Dr. Bronce Rice grew up watching his father, a pastor, get phone calls at two and three in the morning. The family understood implicitly that when someone needed help, you went. Acts of service weren’t a value statement on a wall. They were the air in the house.
Carolina and I spent close to forty minutes with Bronce for an author spotlight, and the conversation centered on a moment that changed his trajectory going forward
During the pandemic, he was limited by the number of patients he coul see. He moved to telehealth, and his calendar filled in a way it had never filled before. He capped his schedule at nine people a day, five days a week, and even at that pace he started having to turn people away. Long-time clients calling back, asking for an hour, and he had nothing left to give them. In his words, “in my world, that was a little bit of a sin.”
That sentence is the seed of his book.
The book is called The Wellbeing Equation. He has been working on it since the pandemic. He told us he wrote it to 240,000 words before he knew how to stop. He’s now cutting it down to publish at fifty or sixty thousand. He got an agent last October, after thirty years in private practice, and as we recorded this his proposal is currently in front of publishing houses.
What strikes you about Bronce, the second you start talking to him, is the rigor underneath the warmth. He spent ten years getting through his psychoanalysis training. He doesn’t speak in slogans. When we asked him for the one thing in his wellbeing framework, he gave us three (sleep, diet, exercise) and then refused to call it three things. He calls it one thing, because the body and the mind have to be functioning before any of the higher work becomes possible.
His central image is what stayed with us. Bronce describes everyone’s wellbeing equation as a fingerprint. The components are universal. Sleep, food, movement, connection, spirit. But the way they combine is yours alone. Most of the advice you’ve absorbed in the last decade has been someone else’s fingerprint pressed onto your life. His book is an attempt to give people permission to find their own.
There’s a moment about halfway through the conversation where he turns the questions back on us. He asks how we built what we built. How Carolina and I work together. What the experience has been like inside the container. It’s a generous move from a guest, and it’s the move of a working analyst. He doesn’t perform expertise. He listens.
A few other threads from the full episode:
The Trifecta of Wellness, and why he refuses to call it three things.
What he means when he says writing this book has become a spiritual journey.
The phrase “experiments in living,” and why he keeps returning to it.
The five-word sentence Carolina gave him near the end that he said would change how he thinks about waiting: “holding the pose.”
What he might write next, sparked by listening to us describe our partnership in real time.
Subscribe to his Substack and read his pinned essay, “Your Wellbeing Equation is Like a Fingerprint” here. When the book launches, his readers there will be the first to know.
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on May 18, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
