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.
I press the number 4 in the elevator, turn left twice, and I'm back in the corridors of my mother's workplace - a room full of women who built something real while somehow also building a life around it. When she retired, she asked me a question I still can't fully answer for her. This is what stayed with me after a conversation about flexibility this week.
The first question I ask a stranger is never small talk - I want to know what they've dedicated their life to. Today it was a farmer at the sauna. A year ago it was me, closing a business I'd built over thirteen years and starting again from nothing. September has a way of turning summer's dreaming into real decisions - and this year it's brought me to a conversation with Karen O'Reilly of EmployFlex about what's changing in how people find work.
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.
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