September always feels like the start of the year to me. A year after beginning Think Visual again, I’m looking back at what grew: circles where women take their masks off, clients who found their way through a swamp and a boulder, and a board that found itself in a hawthorn tree. And a pomegranate, to wish you a sweet year.
For seven years, stretchy pants were my uniform. When a friend's wedding gave me the perfect excuse to try a new look, something that should have been fun left me overwhelmed. What I needed was already hiding in my wardrobe, and it took two friends to help me see it. The same is often true in business.
When money arrived from my mother's estate, I couldn't touch it for months - I had no idea what it meant, or what to do with it. This is a piece about inheritance, about fear dressed up as responsibility, and about the skill neither my mother nor I was ever taught. It closes with an invitation to a Lighthouse Lab on financial confidence, Tuesday 8th September.
For many people, January is the moment for change. I'd argue September is the true one. Drawing on John O'Donohue's writing on thresholds and real stories from a coach, a designer, and a recruiter, this piece is an invitation to use the next twelve weeks well and a free printable worksheet to help you do it.
A year ago, I started a new chapter: coaching and Her Circle, a community for women in business in West Cork. Getting ready to celebrate that, I felt something I didn't expect: unease. Here's what I've learned this year about celebrating honestly, without pretending I've arrived anywhere, and why doing it together might just be an act of rebellion.
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.
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.
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