feelings. Learn to focus on and take action from the ones that serve the desired objective. Always act with intention.

How do you define healthy resilience?

I don’t define resilience as endlessly enduring adversity.

Sometimes resilience is persistence. Sometimes it is rest. Sometimes it is adaptation. Sometimes it is grieving what cannot be repaired. And sometimes the most resilient act available to us is leaving something we have spent years proving we could survive.

Healthy resilience is adaptive capacity: the ability to encounter difficulty without permanently surrendering either yourself or your capacity for possibility. It is not being easily susceptible to woundedness. Woundedness is something that prevents a person from taking the best course of action for themselves. Rest and reset is often an excellent choice. You can be hurt without being wounded. Can we control how hurt we get by things? Yes.

Women do not need to make invulnerability the price of being considered strong. There is tremendous strength in permeability, in allowing ourselves to be affected, to receive support, to recover, to change our minds, and still continue to do what is best for us.

What would you say to women struggling with comparison?

Comparison becomes destructive when someone else’s life becomes the measuring instrument for your own.

Social media intensifies comparison because we measure our private inner lives against other people’s curated public images. It is an epistemologically terrible comparison as we simply do not possess enough information to draw the conclusions we’re drawing.

When I notice myself comparing, I try to convert it into information. What precisely am I responding to? Is it admiration? Desire? Envy? Grief? Does this person’s life illuminate something I genuinely want? Can this be motivational or inspirational?

Then comparison becomes useful. Instead of “Why don’t I have that?” the question becomes

“What is this revealing about what matters to me?”

Someone else’s magnificence does not constitute evidence of your inadequacy. We can aspire to emulate each other. Other people’s lives can be positive examples for us. That is a good thing as long as it’s truly in alignment with who we are and who we genuinely aspire to be.

How can someone cultivate joy when life isn’t what she hoped?

I think one of the great mistakes we make is postponing joy until our lives satisfy a particular set of conditions.

When I have the relationship. When the money arrives. When I get the role. When the business succeeds. When my body looks different. Then I will allow myself to be happy.

But a life constructed entirely around deferred happiness can disappear remarkably quickly.

Cultivating joy does not mean denying grief, financial difficulty, loneliness, or disappointment. It means refusing to make suffering the sole legitimate interpretation of an imperfect life.

Joy can coexist with incompletion. Joy can accompany us through the endurance, change, and transformation life sometimes requires.

Beauty remains available. Play remains available. Awe remains available. Connection remains available. Curiosity remains available. Sometimes joy is not a consequence of circumstances improving; it is a practice of becoming perceptually available to what is already good.

How have your many identities shaped one another?

I’ve stopped believing multiplicity is evidence of anything other than multifaceted brilliance. Being an actress makes me a better educator. Teaching makes me a better communicator.

Filmmaking deepens my understanding of human behavior. Entrepreneurship teaches me courage and adaptability. Non-profit work continually recalibrates my understanding of what constitutes meaningful success. Writing forces me to articulate ideas I might otherwise only intuit.

These aren’t disparate identities to me. They are different manifestations of the same underlying impulse to understand human beings, create meaning, and contribute something consequential.

I think we impoverish ourselves when we believe coherence requires sameness or simplicity. A life can be extraordinarily coherent while containing multitudes of experiences and many chapters pertaining to self-discovery.

How do you protect confidence in industries built around rejection?

I stopped allowing the gatekeepers to become gods. I do not seek external validation. I take nothing personally. I navigate life unbothered.

An actor can be extraordinary and not book the role. A filmmaker can create beautiful work and not receive the funding. An entrepreneur can build something valuable before the market understands it.

External outcomes contain information, certainly, but they are not infallible verdicts on intrinsic worth.

That distinction liberated me.

I remain teachable. I want criticism that improves my craft. I want to know where I can become better. It’s important to know the difference between feedback and choosing to assign other meanings or definitions.

Someone else’s “no” may determine whether I enter their room. It does not determine whether I continue building my own.

When did Queen of the Mind become something you needed to share?

Queen of the Mind emerged when I realized that the principles I had been using to navigate my own life were not isolated insights; they formed an architecture that proved to cultivate thriving.

I became increasingly interested in the intersection between mindset, nervous-system regulation, language, identity, intentionality, emotional literacy, and behavior. I wasn’t interested in telling people simply to “think positively.” Human beings are infinitely more complex than that.

I wanted to explore more rigorous questions: “How do we become capable custodians of our own consciousness? How do we live truly as our most sovereign selves? What is universal consciousness? What truly is the embodiment of Christ Consciousness? Who is my highest and best self? How can I reach my highest timeline? What are magic and miracles and how do I create more of them?”

Queen of the Mind grew from asking those questions. It became less about motivation and more about sovereignty and the deliberate cultivation of an internal world from which a person can make clearer decisions, withstand uncertainty, recognize her own agency, and participate more consciously in the authorship of her own magical life.

How do mentorship, creativity, entrepreneurship, and service connect?

The connective tissue is human flourishing.

Whether I’m working through education, art, storytelling, entrepreneurship, mentorship, or philanthropy, I’m interested in essentially the same question: What helps human beings become more fully capable of thriving in our humanness?

For me, empowerment cannot end with inspiration; it must lead to agency, action, and meaningful change. Inspiration is emotionally compelling but often behaviorally ephemeral. I want people to leave with greater self-awareness, emotional vocabulary, practical tools, creative agency, and an expanded understanding of what they are capable of contributing to their own betterment as well as being more fit for service in the world.

The impact I ultimately care about is generative because empowered people empower people. Healthy leadership propagates healthy leadership. One person’s increased agency changes families, classrooms, organizations, communities, and ideally generations.

One mindset shift and one tangible action?

The shift is to stop treating every thought you have as the truth. Thoughts are transient electrical sparks from the patterns of our brains. Sometimes they mean something and sometimes they don’t.

A thought is a mental event. It is not necessarily a fact, prophecy, commandment, or accurate representation of reality.

The action is to identify one recurring thought that has been governing your behaviour and interrogate it in writing. Ask: Is this objectively true? Where did I learn it? What evidence contradicts it? What has believing it cost me? And what action would become available if I no longer organized my life around it?

Then create one piece of behavioral evidence against the old belief. Apply. Ask. Audition. Leave. Begin. Speak. Create.

Identity changes far more powerfully when the mind is presented with evidence.

What does “Queen of the Mind” mean to you today?

Today, Queen of the Mind essentially means sovereignty and adaptability throughout all of life. I co-create everything that I experience.

When I was younger, I think confidence meant certainty. Now I think confidence is the capacity to remain fundamentally allied with yourself even without certainty.

Purpose has become less about proving significance and more about living in congruence and coherence. Success has become less performative and more multidimensional. And joy has become less something I expect life to deliver to me and more a faculty I deliberately cultivate.

Perhaps most importantly, I no longer think mastery means arriving at some perfected psychological state in which fear, grief, insecurity, or uncertainty cease to exist.

Mastery is awareness. Discernment. Regulation. Choice.

To be Queen of the Mind is not to dominate yourself. It is to know yourself sufficiently, govern yourself wisely, forgive yourself readily, challenge yourself courageously, and remain sovereign enough to choose who you become next.

That definition will probably continue evolving for as long as I do. And I think that’s precisely the point.