I’m writing this from São Miguel in the Azores, Portugal, a few days before I fly home. This week’s episode came out of something that happened here: a 2:30am hike up the highest peak on the island, with a group of people who’d been strangers to me days earlier. Ten of us, nine other solo travelers and me, different ages, different countries, all reaching the summit together right as the sky opened into sunrise.

But the story isn’t really about the mountain. It’s about breakfast.

What Stayed With Me

1. Connection doesn't find you, you start it. Every morning at breakfast, I made a point of greeting whichever solo traveler was sitting alone. That one habit, repeated for days, is the entire reason ten of us ended up on a mountain together.

2. The question matters more than the greeting. Once the conversation started, the real move was asking what someone loved, not how they were. Asking a newer arrival about his favorite trail is what led us to the highest peak on the island in the first place.

3. Say yes before you feel ready. When the mountain guide in our group offered to organize the climb, plenty of us weren't physically or mentally prepared. Nobody backed out, and nobody was left behind.

Share

I used to believe connection was something that happened to you. You got lucky, you ended up at the right table, you met the right person by chance. Sitting on top of that mountain, watching the sky turn colors I don’t have real words for, surrounded by nine people who were strangers less than two weeks ago, I understood how wrong that belief was.

None of it happened to me. I built it, one breakfast at a time. I said good morning first. I asked a real question. I said YES to a climb.

Not everyone on that mountain became a friend, and that’s fine. That was never the goal. I’m flying home with a handful of people I’ll actually stay close to, people I’ll see again, and that is exactly how real connection works. It was never about being liked by everyone. It’s about showing up enough times that the right people stick.

A question for you

• What would happen if you said good morning to the person sitting alone tomorrow?

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!

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

• So, what do you do?

It is friendly. Nobody means anything by it. And for most of last year, I dreaded it.

Over a year and a half ago I lost my job. Finding another one in marketing turned out to be the hardest thing I have ever done. These are not easy times to be looking, and I want to be honest about that, because I know some of you reading this are in it right now.

So when someone at a dinner or a networking event turned to me, perfectly kindly, and asked what I do, I felt it drop. Like a bomb.

What the question actually does

It asks you for a category. And once someone has your category, the next question writes itself. Oh, you are in marketing, which company? Oh, you are a teacher, which subject?

If your category still fits you, that is fine. You answer, they follow the script, everyone is comfortable.

But if you have lost yours, or outgrown it, you have three options and all of them are bad.

You give the old answer. The job you do not have anymore. And you feel yourself doing it.

Or you tell the truth. I am looking. I am between things. I am figuring it out. And you watch their face do that small recalculation, and then comes the question you were dreading. So what is the plan? And you do not have one, because if you had a plan you would not be in the messy middle. You would be past it.

Or you give the rehearsed answer. Everybody in this situation has one. You wrote it in the car on the way there. Mine was terrible for months.

The part nobody talks about

Here is what that question costs, and I do not think most people see it.

People in the middle of a change stop going to things.

I did. There were events I should have gone to and I did not go. It was not because I was ashamed. It was because I was exhausted from performing a summary of myself that was not true yet. It is easier to stay home than to explain eleven times in one evening a life you are still building.

But those were exactly the rooms where the next thing was going to come from.

So the question does not just make people uncomfortable. It removes them. It takes the person who most needs to be around others, and it keeps them home.

That is what I mean by trapped. Every time you answer with the old label, you rehearse the old life one more time.

Subscribe now

Three things I would like you to take from this

1. Ask about a decision, not a category. I have been in São Miguel for two weeks and I have been meeting people every day.

   Alex is an expedition guide. She works on ships that go to the most extreme parts of the world. We walked one of the most beautiful trails on this island together, and by the end she had said yes to coming on the podcast.

   Gareth is a mountain guide. He spends his working life on mountains, and here he is on his holiday, walking up more mountains. For fun.

   If I had opened those conversations with what do you do, I would have three job titles. Guide, guide. Two labels. No people.

   Instead I asked how come they chose the Azores, and I got three lives.

   A category is something you were given. A decision is something you made. You thought about it, you probably defended it to someone, you maybe saved up for it. It is yours, and you are a little proud of it.

   Nobody has a rehearsed answer for how come you chose this. So you get the real thing.

2. When someone asks you, answer the question you wish they had asked. Someone says so what do you do, and you say: I am in the middle of changing that. Ask me what I am building.

   That is the whole sentence. Learn it, and say it proudly.

   It is honest. You are not pretending you still have the old job, and you are not handing over the version of yourself you feel worst about. And it tells the other person how to talk to you, which most of them are quietly grateful for, because they did not know either.

   The day I started saying something like that instead of apologising for not having a title was the day those conversations stopped costing me so much.

3. Choose the room. Marta was my second ever guest on this podcast. In March she invited me to her yoga retreat here. Five months later I am on an island in the middle of the Atlantic because of one conversation.

   I came for a week of yoga, but I had already decided from home that I was not leaving when it ended. So I had to figure out where to stay.

   I booked a hostel. My first one. A shared room, sleeping with strangers.

   Partly the money, I will be honest. But not only. Because I knew that if I booked a nice quiet apartment for myself, I would have a beautiful two weeks and I would speak to nobody.

   I did not hope to meet people. Hoping does not work. I put myself in a room where it was almost impossible not to.

Almost everyone here came alone, and none of them were waiting. Not for a partner, not for a group, not for a better year, not for someone to say it was okay. They looked at a map, booked the flight, and showed up.

You arrive alone, but whether you stay alone is completely up to you.

We tell ourselves that being alone means being lonely, so we do not go. And then we are alone at home, which is worse. It is the same thing as those events I skipped last year. Exactly the same.

And one more thing I did not expect. Losing that job made it the worst year I have had in a long time. But I am not sure I would be here, doing this, if it had not happened. That is not a nice thing to say to someone in the middle of it. I hated hearing it too.

A question for you

• What do you say when someone asks you what you do?

• And if you are in the middle of something right now, has that question ever kept you home?

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!

Share

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

This week's guest is Helene Knoll, and she is also a friend. I met her a year and a half ago in a yoga studio here in Düsseldorf, and I have been quietly admiring her ever since.

She spent most of her career as a mechanical engineer. Six years at the Max Planck Institute for Iron Research, then years running a scanning electron microscopy lab for a steel manufacturer, then technical sales. Today she is a certified nutritionist and naturopathy practitioner with her own YouTube channel and a community she guides through detox programs every year.

Two women in the same room, both a little unsure of how it would go. Helene doesn’t speak English often, and she said yes anyway. When we finished, she told me she couldn’t believe how good it felt.

Neither could I.

What stayed with me

1. The moment the story stopped adding up. Helene’s company offered a free blood analysis once a year. Her results came back with alarmingly high cholesterol, and the doctor called her in.

   When Helene walked through the door, the doctor was visibly surprised. She had been expecting a woman in her sixties, significantly overweight. Instead she got a woman in her forties who exercised three times a week.

   The doctor gave her the standard advice. Stop eating eggs. Stop eating butter.

   But Helene had already stopped eating those things, because that was what everyone said to do. So the advice didn’t just fail to help. It made no sense at all.

   That’s the moment. Not the test result. The moment where the explanation you were given doesn’t match your actual life, and you have to decide whether to accept it anyway or start looking for yourself.

   She started looking. It turned out the answer was sugar.

   A year earlier she had separated from her partner, moved into a small apartment, and gotten rid of her television. She taught herself to bake instead. Cake every day. Two slices on weekends. She had built a full sugar addiction without ever noticing it happen.

2. Quitting cold turkey didn't work. One small square did. She stopped sugar overnight and described it as withdrawing from a drug. Her body revolted.

   So she changed the approach. She bought good quality 70 percent dark chocolate and allowed herself one small piece, with one rule: she wasn’t allowed to chew it. She had to let it melt and pay full attention to the texture the entire time it took.

   She did this for over a year. Eventually the cravings simply weren’t there anymore.

   What strikes me isn’t the chocolate. It’s that she replaced restriction with attention. The thing that finally broke the addiction wasn’t willpower. It was presence.

3. Read until the first bad ingredient. Then put it back. I asked Helene for practical advice and she gave me the simplest possible version.

   Never read the front of the package. That side is marketing, always. The ninety-nine percent clean, the bio, the natural. Turn it around.

   The ingredients are listed by concentration, most first, least last. So what sits near the beginning is what you are actually buying, and what sits at the end is preservatives and colorants.

   And then the part I keep repeating to myself: read until you hit the first questionable ingredient, then stop and put it back on the shelf. You don’t need to finish the list.

   I asked about the scanning apps too, the ones where you point your phone at a barcode and get a score out of a hundred. She said no. Every app runs a different algorithm and none of them show you what’s behind the number. She has tested them against products whose labels she can read herself, and the scores didn’t match.

   Her line stayed with me. Switch on your brain and take responsibility for your own health, instead of handing that responsibility to an application.

Share

My reflections

There's a version of Helene's story that reads as a career change. Engineer becomes nutritionist. Non linear path, real change and the will to do the reinvention work.

Here is what I think happened. Based on what she told me in our conversation, her scientific brain refused to accept an answer that didn’t fit the evidence, and she followed that refusal all the way into a different life. The reinvention wasn’t the plan. It was the consequence. And I love such a story because reinventions are successful when they are done deliberately.

I keep thinking about how often we accept explanations simply because they came from someone with authority. The doctor said it. The label said it. The app gave it a green score. And most of the time that’s reasonable, because none of us can research everything. And we think to ourselves, who am I to question this?

Helene was 43 when she typed “modern professions” into Google and read the list one by one until she reached the word nutritionist. She was still working full time. She studied in parallel. Nothing about it was dramatic or cinematic. It was just a woman deciding she would rather understand something than be told about it.

And I have to be honest about my own week here, because sitting across from her in the same room taught me a version of the same lesson.

I have recorded every single episode of this podcast through a screen. It works. There was no real reason to change it. But being in the room with someone is different, and I only found that out because I was willing to be a beginner again at something I already know how to do.

The pauses land differently. You catch things a screen would never show you.

A question for you

• Where in your life are you accepting an answer that doesn’t quite add up, because someone with more authority than you handed it to you?

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!

Share

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

Almost two years ago I lost my job. What followed was not a plan. It was coaches, books, workshops, and a long list of questions I did not want to answer. I learned slowly. I learned expensively.

And then six months ago I started this podcast, and something happened that I did not expect. Every person who sat down with me had built a life that looked nothing like anyone else’s. Alina left the perfect job at thirty because a question would not leave her alone. Steve walked away from Partner at a global advisory firm. Max left Microsoft and now teaches AI from a small island in the Azores. Marina was laid off at thirty and did not panic.

Not one of their definitions of success matched another. That is the whole point of this show. There is no single way to live a fulfilled life. There are dozens.

But underneath all those different lives, the same few things kept showing up. Over and over. My brain loves patterns, and it could not stop noticing this one.

So this week’s episode is just me, and ten lessons.

1. You cannot control the macro world, but you can prepare yourself for it.

2. Complaining does not help. Your brain believes what you tell it.

3. Write down three small good things every day.

4. Clarity comes from moving, not thinking.

5. Your sensitivity is not the problem. It is the advantage.

6. The people around you decide who you become.

7. Consistency beats intensity.

8. You are allowed to disappoint people.

9. Be present.

10. Stay open, take one action, then look up in a year.

Share

Three that cost me the most

Rewrite these three in your own words. This is the section that will read as yours or not.

1. Clarity comes from moving, not thinking. This one was hard for me, because I like to think. I can sit and think all day. And thinking felt productive, which is what made it so easy to keep doing. But clarity is not the thing you need before you move. Clarity is what moving gives you. What kept me on the couch was never a lack of information. It was fear, wearing the costume of preparation.

2. The people around you decide who you become. It took me decades to really understand this one. Not the surface of it, the bottom of it. Look honestly at who you spend your time with. Are they finding solutions, or are they narrating the problem? Are they chasing something, or are they talking about other people so they do not have to look at their own life? Not everyone is in your life for the rest of your life. You already know what you need to do.

3. You are allowed to disappoint people. Not everyone is here to like you. You do not like everyone either, and that is fine. People grow in different directions, and sometimes a break between two people is the kind thing. I have also had relationships come back years later, once both of us had moved the same way. Let go of the need to be liked by everyone and you will sleep like a baby.

Also worth rewriting. This is the part readers come for.

A year ago, if you had told me I would be running a podcast, sitting across from people whose stories I now carry around with me, and writing my second book, I would have said that is impossible.

I did not plan any of it. I did not have a five year plan. I did not have a three year plan. What I had was a direction and the willingness to notice what was already in front of me.

That is the thing nobody tells you about losing a job, or a relationship, or a version of yourself. The opportunities are not in the future, waiting for you to become ready. They are in the present, and they are usually smaller than you expect, and you will walk straight past them if you are living in your head.

I am still learning all ten of these. I have not graduated from any of them. But I did not want you to pay what I paid to find them.

A question for you

• Which one of the ten do you need today? Not the one that sounds most impressive. The one that made you slightly uncomfortable.

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!

Share

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

My guest this week is Marina Krasochka. She is a Co-Active coach working between Hamburg and Luxembourg, helping expats who have lost their sense of self in a new country find their way back to it. Before that she spent about a decade in global tech recruiting, at Google, at Meta, hiring across continents. She grew up in Kyiv.

She is 34. And she has already reinvented herself more times than most people do in a lifetime.

I found her on LinkedIn. Steve, one of my past guests, had liked one of her posts, and something in her very first sentence made me stop scrolling. By the time I reached the end of it I knew she belonged in our reinvention stories.

What I did not know until we finished recording was that this was her first podcast, ever. She thanked me at the end and told me she had loved the experience. I have been sitting with how much that meant to me since.

Share

What stayed with me

1. Fear does not go away. That is actually the point. Marina said something that reorganised how I think about this. Fear disappears when you are back in the comfort zone, when everything around you is familiar and known. So the moment fear shows up, it is not a warning that you have made a mistake. It is evidence that you have moved.

   She is rational about it. Fear is a physical process designed to keep you alive. It is doing its job. Your job is to act anyway.

2. You do not have to leave everything behind to try. This was the one I most needed to hear on behalf of everyone reading this who has children, a mortgage, a partner who depends on the income.

   Marina had unusual freedom when she started. Severance pay, no partner at the time, parents who told her they would be fine without her support for a while. She knows that. And she was clear that the version of her story with the plane ticket is not the only version available.

   Take a small project. A pet project. Do it after work. Do not wait until the kids are at university.

3. Never put yourself in a time frame. When she was laid off she had severance plus a year of unemployment benefit, and she decided she would rebuild her entire life in that year and be earning what she earned before by the end of it.

   It did not happen in a year. It has taken more than two, and she is still building.

   Her advice: talk to people who have walked the path and ask them how long it actually took. Some did it in one year. Some took ten. The deadline you set for yourself is invented, and the only thing it reliably produces is the feeling that you are failing.

My reflections

There was a moment in our conversation where we both went quiet, because we realised how closely our stories rhyme. She flew to Indonesia in December 2022 after her layoff and a separation. I went to Indonesia after I lost my job too. She went to Bali. I chose Lombok, because I wanted to learn to surf. Different islands, three years apart, the same instinct.

And when I tell people here that going far away by yourself will teach you things you cannot learn at home, they say, but I could do that here. And then they never do it here. They never do it anywhere. Marina named it plainly. It is just another excuse.

But the thing I keep returning to is her answer to my signature question.

She said she does not wait for the green light. She said, and this is the part that got me, that most of the red lights are ones we put up ourselves. I cannot move yet because my parents are unwell. I cannot start until the world is more stable. I cannot begin until I finish this course. Artificial stop signs. Invented ones.

They feel exactly like real obstacles from the inside. That is what makes them so effective. Nobody invents a red light they can see through.

And here is where it gets interesting, because Marina and I are opposites in how we get stuck. She is impatient. She wants the marathon run today, the business profitable tomorrow. She has a tattoo of a small figure taking small steps, and she got it to remind herself that nothing worth having arrives overnight. I have spent a lot of my life being patient. I can wait decades for something.

She had to learn to slow down. I had to learn to move.

Same trap, opposite doors. Her red light says not yet, it should already be finished. Mine says not yet, there is still time. Both sound reasonable. Both are stop signs I built myself.

Maybe that is the actual lesson. Not speed, not patience, but knowing which one is your particular way of standing still.

A question for you

• What is the red light you have put up for yourself?

Not the real obstacles. The invented ones. The sentence that starts with “I can’t yet, because.”

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!

Share

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

I met Simon Platts in 2023, at the Blue Earth Summit in Bristol. The company I worked for at the time sent me there to represent them. He was on stage. I have followed what he does ever since.

I want to say something about that event before I get to Simon, because I have been thinking about it all week.

I walked into a room full of people who had poured their souls into making a positive impact. Outdoor lovers. Runners, surfers, climbers, people who spend their lives outside and have therefore watched what is happening to the outside. Nobody there was performing concern. They were talking about what each one of us can actually do, and then going and doing it.

I am grateful to Simon for the conversation we just had. I am also grateful to the company I worked for then, because they trusted me to go and represent them, and that trust is the only reason I was in that room at all. You never know which door someone opens for you is the one that matters.

Now to Simon.

He spent 40 years inside fashion and textiles. He started on a shop floor at Next in 1985 and stayed nearly 20 years. Then almost 10 at ASOS, leading responsible sourcing and ESG. In 2023 he left.

I went into our conversation expecting a story about the industry. What I got was a story about us.

What stayed with me

1. Blame is the wrong question. In almost every conversation about fashion, someone asks who is at fault. The brands. The factories. The shareholders. The shopper who bought the five euro t-shirt. We pass it around the table until it lands somewhere far enough away from ourselves.

   Simon does not play that game. He is blunt about what the industry has to fix, and after four decades inside it he has earned the right to be blunt. He said the onus is on the industry, and he meant it. But he also refuses to let the rest of us stand outside a thing we are already standing inside.

   We are all part of this. Not equally. But all of us.

2. Progress, not perfection. This was his phrase and it is the most useful thing in the whole episode. You do not have to become a different person by Monday. You ask simple questions before you buy. Do I need this. Will I wear it. Where did it come from. Could I borrow it, or buy it second hand, or wear the one I already own.

   None of that is dramatic. That is exactly why it works. One thought. Then one decision. Then one small thing.

3. Nothing is a given. Before he left ASOS, Simon spent a night in a hospital bed. He called it a little health wobble, said all is fine now, and moved on quickly, the way people do when they do not want to make a thing heavier than it needs to be. But he told me what went through his head that night.

   Nothing’s a given. I can’t faff around for the next 20 or 30 years, however long I’m given on this planet.

   So he left. Not to retire. To do more.

Share

My reflections

Halfway through our conversation I stopped and corrected myself out loud. I had introduced this as a reinvention story. It is not. Simon did not start over. He took 40 years of knowing exactly what he was doing and stopped renting it to one company. That is not rebuilding. That is finally using all of it.

And I liked him. I liked his passion and his wisdom and how little interest he had in sounding impressive. It reminded me of something I keep relearning: people who share your values tend to find each other. Not because they are looking. Because they are pointed the same way.

We are living in a time when contributing is not optional any more. If we want our children and the generations after them to still have green forests and oceans and glaciers, then it has to happen in each one of our lives, today, in the ordinary decisions nobody is watching us make.

Not because the industry is off the hook. It is not.

But because waiting for someone else to fix it is just another way of waiting.

When I asked Simon my signature question, what it means to catch more green lights, he said do not wait for the big flashing obvious one. The green lights are usually small and off to the side. You will miss them if you are sitting with your eyes shut and your hands behind your back.

The question I’m leaving you with

• What is the one small thing you would change? Not the big one. The small one. The one you could do this week without telling anybody.

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!

Share

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

I have done this many times. Sometimes it arrived as a single loss. Sometimes several things ended at once and I had to rebuild while still counting what was gone. And once, nothing dramatic happened at all. I simply woke up one ordinary morning and understood that the life I had carefully built no longer belonged to the person living inside it. Like a coat you loved at twenty that you keep wearing at forty because it was expensive and it used to suit you. But it isn’t yours anymore.

Different every time. And every time, the same three things pulled me back out.

The three things

#1. You let go of the people who insist they know you better than you know yourself. This is the step that costs you something, which is why most of us skip it. It doesn’t require a confrontation. You don’t owe anyone an explanation for who you’re becoming, and you certainly don’t owe them an announcement. You simply stop giving your time and your energy to the people who need you to stay who you were.

You go quiet. You step back. And it’s not about deciding someone is bad. It’s that you cannot rebuild while somebody else is still holding the old blueprint. As long as another person is allowed to define you, you’re not rebuilding at all. You’re redecorating a room someone else designed.

This was the hardest step for me. And I promise you, it works.

#2. You go looking for joy, and you stay consistent with it. The real, specific, slightly unglamorous kind of joy. If you already know what brings you joy, go and do more of it. If you've lost track, and most of us have, somewhere between the responsibilities and the years, then you experiment.

Take the class. Join the community you keep thinking about. Try the thing you always wanted to try and never had a good enough reason for. Then notice what actually lights you up, and keep it.

Confidence is built from the inside out, one repeated choice at a time.

#3. You change how you speak to yourself. Yes, wearing the clothes that make you feel like yourself helps. It’s just a very small piece of it. I talk to myself with kindness now. Especially in the moments I mess up, that’s when it counts. I am my own best friend, and if I’m not, who exactly is going to take that job?

I started small. I wrote kind, true things about myself on a piece of paper and pinned it to the board in my kitchen. Every time I walk past, I read it. And I smile every single time.

That small piece of paper taught me something bigger. There is very little I control, and I had been carrying all of it. We are living through heavy days and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But I can’t change how a conflict on the other side of the world unfolds. I can’t change how anyone votes tomorrow. That used to leave me feeling powerless, until I understood what was actually in my hands.

I can change how I speak to myself every single day. I can keep the small promises I make to myself. I can choose how I show up and what I put into the world around me.

That's what I have come to call earned confidence. You build it quietly, promise by promise, until one day you notice you've become someone whose word means something to you.

Because rebuilding is about becoming someone who finally trusts herself again.

The question I'm leaving you with

• Where are you in your own rebuild right now? And which of the three is the one you keep avoiding?

I would 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!

Share

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

Just buy the ticket.

It came at the very end of my conversation with Dan Holz, a photographer and filmmaker who spent two decades behind the camera before deciding, at 50, to co-found a company of his own. He was quoting a friend from many years ago. She was young, she was traveling constantly, and when he asked her how she did it, she said: You just buy the ticket. The rest falls into place.

He never forgot it. And when he said it out loud in our conversation, I realized something. That's what I've been doing my whole adult life. That's exactly what I did back in my thirties when I bought a one-way ticket out of everything familiar. And that ticket, that one small decisive act, changed my entire life.

Every amazing opportunity I've had since. Every extraordinary person I've met. Every version of myself I've grown into. All of it started with buying a ticket. Sometimes literally. Sometimes metaphorically. But always the same small, brave, uncomplicated act of choosing to go.

I plan to keep buying tickets for the rest of my life. And I want to encourage you to do the same.

Dan is a photographer and filmmaker who has spent two decades in the industry, including 8 years in-house at Osprey directing global campaigns, and years of freelance work with brands all over the world. About a year ago, he co-founded Fieldborn Creative with Cory, the friend he met climbing on a beach in Thailand in 2008. His work has taken him from Vietnam to Chiloé, from the Zion Narrows to the Colorado Plateau. He's a member of Protect Our Winters' Creative Alliance and lives with his wife and two daughters in Leavenworth, Washington. Through all of it, he never stopped listening to the quieter voice inside him that said: there's more.

What stayed with me

1. Regret is riskier than failure. Dan wrote this on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, and it stopped me scrolling. The idea that the real risk isn't leaving. The real risk is waking up ten years from now still wondering if you should have tried. Because most of us think we're being careful when we're actually being frozen. We think we're being responsible when we're actually just staying small. Regret compounds quietly, without asking permission. Failure at least tells you something.

2. You catch more green lights when you're actually out there. Dan said something I'll carry with me for a long time. When you're at home, siloed, working alone in your office and not talking to anyone, it's easy to think this is it. This is my life. But the moment you start putting yourself out there, the whole world opens up. Opportunities arise because you made yourself available to them. Green lights don't come to closed doors.

3. Just buy the ticket. We overcomplicate things. We wait for the plan to be perfect. We wait for the money, the timing, the permission. But sometimes the whole shift begins with one small, decisive act. Buy the ticket. The rest falls into place.

Share

My reflections

I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to design a life on my own terms. Dan's story reminded me that this isn't a single dramatic decision. It's a thousand small moments of choosing yourself. It's saying yes to the trip. It's leaving the job that no longer fits. It's moving to the mountains because that's where you feel most alive. It's meeting a stranger on a beach and knowing, somehow, that this person will matter to you 15 years later.

Dan belongs to what I've been calling my "On Their Own Terms" stories. Different from the reinvention stories, where someone rebuilds after burning everything down. The people in this category kept their craft. They just changed everything about how they were doing it. Where they lived. Who they worked with. What they said yes to. What they said no to.

That distinction matters to me, and I think it will matter to you too. Because sometimes we tell ourselves that the only way to change our lives is to blow it all up. Quit the career. Sell the house. Start from zero. And that's a story we've been sold. It's dramatic. It's cinematic. It's terrifying.

But Dan's story is quieter than that. And so is mine, honestly. It's the story of someone who paid attention. Who kept adjusting the direction, one small green light at a time. Who trusted the friendships made along the way. Who noticed when something had run its course and let it go without punishing herself for outgrowing it.

Every meaningful thing that's happened to me since my thirties came from a ticket I bought. The move. The book. The podcast. The relationships. The version of me writing this letter to you right now. None of it was guaranteed. All of it required trust.

The question I’m leaving you with

• What ticket have you been talking yourself out of buying?

Sit with it. Not to answer it perfectly. Just to notice. And if the answer comes, maybe this is your sign.

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!

Share

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

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.

   Share

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.

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

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.

Share

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!

Share

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.

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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

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

“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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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

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.

Share

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!

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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

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.

Share

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.

Share

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!

Share

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