An Honest Beginning - Lighthouse Talks
This morning, I was listening to a podcast about a woman who left Hollywood, moved to Fiji to protect coral reefs, and ended up rethinking how investment works from the ground up.
Her name is Jodi Smith. She's building financial models for places where traditional approaches don't work - connecting businesses across agriculture, tourism, and ecosystems into something she calls interconnected deal flow. She talks about the economy as a subset of the ecosystem, not the other way around.
I'm in West Cork. She's in Fiji. And something about hearing her this morning made me hopeful. Not in a vague way - in a specific way. The kind of hopeful that comes from knowing that somewhere else in the world, someone is already doing the thing you can sense needs doing. Building the new model. Designing from care rather than extraction.
That's what a voice from outside your world can do. It doesn't just inform you. It changes the altitude from which you see your own situation.
I've been watching that happen in Her Circle. In our last session alone, one woman offered help to another to draft an email holding a clear boundary with a difficult client - the kind of email that's impossible to write for yourself. Someone offered to run a shop while another recovers from surgery. A website designer and a woman with a rustic holiday space found each other. A new member offering a decluttering service was being promoted by another, who could see exactly where her clients were waiting - places she hadn't thought of herself. Four exchanges, one session. None of it was planned. All of it is real.
Women from completely different worlds, opening doors for each other into futures they couldn't have imagined alone.
This has been happening on a small scale in Her Circle. And it has been one of the biggest forces of positive change in my life throughout my whole career. I've been lucky to cross paths with smart, generous people who, like me, believe that we are here to help each other grow. Meeting Jole led me to Guillaume. Guillaume said yes to an idea I hadn't quite formed yet. That's the spirit I want to bring into the Lighthouse Talks. It's not a webinar. It's not a workshop. It's a place where a voice from outside your world lands inside it - where you get to connect to new ideas, bring your own, and come out with more possibilities and forward momentum than you came in with.
Going deeper into the Two Loops model - Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze's way of understanding how change actually happens - one of the things it names clearly is this: when familiar maps stop working, we need perspectives from outside our usual world. We need to find each other across the usual boundaries. Right now, when the old ways of doing things are visibly coming apart at the seams, we need voices from outside our usual world. We need to find a lighthouse to guide us to new destinations - to imagine a new future, to see a new reflection of ourselves we didn't realise existed, to find new colleagues, friends and mentors. That's the seed of the Lighthouse Talks.
This is an experiment. I don't have a mapped-out series or a lineup to announce. What I have is my amazing network of people, a genuine belief that the richness of the conversations in my world is worth sharing - and a Tuesday afternoon with Guillaume that I think is the best way to launch us into this adventure.
The first Lighthouse Talk is this Tuesday, 28 April, 4-5:30pm, online.
Guillaume is the founder of MetaHelm and the creator of Strategic Narrative® - a methodology built on a premise I find both simple and radical: action creates clarity. Meaning follows motion.
The talk is called Start With What: Stop Spinning, Start Making.
If you've ever found yourself waiting - for more confidence, more resources, more certainty - before your next move, this is the session for you. Guillaume will walk through a focused practice from his framework. You'll leave with something concrete you can use straight away.
Tickets are free. Everyone is welcome - no prior connection to Her Circle or Think Visual needed. If you can't make the live session, register anyway, and you'll get access to the recording.
If it resonates, I'd love to see you there. And if Tuesday doesn't work, there will be more. That much I know.