There's a story about wildland firefighters who are told, in the moment of greatest danger, to drop their tools and run - and who, again and again, choose to hold on instead. It costs them their lives. I've been asking my clients a version of the same question ever since: what are you holding onto that, if you dropped it, would let you move with more ease? My own answer came from three generations of women in my family who never once took a relaxing holiday.
I went to an art school. The visual arts department was my world — drawing, journalling, making things that could speak without me having to. Over the years, something else emerged. A part of me that loves to facilitate, that comes alive in front of a room. Making videos is where these two run into each other.
This Tuesday's Lighthouse Labs, our guest Jole Berlage-Buccellati opened with a provocation: most of what blocks us around money doesn't live in the mind. It lives in the body. In patterns carried from ancestors who survived things we have no memory of. This is what came up for me - and what I'm still sitting with.
We have been taught that the answer to slow growth is more - more platforms, more posts, more visibility. But what if that belief belongs to a system that no longer fits? I have been mapping human ecosystems for over a decade, and the question that changes everything is not how to reach more people. It is whether you actually know who your people are - and whether you are tending that relationship.
Tony had everything - solid science, a great product, real expertise. But every room he walked into, the doors quietly closed. I recognised the pattern immediately. He was flooding the Rider and the Elephant never woke up. This piece is about the model that changed everything for him - and the three questions that will change how you communicate too.
This morning I was listening to a podcast about a woman who left Hollywood, moved to Fiji, and ended up rethinking how investment works from the ground up. Hearing her made me hopeful - in a specific way. That's what a voice from outside your world can do. It changes the altitude from which you see your own situation. That's the seed of the Lighthouse Talks - and the first one is this Tuesday, 28 April, free and online.
I reached out to someone last week, in the middle of everything that’s been happening in Ireland. I asked: “Can I support you? What do you need?” They were surprised. And grateful.
We’re all getting very good at being grand. At wearing the mask for work, for the children, for the sake of keeping things together. But at night, it slides off — and there’s nobody there to hold us.
This post is for anyone who’s lying awake, not quite knowing how to be. The real face has been there all along.
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