I laughed. Not because it was funny. Because of what it revealed. He had my whole financial picture in front of him and the thing that stood out to him was that I’m alone. As if that’s the one line item that needs fixing

That moment became this week’s solo episode.

What stayed with me

1. The question “why are you single?” is rarely a question. It’s an assumption wearing a question mark — that single is the broken state and partnered is the solved one. Most people asking aren’t trying to hurt you. They were handed one picture of what a good life looks like, the same picture I was handed, and they’re checking on you with the only map they were given. Understanding that changed how I receive the question. It didn’t change my answer.

2. The world does make it harder — you’re not imagining it. Every form that asks for a plus-one. Every table set for couples. Every well-meaning question that lands like a diagnosis. If you’re single in your 30s, 40s or 50s, the weight you feel isn’t a flaw in you. It’s the design of the world around you. And you’re not broken for feeling it.

3. One true sentence ends the explaining. Mine is: I’m building myself, so that when it happens, it’s built on something solid. That usually ends the conversation — because there’s nothing left to fix.

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My reflections

A few years ago I stopped dating. Not because I gave up, but because I saw two options in front of me: keep doing what everyone does — the apps, the blaming, the timing — or stop and build the person who would actually be ready for the right thing, instead of just available for the next thing.

What I want is a partnership, not a relationship that fills a gap. Two whole people choosing each other — not one person borrowing the other’s energy because he hasn’t built his own. That takes time. It’s not supposed to be quick.

And in the episode I admit something I’ve never said publicly: there were times I told people I was with someone, just so they would stop asking. So many times. I say it without shame now, because we’ve all found our ways to quiet the noise. Maybe it’s time we stop apologizing for it instead.

A question for you

What’s the funniest or strangest comment you’ve gotten about being single — or have you ever quieted the noise the way I did?

Hit reply and tell me. I read everything.

Keep catching those green lights and until next week,

Cris

My conversation with Steve Muscat Azzopardi was the second kind. I met Steve at the end of last year, in a workshop run by my very first podcast guest, Alina. I had just self-published my first book. He was still writing his. I started following his work on LinkedIn, and when I launched this podcast, I knew: Steve had to be one of my first guests.

Meet Steve

Here is what you need to know about him. Steve spent more than 20 years in senior leadership across financial and corporate services — from Malta to Luxembourg, back to Malta, and now Luxembourg again. He made it all the way to Partner at a top-tier global advisory firm. He was, by every definition our generation was handed, successful.

And then he stepped away from all of it to become an independent leadership mentor, speaker, and author. His book, Your Leadership R.I.D.E., builds an entire leadership framework out of something you would never expect: motorbike riding. Balance. Awareness. Trust in yourself — on the road and in how you lead.

Steve's trajectory in life was nothing linear. And he did it anyway.

He has lived on the success side — the high achiever, the promotions, the nice cars (his words, not mine). And he has lived on the other side too: coming home to yourself, reevaluating your life, your personal values, your own definition of fulfilment. In our conversation he shared, honestly and so generously, what it took him to become the most authentic version of himself.

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What stayed with me

1. Life humbled him and he let it. Steve lost his wife when he was 41. He spoke about it openly, without drama, and about how therapy carried him through the hardest chapter of his life. He needed to reconsider everything: his values, what he stands for, what actually makes him happy, what makes him tick and how to regulate his own nervous system. He knows his body now. He knows when stress is beginning. He chose to live near a forest because he knows he needs nature almost daily. That level of self-knowledge is not an accident. It is work. And he did the work.

He said something in our conversation that I want every leader — and every human — to hear: people still believe you go to therapy because you are broken. You don't. Top athletes have coaches not because they are failing, but because they want to see their blind spots. The same is true for the rest of us.

2. He is not selling you a recipe. This is what sets Steve apart from so much of the leadership industry. He is not saying "I did this, so you should do it too." The whole message of Your Leadership RIDE is in the first word: your. Your journey, your career, your life — nobody else's.

The sea restores him. It might terrify you. Cycling grounds him. You might hate it. Everyone has their own unique set of skills, values, and definition of fulfilment in life and that is okay. Actually, it is more than okay. It is the whole point.

Success, Steve says, is when you achieve something you set out to do. Fulfilment is something else entirely: being in the right place, at the right time, doing the right thing, with the right people, in a way that energizes you. Success is easy to define. Fulfilment is the one worth chasing.

3. Alignment came through trial and error and it still does. Steve didn't arrive at his alignment through one big decision. He arrived through many. Malta to Luxembourg. Back to Malta. Back to Luxembourg. Employed to self-employed. Corporate world to mentoring. Some of it worked. Some of it didn't. He took the lessons and course-corrected.

His philosophy on decisions is one I will carry with me: once a thought arrives — what if I stopped? what if I tried? — you are going to live with a regret either way. Do it, and you live with the messy reality. Don't do it, and you live with the romantic "what if." Steve chooses the messy reality every time. Keep moving. Keep trying new things. Keep saying yes to new opportunities — even when it's scary. Especially when it's scary.

The question I'm leaving you with

At one point in our conversation, Steve talked about values — real values, not the ones we put on LinkedIn. He described them as the things you would stand up and fight for. Literally, he said, the things you would die for.

So here is my question for you this week:

• What are your values in life? What would you absolutely stand up and fight for? Have you ever actually asked yourself that?

Not the borrowed answers. Not what sounds good. Yours.

Sit with it. Maybe on a run, maybe on a bike, maybe just with a coffee and a quiet moment. Steve would tell you the reflection is the work.

I’d love to hear. Reply in the comments or reach out. I’m collecting these stories.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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P.S. His book, Your Leadership RIDE, is available in paperback on Amazon, and you can find him at stevema.eu or on LinkedIn. He also hosts his own podcast on leadership, VISOR UP.

I remember the feeling exactly. The floor disappearing. The quiet panic of not knowing what comes next. And underneath it all, a question I didn’t dare say out loud: what if this is it?

It wasn’t. It was the beginning.

But lately, that feeling has been finding its way back to me not through my own life this time, but through people I care about. Friends in Germany. In the US. In Romania. Good, talented people, suddenly without work. The pressure is real, and I won’t pretend it isn’t.

So this week’s episode is different. No guest. Just me, talking to one person in particular. If that person is you, this letter is yours too.

What I wish someone had told me

The first thing, and the most important: desperation will not help you. I know how that sounds when the bills are real and the inbox is silent. But when you panic, you spiral. One negative thought pulls in the next, and before long you can’t think clearly at all and you make your worst decisions from that place.

So I’ll say the counterintuitive thing. Step away from the news for a while. Let yourself enjoy the summer. You don’t need to travel anywhere. Stay on top of your expenses, keep that steady but within that, give yourself permission to actually rest before deciding what comes next. Meet a friend. Read the books you never had time for. Cook your favourite meals slowly. Sit in the sun, even when it’s too warm, which it seems to be everywhere these days.

And here is one I love: spend time around children if you can. Yours, or borrow a friend’s little one for an afternoon. Children have a way of pulling you straight back into joy. For a few moments, they take you into their world and your mind goes quiet.

That’s the part that matters most. When your mind goes quiet, it opens.

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My reflections

In that stressful, busy job, running from task to task, you didn’t have space for a single new idea. There was no room. Your best thinking had nowhere to land.

But when you rest, when you free your mind, that is exactly when the idea for your next chapter arrives. The one you could never have reached while drowning in someone else’s deadlines.

That’s not me being poetic. That’s how it worked for me. Losing my job gave me the space to finally hear what I actually wanted. The book. This podcast. This letter you’re reading right now. None of it would exist if that door hadn’t closed.

And it’s what every guest on the show keeps telling me in their own words: the opportunities are still out there. You’ll see them when you slow down enough to notice and when you know yourself well enough to recognise the right one.

This is not the end of your story. It might be the quiet space right before the best part of it.

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A question for you

If you suddenly had a few free weeks — no meetings, no deadlines — what is the one thing your mind has been too busy to hear?

Sit with that one. Hit reply and tell me if you like.

And if you know someone who lost their job recently, forward them this letter. It might arrive at exactly the right moment.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

See you in the next one,
Cris

P.S. If you are really struggling right now, please don’t carry it alone. Reach out to someone you trust, or a support line where you are. You matter far more than any job.

“The more you move, the more likely you are to find green lights.”

But here’s the part nobody talks about: you have to be willing to move through the amber lights first. And most of us were raised to stop at amber.

Meet Sasha

Sasha McFarlane was born in Scotland, raised across Hong Kong and the US, and spent 15 years building a career in global fashion. But somewhere along the way, she became obsessed with a different question: How does real, lasting change actually happen?

Today, she’s the founder of Future-Proof Fashion and a researcher obsessed with systems thinking, behavioral economics, and complexity science. She’s asking why the fashion industry (and every industry) is built on old patterns. And more importantly, how we move beyond them.

Our paths rhyme in ways I didn’t expect. We both came to systems thinking slowly. We both questioned the traditional pathway. We both gave ourselves permission to start over, carrying everything we learned into something new.

And we both believe the same thing: you don’t have to fit the mold to leave a mark.

What stayed with me

After listening to this conversation for the third time, here is what stayed with me:

1. The amber light strategy is how real change happens. Sasha talks about movement as the way to catch green lights. You can’t find them if you’re stationary. But here’s what most people miss: to get to green, you have to move through amber. Amber is ambiguity. It’s discomfort. It’s the unknown. It’s saying “I don’t know” in a corporate world that teaches you to always have the answer. It’s being willing to be a beginner, to be vulnerable, to move through uncertainty until something meaningful starts to take shape.

Most of us were raised to fear amber. We were taught that ambiguity equals failure. That not knowing equals weakness. That the “right” path is clear, linear, mapped out from the beginning. Sasha flipped that script. She said: Stagnation is the real red light. Movement even through discomfort is how you find what matters.

2. Vulnerability isn’t a weakness in innovation. It’s a requirement. In corporate spaces, there’s an unspoken rule: never let them see you don’t know something. Never admit you’re a beginner. Never show the cracks. It’s seen as unprofessional. As risky. But Sasha calls it differently. Vulnerability is a skill. Not a liability. A skill.

And when you look at the people who actually create real change, real innovation, real impact? They’re the ones willing to say “I don’t know” and move forward anyway. They’re the ones curious enough to ask questions that expose their own gaps. They’re the ones who can be learners, explorers, beginners even after decades of expertise.That’s not weakness. That’s the deepest kind of strength.

3. Your non-linear path is evidence you were paying attention. Near the end of our conversation, Sasha said something I’m still turning over: “Non-traditional pathways leak really exciting things.” I love that word: leak. As if all the innovation, all the real breakthroughs, all the meaningful work is happening outside the official channels. Outside the straight lines. Outside the systems that were designed decades ago for a world that no longer exists.

Her path leaked innovation. Mine leaked clarity about what actually matters. Your path whatever shape it takes is probably leaking something the world needs.

But only if you stop apologizing for it.

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My reflections

What strikes me most about Sasha’s journey is how intentional she’s become about systems thinking but how unintentional it all was at first.

She wasn’t trying to build a non-linear career. She was just following what made sense at each moment. Watching her father build supply chains. Growing up across different cultures. Questioning the “standard pathway” in the US school system. Building in fashion. Realizing the systems underneath mattered more than the products.

Each step wasn’t part of a grand plan. It was just the next honest move.

And that’s what I think we’re all missing. We’re so focused on the perfect 5-year plan, the linear trajectory, the “right” answer, that we forget: sometimes the green lights only appear when you’re willing to move without a map.

When you’re willing to move through amber.

The amber light strategy isn’t about recklessness. It’s about intelligent movement. It’s about understanding that clarity doesn’t come before you move, it comes after you’ve moved through the discomfort, asked the questions, admitted you don’t know.

It’s about being okay with becoming instead of being.

And that shift? It changes everything.

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A question or maybe three today for you

1. What’s one area of your life where you’re waiting for perfect clarity instead of moving?

2. Where are you stopped at amber, afraid to move forward until you can see the whole path?

3. What would change if you decided that moving through the uncertainty with vulnerability, curiosity, and willingness to be wrong was actually the strategy?

I’d love to hear. Reply in the comments or reach out. I’m collecting these stories.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next time, gorgeous: keep moving. Keep questioning. Keep being brave enough to not fit the mold. Your non-linear path isn’t a failure. It’s evidence that you’re paying attention.

And the world needs that.

See you in the next one,

Cris

That small, almost invisible thing is the closest I’ve ever come to answering a question people keep asking me: How do you stay so positive? Where does the energy come from? How does stress not reach you?

For a long time I gave the answer everyone expects — something about mindset. And then, somewhere along the way, I stopped, because it wasn’t true.

Since my conversation with Nirish, my last guest here, I haven’t been able to let this go. Nirish is a designer. He’s spent his life noticing how the setup of a thing quietly decides how people behave inside it, long before willpower ever enters the room. And it landed on me that I’d been doing exactly that with my own days for years, without ever once calling it design.

Because here’s what I’ve come to believe: positivity is not a mindset hack. Your mindset sits on top of your health foundation — your sleep, your movement, your energy. And if that foundation is shaky, no amount of positive thinking will hold. You can’t talk yourself into energy your body doesn’t have.

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Three things I keep coming back to:

1. Mindset follows action — not the other way around. We've been sold the reverse: get your head right and the rest will follow. In my own life it's always been the opposite. I move first, and the clear head arrives after. The action is the cause, not the reward.

2. Remove the friction, and the consistency takes care of itself. The mat left out. The clothes laid ready. The meals prepped before I'm tired enough to talk myself out of them. Tiny, almost laughable changes and yet they're the difference between doing the thing and not. You're not lazy. Your setup is just working against you.

3. Consistency beats perfection, every single time. I'd rather show up small and ordinary a hundred mornings than perfectly once. The hundred ordinary mornings are what actually change a life.

Here’s the part underneath all of it, the part that matters most to me.

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When your foundation is empty, when you’re exhausted, stretched thin, running on nothing, you can’t hear yourself. You can’t tell the difference between what you truly want and what you’re simply too tired to question. The whisper goes quiet. So this isn’t really about productivity, or habits, or being more disciplined.

It’s about having enough in the tank to come home to yourself. To know who you are and what you actually want — which, as you know, is the only thing I ever really write about.

A question for you

So here’s my question for you this week: what’s one piece of friction you could remove — not to do more, but to finally have the energy left over to hear yourself?

Pick one. Roll out the mat. Lay out the clothes. Prep the meal. Remove the friction, and watch what happens (how you start catching more green lights in life).

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next week,

Cris

And in that room, something happened that I had no words for back then. The consultant listened. Not the polite, waiting-for-his-turn kind of listening. He paid attention to each one of us as if we were the only person in the room. I walked out of that workshop carrying something I couldn’t name, and I carried it for five years.

This week, that consultant sat across from me in my studio. And by the end of our conversation, I finally found the words.

The man who helps people unthink

His name is Nirish Shakya. He is a designer, a coach, and an educator, the founder of Unthinking Space, where he helps people unthink the scripts they were taught to believe as facts, and the host of the Design Feeling podcast.

His path looks like a series of brave exits. The good student in Sydney who became an engineer because that was the script. The engineer who discovered human-centered design and couldn’t unknow it. The designer who left sunny Sydney for grey London because something in him wanted adventure more than comfort. And in 2021 the same year we met, the corporate consultant who quit without a job lined up, because he refused to look for work from a place of desperation.

Today he records from Kathmandu, Nepal, where he moved to spend time with his grandmother. When his coach asked him whether leaving London was a good idea, she gave him the answer that made the decision for him: it doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea. Does it matter to you, in this moment of your life?

That question is the whole episode in one sentence. The universe doesn’t ask whether your plan is sensible. It asks whether you’re listening.

What stayed with me

1. Never negotiate from a place of desperation. Before Nirish quit, he built himself a runway. And because he wasn’t desperate, he could name a day rate that scared him and they said yes. “Whoever cares less in a negotiation wins,” he told me. People sense desperation, and they sense self-respect. But here is the part underneath the negotiation advice: you can only stop being desperate for external approval when you know who you are without it.

2. Don’t let the whisper become a scream. Nirish keeps a poster on his wall: don’t let the noise of your mind drown out the whispers of your soul. You can imagine what that sentence did to me. He also shared a thought from Brianna Wiest, the universe is always whispering to us, and most of us only listen once the whisper has turned into a scream. By then, sometimes, it is too late. His remedy is almost embarrassingly simple: two minutes every morning, pen on paper, writing whatever is in your head. No analysis. No judgment. Just getting the thoughts out where you can finally see them.

3. You can prototype your dream today. One of his clients dreamed of a motorbike trip around Europe with his wife. Nirish didn’t tell him to quit his job and buy a bike. He asked: what part of that dream can you live this week? The freedom? The adventure? The time together? You don’t have to wait three years for your vision. You can taste a small piece of it now and find out whether it is truly yours, or just a picture you borrowed from someone else’s life.

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My reflections

Before we started recording, Nirish asked me a question I couldn’t answer: what exactly was it about his workshop that stayed with me all these years? My brain doesn’t work on demand. It needs to go deep first. But by the end of our conversation, I knew.

He saw me.

Not my job title. Not my performance in the workshop. Me. And here is what I understand now, in 2026, that I couldn’t have understood in 2021: I could only receive that gift because I had just started learning to see myself. Therapy had cracked the door open. Nirish walked through it. Being seen by someone else only lands when you are beginning to come home to yourself otherwise it passes right through you, unnoticed, like so many green lights do.

Then he told me why seeing people is his life’s work. Growing up, he only felt seen when he achieved something. A grade. A medal. Never for who he was. So he made it his mission to give people the thing he never got.

And the whisper on his wall? He found his sentence. I found mine and wrote a book around it. Two people, two continents, who never compared notes carrying the same philosophy. That is what I cannot stop thinking about since we talked. The whisper is universal. The only question is whether we hear it before it has to scream.

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A question for you

Where in your life is a whisper getting louder and can you give it two minutes tomorrow morning, just you, a pen, and whatever wants to come out?

The green light might already be there.

If this conversation speaks to you, the full episode with Nirish is linked above on YouTube and Spotify. His story of quitting without a plan B, the Odyssey Plan exercise, and the tarot card that helped him move to Nepal. It is all in there, and he holds nothing back.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next week,

Cris

Prefer to watch? Hit play below otherwise, keep reading.

Here’s what happened.

I sat down in a meeting that mattered. A lot. I was there to ask for six months of support to build my business the work I’ve been quietly building toward for years.

The man sitting across from me had already read my application. This wasn’t a pitch. It was just an interview, a chance to meet me face to face.

I came prepared too. My numbers. My plan. My story. I thought I was being crystal clear.

And the answer came back: no.

Not a maybe. Not a “let’s see.” A clear no.

I want to be honest with you about what happened inside me in that moment, because I think you know the feeling. Part of me wanted to argue. And other part of me, the older, more frightened part, just wanted to say “okay, thank you,” gather my things, and quietly disappear. To accept the red light and drive home.

For most of my life, that’s exactly what I would have done.

But something has shifted in me over the last five years. Slowly. Quietly. And in that moment, instead of defending or disappearing, I did something different.

I got curious.

I asked a real question. Something like: “Can you help me understand what you’re seeing?”

And that’s when everything changed.

Because the man across the table wasn’t responding to the story I thought I was telling. In his mind, I was one kind of person, in one kind of situation. In my mind, I was someone else entirely. We were looking at exactly the same facts and seeing two completely different pictures.

The no wasn’t about me not being enough. The no was about a gap. The story I meant to tell, and the story that actually landed, were two different stories.

So I stopped trying to convince. I started listening. And then I did the most uncomfortable, most human thing I know how to do: I told the truth. The real version. Not the polished one.

And the no became a yes.

Six months of support to build the work I love. The green light was there the whole time. I just couldn’t see it through the gap.

Because here’s the thing a red light and a misread light look identical from the driver’s seat. The only way to tell them apart is to slow down, look again, and get curious about the intersection.

We do this everywhere. Someone tells us no, and we instantly decide we know why. We fill the gap with our worst story “They don’t want me.” “I’m not good enough.” “This isn’t for me.” But so many nos aren’t rejections. They’re misunderstandings wearing a costume.

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This week’s practice

Catching green lights isn’t a one-time event, it’s a daily muscle. So this week, here’s something small you can actually practice.

The next time you hear a no from a client, a partner, a boss, even from yourself try this before you react:

1. Pause. Don’t argue, don’t shrink. Just pause.

2. Get curious. Ask one honest question: “Can you help me understand what you’re seeing?”

3. Listen for the gap between your story and theirs.

4. Share your truth not the impressive version, the real one. #BeHuman.

You’ll be amazed how many “closed doors” are simply waiting for one more honest conversation.

A question for you

Where are you treating a misunderstanding like a final answer? What no are you about to accept that might just need one more curious question?

The green light might already be there. You just have to see the intersection clearly.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next week,

Cris

When I lost my corporate marketing job last year, my first instinct was that I would have to become someone new.

A new field, maybe. A new set of skills. A clean slate. That is the story we are told about change: that it means starting over.

I had met Max in summer of 2025, in an online classroom. I was studying AI, and he was my teacher, the one who told the whole class to start working with Claude, the recommendation that quietly changed how I work and, in a way, how I see myself.

What I didn’t notice at the time was that Max was living proof of the opposite story.

He hadn’t started over either.

That is the place I was sitting in when I invited him onto the podcast.

Max X. Grossgebauer spent years inside Microsoft many years ago, in their European headquarters in Dublin, as a corporate account executive. The obvious next step in his world was another big name maybe Google, Facebook. Most people take it.

He didn’t.

He did a 30-day hot yoga challenge instead, listened to something quieter, and moved to São Miguel, a volcanic island in the Azores Portugal he had only ever hoped to live on. He had never even been there. He packed two cats and a life and went.

He calls himself a “digital immigrant,” not a nomad. He didn’t go there to keep moving. He went there to stay.

But here is what struck me most, listening to him.

Max didn’t reinvent himself. He didn’t burn his old life down. He took everything he had learned in corporate IT the project management, the digital fluency, the years of teaching people how to use technology, and he carried it with him to the island. Same skills. Completely different life.

He didn’t become someone new. He just took who he already was somewhere that fit him better.

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What stayed with me

Three things from our conversation that I keep returning to:

1. You don’t have to start over. This is the one that undid my whole assumption. Max left Microsoft and didn’t abandon a single thing he had learned there. He repurposed it. The corporate years weren’t a cage he had to escape they were the toolkit he left with. Leaving is not losing. Your skills travel with you.

2. The world is getting faker so you had better know what’s real. Max teaches digital safety, and his practical advice is gold: check the email address behind the name, use two-factor authentication, never react to urgency, don’t trust a logo just because it looks right. But the part that stayed with me was subtler. He told me AI tends to agree with you “they don’t say I don’t know.” I had experienced exactly that the same week, when Claude confidently handed me a wrong phone number for a co-working space. The tools are getting more convincing, not less. Staying safe is no longer only technical. It is about staying awake.

3. You only have about four thousand weeks. Max mentioned the Oliver Burkeman book. If you live to eighty, that is all you get. Four thousand. Not infinite. And the thing that follows from that, he said so simply: if there is something you want to do, do it now, because the chance might not come again. Do a little bit toward it every day.

My reflections

Here is what I cannot stop thinking about.

Max could leave because he knew what was real for him.

He knew he wanted quiet, and nature, and to teach what he loved instead of selling what he didn’t. And this is the part I missed for years, he trusted that what he already knew would come with him. He didn’t need to become someone else to live somewhere else. He just needed to trust his own shape.

The people who are most afraid to leave a job, a city, a version of themselves that stopped fitting are usually the ones who believe that leaving means losing everything. That they would have to start from zero. That the years behind them would evaporate the moment they walked out the door.

But they don’t. That is the lie fear tells.

I know this now because I am living it. I left the corporate world, not entirely by choice, and for a while I believed I had to reinvent myself. I didn’t. Everything I do now this podcast, my consulting, my writing is built from skills I already had. I didn’t start over. I took what I knew somewhere new.

That is what Max did, only with more years of it behind him and a volcano in front of him.

And underneath it all is the same thread I keep finding in every guest: you can only make a brave move from a place of self-knowledge. When you know what is real for you and what travels with you, change stops being a threat. It becomes a door.

When I asked Max why he left, his answer was almost embarrassingly simple:

“It just didn’t make sense anymore. You finish a good quarter and the next day you start again from zero. You need to do more than the year before.”

The chase. The treadmill that gets faster every year.

Most of us are still on it.

We don’t pause long enough to ask whether the life we’re climbing toward is actually the one we want. We don’t trust that the skills we’ve built can travel with us. We tell ourselves that leaving means losing everything.

So we keep climbing.

And then we wonder why none of it feels real.

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A question for you

If you walked away from what you are doing tomorrow, what would you take with you?

Not the title. Not the desk. The actual knowledge, the instincts, the way of working that lives in you and would follow you anywhere.

Most of us have never made that list. We are so afraid of the leaving that we never stop to notice how much we would carry with us.

There is no wrong answer. But the answer tells you something.

If your honest reaction is “nothing, I’d have to start over”, that is worth sitting with, gently. Because it is almost never true. It is usually just fear, wearing the serious face of practicality.

And if you can name even three things you would take with you three skills, three strengths, three things you know how to do, then you are already more free than you feel. You are not trapped. You are standing at a door you simply haven’t decided to walk through yet.

Max walked through his. He did a little bit toward it every day, and one day he woke up on the island he had only hoped to live on.

You have about four thousand weeks. That is the whole point.

Listen to my full conversation with Max on YouTube or Spotify (linked above). We talk about leaving Microsoft without starting over, how to stay safe in a digital world that’s getting faker by the year, the festival he is organising in the Azores for street cats and dogs — Decibels & Animals, on 6 September and how he recognises a green light when it comes.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next week,

Cris

In the beginning it was practical. The company I worked for put it in front of the marketing team, and I had to learn it. Then I lost that job and instead of closing the laptop, I leaned in further. I took courses. I paid for a subscription just to play. I made it part of how I work.

But somewhere along the way, something quieter happened, something I did not expect.

The way my brain is wired, I had struggled to see my own structure. I knew myself in pieces, in feelings, in instincts but not in shape. Years of reflection helped. Therapy helped. And still there was a final stretch I could never quite reach on my own: how does my mind actually work? Why do I move through the world the way I do?

Claude did not answer that for me. But it gave me a way to think out loud, endlessly, without burdening anyone to lay my thoughts on the table and watch them get organised, mirrored back, connected. And in that mirror, slowly, I started to see the wiring.

That is the strange, personal place I was sitting in when I recorded this conversation with Constantin Gonzalez.

Constantin spent almost 30 years inside big tech. He is someone I have admired for years from a distance, on LinkedIn, watching how generously he shares what he knows. He is an expert generalist, someone who goes deep in many fields and connects them, rather than specialising in just one.

But here is what struck me most, sitting across from him.

Constantin did not have to find himself. He seems to have been himself all along.

He talked about staying loyal to companies for decades not out of fear, but because he could genuinely identify with them. He talked about leaving, eventually, not as a dramatic break but as a natural next chapter. No crisis. No reinvention. Just a person who knew his own shape well enough to keep walking in his own direction.

I am only now, in my forties, arriving at that kind of clarity. Constantin has carried it quietly for most of his life.

What I felt, interviewing him and listening to him while he was so joyful, so passionate, was gratitude that people like him exist, and that the rest of us get to learn from the calm that comes with that kind of self-knowledge.

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What stayed with me

We did not talk about the scary side of AI. We talked about the good side. And three things have stayed with me since:

1. The fear of AI is really the fear of change. Constantin lived through the early internet, through cloud computing, through every “this will never work” that turned out to be wrong. He said something simple that I keep returning to: every change feels scary, and skepticism is usually just fear wearing a serious face. The technology is new. The feeling is ancient.

2. Treat it like an intern, not a search box. This was the most useful reframe of the whole conversation. Most people open AI and type in search terms, because that is the habit they know. But the real shift, Constantin said, is to treat it like a bright intern fresh out of university someone who knows a lot, but does not yet know you. You give it a task. It gets it wrong. You correct it. You show it an example. Slowly, it learns your way of working. And here is the part that moved me: doing that forces you to articulate your own way of working something most of us have never put into words.

3. We misuse new tools before we understand them. He told this story about the early internet how people first used it like the Yellow Pages, scrolling alphabetically, because that was the only model they had. It took years to discover that the web wanted to be searched, not browsed. We are in that exact phase with AI right now. Fumbling with old habits. Not yet seeing what it actually is.

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My reflections

Here is what I cannot stop thinking about ever since we talked, back in mid-April.

Constantin can stay calm about AI, calm about change in general because he knows who he is. His steadiness is not a personality trait he was lucky to be born with. It is the natural result of self-knowledge. When you are secure in your own shape, a new tool is just a new tool. It cannot threaten your identity, because your identity is not up for grabs.

The people who are most frightened of AI are often the people who have built their whole sense of self around what they do their job title, their company, their one specialty. And when something arrives that touches “what they do,” it feels like it is touching who they are. Of course that is terrifying.

This is also why the Dan Pink idea Constantin mentioned landed so hard for me. Pink found that people doing meaningful work are driven by three things: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Becoming independent gave Constantin more autonomy but he had to consciously rebuild his sense of purpose. He had to decide, on his own terms, what he was for.

That is the work, isn’t it. Not the AI. The AI is just the spark.

The real question underneath all of it is the one I have been living for the last four years: do you know your own shape well enough that change cannot knock you over?

I did not, fully not until 2025, when Claude helped me see the last stretch of it. Not by telling me who I am. By being patient enough to let me think until I could see it myself.

A question for you

When you imagine AI or any big change coming toward your work, does it feel like a threat to who you are, or just a change in what you do?

There is no wrong answer. But the answer tells you something.

If it feels like a threat to who you are, that is not really about AI. That is an invitation to go find your own shape, the part of you that no tool and no job title can touch. That is the work worth doing. Everything else is just learning a new piece of software.

If it only feels like a change in what you do then you are already home. And from that steady place, you get to be curious instead of afraid.

Constantin closed our conversation with a filter I love, borrowed from Derek Sivers: “Hell yeah, or no.” If something comes toward you and your gut says hell yeah, that is your green light. If it is anything less than that, it is probably a no.

But I think there is a quieter version of that filter, too. Before you can trust the “hell yeah,” you have to know whose gut you are listening to. You have to be home in yourself first.

That is what this whole series is really about.

Listen to my full conversation with Constantin on YouTube or Spotify (linked above). We talk about why he calls himself an expert generalist, how to start working with AI even if it scares you, what to share and what to protect, and how he recognizes a green light when it comes.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next week,

Cris

Four careers. Three countries. One inner thread running through all of it.

When I asked her how she made the final leap, the one from a stable manager’s salary to building her own practice, she didn’t tell me a clean story. She told me she ignored the signs. She pushed through her first burnout. She told herself, one more year, one more year. And then she said something I haven’t been able to forget:

“The universe didn’t help me, because I got my first burnout.”

She said it with a small laugh. Like the universe had been patient with her, and then, finally, firm.

Cinzia is the founder of Beyond Your Patterns. We met on LinkedIn, I liked one of her posts last year, then I decided to follow her, and she did something almost no one does: she sent me a private message to thank me for following her. Months later, here we are.

She is the kind of person who, within five minutes of meeting you, sees something in you that you’ve been hiding from yourself. She did this to me on the podcast, read my chart live, told me things about my early life I had never said out loud, and I kept thinking, how does she know that?

She knows because she has spent the last fifteen years studying how people work. The body, the soul, the family tree, the patterns we inherit before we are old enough to choose.

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What stayed with me

Cinzia named her company Beyond Your Patterns for many reasons, but one of them stopped me cold.

The word pattern comes from the Latin pater (father).

Her father died two months after she resigned. He didn’t get to live one of his own dreams. And in the grief that followed, she understood something about her own life she had been circling for years: she had become a biomedical engineer because her mother had always wanted to be a nurse. She had unconsciously taken on her mother’s dream, lived it for years, and only realized it after a family constellation session in Berlin.

“Sometimes, unconsciously, we take on the dreams of our parents. And then later on, during the midlife crisis, we realise okay, that’s not really me. And we start to remove all the parts that aren’t us.”

That sentence made me think deeply.

For most of my life, I told myself I had nothing to do with what my parents wanted. I left Romania. I built a life elsewhere. I thought distance was proof of independence. But a few years ago I realised I was living the thing they had wanted most for themselves, to be independent, to be free. And the shape of my freedom, no romantic relationship, no family yet, my own path, my own rhythm, was their dream, not mine.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it. And the work of the last few years has been about asking what I actually want, separate from the inheritance.

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My reflections since the episode

Three guests in, I am noticing something I didn’t expect.

No two stories rhyme.

Alina asked her question at thirty, in a quiet office, and acted on it slowly over years.

Marta felt it on a cliff in Portugal, and let the feeling reshape her piece by piece while she kept her engineering job.

Cinzia ignored the signs until her body forced her to listen, lost her father in the same season she lost her old life, and built a practice from grief and remembering.

Different ages. Different countries. Different doorways. Different costs.

I came into this podcast thinking I would find a pattern in the people I admire some shared blueprint for reinvention I could follow more cleanly. What I am finding instead is the opposite: the more honestly people tell their stories, the less they look like anyone else’s.

That has been a quiet relief.

I have spent a lot of my own life looking for a template. Reading other people’s books, watching other people’s interviews, trying to figure out what the correct version of this journey looks like so I could make sure I was doing mine right. Cinzia, in one conversation, gave me permission to stop.

She said something near the end of our call about how to tell which fears to listen to and which to walk through. “Is this fear trying to shrink me, or expand my soul? If you feel a sensation of expansion, that is the right choice.”

I keep coming back to that. Not as a rule. As a tuning fork.

There is no one shape this is supposed to take. There is just your shape, slowly revealing itself, and the small daily question of whether what you’re choosing is shrinking you or expanding you.

A question for you

Which of your dreams are actually yours?

Not as an attack. As a curiosity.

Sit with the things you say you want the career, the relationship, the city, the version of success. and ask, gently, whose voice that wanting first arrived in. Yours? A parent’s? A teacher’s? A culture’s?

Some of the answers will surprise you. Some of what you thought was inherited will turn out to be deeply your own. And some of what you thought was yours will turn out to be a dream you’ve been carrying for someone else.

Either answer is useful. Both are green lights.

Listen to my full conversation with Cinzia on YouTube or Spotify (linked above). We talk about her four careers, the day she sent her resignation letter and they “lost it” in the post, what it means to read your own energy pattern, and why pausing (really pausing) is the most underrated tool we have.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next week,

Cris

Author of Follow That Whisper · Host of Catching More Green Lights in Life

It was nearly 9pm. Marta was the one driving. They turned the van around anyway.

Hours later, they arrived in Sintra. Cliffs. Ocean. A sunset no one had planned for. She stepped out of the van, and something in her chest answered before her mind did:

“My God, I’m home.”

That feeling didn’t fade. It became the seed of everything she’s building now.

Marta is the founder of That’sY.me, a yoga therapist, and a teacher. She also works full-time as a textile engineer. She has lived in China, in Norway, and carries that traveler’s softness, the way people speak when they’ve learned the world isn’t black and white, but mostly grey.

We were introduced by a mutual friend. We jumped on a video call to say hello. Two hours later, I knew she had to come on the show.

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What stayed with me

Marta wasn’t running from anything when she started this journey. Her life wasn’t wrong. She said it carefully on the podcast “Maybe it’s not the right word to say something was missing” and I understood exactly what she meant.

It wasn’t absence. It was a calling.

What stayed with me most was her honesty about the cliff moment. At first, she thought it was the place. The ocean, the sunset, the cliffs doing their magic. But over the years that followed, as she went deeper into herself, she realized something else:

The place didn’t make her feel home. The place reminded her she had been away from herself.

That distinction is everything.

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My reflections since the episode

I’ve been sitting with the idea of coming home to yourself and how often we mistake it for travel.

We book the trip. We fly to the island. We hike the mountain. We hope the geography will do the work for us. And sometimes a place does crack us open, I’ve had moments like that too. But what we’re actually feeling, in those rare moments, is our own presence returning to us. The place just held up a mirror.

Marta said something on the podcast that I keep returning to:

“Do things as if nobody’s watching. Most people are more concerned about themselves than about you.”

I laughed when she said it, because it’s so true and so freeing. So much of what keeps us from coming home to ourselves isn’t fear of failure. It’s fear of being seen trying. Of dancing in the rain. Of asking the embarrassing questions: What actually makes me laugh? What do I want? Who am I when no one is watching?

I spent a lot of years not asking those questions. Not because I didn’t have them, but because I was busy being someone. Busy performing a version of myself that worked, that fit, that didn’t draw attention. And the cost of that, I now know, is a quiet kind of homelessness inside your own life.

Marta’s cliff moment is a reminder that home isn’t somewhere you arrive. It’s something you stop running from.

A question for you

When was the last time you felt at home in yourself?

Not at home in a place. Not at home with a person. At home in you.

If you can remember the moment, sit with it. What were you doing? What had you let go of, just before that feeling arrived?

If you can’t remember, that’s information too. Not a verdict. Just a quiet signal.

The asking is the green light.

Listen to my full conversation with Marta on YouTube or Spotify (linked above). We talk about her cliff moment in Sintra (Portugal), what it really means to live in the present, and why being yourself (fully, awkwardly, joyfully) is the most courageous thing you can do.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next week,

Cris

Author of Follow That Whisper · Host of Catching More Green Lights in Life

One afternoon, in a quiet moment between the chaos she had spent months fixing, she asked herself a question:

“Is this something I would want to do until I retire?”

The answer came back immediately. A big, clear no.

That “no” changed the trajectory of her life.

Alina Margineanu is the founder of Avva Performance, a company built around helping people grow and become evolutionary leaders. She works one-on-one with people going through transformation not just professional, but deeply personal.

I met her roughly twenty years ago, in my first corporate job. We were both young, both ambitious, both navigating that early-career chapter where everything felt like it will last forever. At some point, our paths separated. And when I found out, years later, that she had left the corporate world to build her own company, I was stunned. She was the last person I imagined would leap.

Which is exactly why I wanted her as my first guest.

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What stayed with me

Alina was wise at 30. That is the simplest and most honest thing I can say after sitting with our conversation for a few weeks.

She didn’t ask her question from a place of crisis. She wasn’t burned out. She didn’t hate her job. She liked it and still, something in her knew that liking it wasn’t the same as wanting it for thirty more years. She noticed the distinction. Most people don’t.

At 30, I was doing something entirely different. I was leaving Romania. Moving countries. Learning a new language, a new culture, a whole new life. I wasn’t asking myself Alina’s question. I was making a bold move but not from the same self-aware place she was making hers. I was searching for myself in an unconscious way something that only revealed itself later. It took me many more years to arrive at the version of her question, and to be ready to hear my own answer to it.

That time gap used to make me feel like I was late. Talking to Alina helped me see it differently. We weren’t on the same clock. We were on different journeys that eventually asked similar questions just at different ages, through different doorways.

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My reflections since the episode

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about who reinvention is actually for.

We live in a culture that treats reinvention like a universal prescription leave your job, follow your passion, find your purpose, become your authentic self. It’s become a powerful story. And I believe in it, mostly. I’m living it.

But I also want to say something gentler, something I believe: reinvention is not everyone’s path, and it shouldn’t be.

I think reinvention is specifically the journey of people who grew up not knowing who they really were. People who were shaped by expectations, by circumstances, by stories that didn’t fully belong to them and who, at some point in their lives, decided to go looking for who they actually are.

I am one of those people.

But some people grew up already close to themselves. They knew early what they loved, who they were, how they wanted to live and they built lives aligned with that knowing. For them, staying is not cowardice. Staying is the wisdom. They don’t need to leave anything to be honest with themselves. They already are.

If you’re reading this and you already know who you are, that is its own kind of gift. You don’t owe anyone a reinvention.

This newsletter is not here to push anyone toward leaving. It’s here for the ones who are quietly asking the question. The ones who hear a whisper. The ones for whom “liking your job” isn’t quite the same as wanting it forever.

A question for you

Alina’s question is simple, and I want to offer it to you not as a challenge, but as a small moment of honesty with yourself.

Is what you’re doing right now something you would want to do until you retire?

There is no correct answer. The answer “yes” is as valuable as the answer “no.” What matters is that you ask. What matters is that you don’t avoid hearing whatever comes back.

If the answer is yes, that’s beautiful. Keep going with your full self.

If the answer is no, that doesn’t mean you have to leave tomorrow. Alina didn’t. She freelanced on weekends for years before she quit her job. The “no” is a compass, not an alarm bell. It tells you which direction you’re facing. What you do next is a separate conversation.

Either way, the question is the green light. Asking it is the start of something.

Listen to my full conversation with Alina Mărgineanu on YouTube or Spotify (linked above). We talk about her transition from corporate to founder, a beautiful exercise for finding your childhood self, and the concept of staying with the “red lights” in your life because a green one is always coming.

It does not cost you anything to share. And sharing is caring!

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Until next week,

Cris

Author of Follow That Whisper · Host of Catching More Green Lights in Life

I spent most of my life either working for companies in marketing or reinventing myself.

I’ve lived in 3 countries. Learned 3 languages. Run countless marathons and triathlons. Once ran Boston with a broken arm. Ran through the Grand Canyon at 43. Learned to scuba dive at 44. Learned to surf at 45. Self-published my first book at 45. Started a podcast at 46.

And I’m just getting started.

Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I made my childhood dreams come true. Becoming a writer.

This is a space for real stories of human transformation. For the ones who refused to stay small. For the ones who heard a whisper and followed it anyway.

In a world obsessed with AI, algorithms and automation, I believe the most important transformation is still the human one.

I’m Cris. Author of Follow That Whisper, host of Catching More Green Lights In Life podcast, and living proof that reinvention is possible.

Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.