Decades after his burial, I stood at my dad’s grave reading the words etched into the simple gravestone: Service to others before self. I thought, “Yeah, and we buried him in the ground way before what should have been his time.”

My dad died from a brain tumour at the untimely age of 46. Although it was complications from cancer that ended his life, I contend he had lost his will to live long bef...

Not everyone is intentional about where they choose to work. Sometimes we get complacent with where we “grow up” and we forget to venture beyond our own boundaries. Other times, we hop from “town” to “town”, never truly satisfied, hoping the next town will be different, yet somehow end up in the same situation surrounded by the same people as before.

In work, just like in life, there are the plac...

I tend to be attracted to adventurous spirits and creative souls who are deep thinkers, paradigm shifters, and wholehearted lovers of life. However, in my work, they often gravitate toward me because somewhere along their journey, their true nature became suppressed, stifled, or silenced.

Over the years, I’ve noticed a common thread that weaves throughout their stories and mine. At a time earlier...

When I was in my 20s, I was in a relationship with a singer-songwriter musician. He wrote a few songs for me, some to me, but there was one song he wrote about me. He called it “Fearless”. When he told me, I thought, “Wow, he really doesn’t know me at all. I live in a constant state of anxiety and fear.” But he saw me differently than I saw myself at the time.

I was with him through a significant...

Many people who come to work with me identify as being “unconventional”. Regular-type jobs make them feel trapped. Old structures and systems stifle their adventurous spirit. They like to take the status quo, scrunch it up into a ball and throw it into the fire. They’ve spent much of their lives trying to reconcile the way they perceive the world with the way others proclaim it to be.

The unen...

I am genuinely surprised at how often people express guilt and shame around doing self-discovery work. I just welcomed a new cohort into the Vision Program and already this has come up in conversation. Some perceive themselves as being self-indulgent – irresponsible, even.

They question: Who am I to be sitting around figuring out what inspires me, especially when there is so much suffering in t...

When I used to operate my school as a physical entity, I would welcome people into the classroom and advise them that it was a space for “not knowing”. They would heave a sigh of relief and then ease into their chairs. They could finally relax.

If you are currently in a career transition, you might feel a tremendous amount of external pressure to know what’s next. Under the guise of caring, your ...

Every time I have occasion to visit my family doctor, I think about how much it would suck to have the job of a GP. All day, every day, they see humanity at their lowest. We go to them when we are sick, injured, or broken – literally. The primary tools they have available to help us include either referring us to another doctor or prescribing drugs. It must feel helpless. When my doctor enters the...

“It’s going to take how long?” she asked. A couple of years ago, a lovely human reached out to me to discuss her work situation. She found her work to be “dull” and “repetitive”. She wanted to find something more inspiring and more fulfilling, but she wasn’t clear about what that was. During our discovery session, she decided she was keen to enroll in the Vision Program. However, when she learned ...

You are a creator. Full stop. You were born this way. You can refute it as much as you’d like, but if you’re depressed, bored, numb, unfulfilled, or mad at the world, it’s because you’re not allowing the natural flow of creative life-giving energy to be expressed through your being.

Most people who work with me are frustrated creators, though they don’t necessarily perceive themselves as such bef...

I turned in my chair to face my friend, whom I had known my entire adult life, opened my mouth to say “I love you”, but no words came out. I just stared at her with my jaw agape. I tried again, but there was cotton in my throat. My friend just smiled at me with her eyes. She knew. She knew I couldn’t say it because I couldn’t feel it.

This was decades ago now, but I remember the incident as being...

“Hello? Is everything okay? Are you okay?” That’s me, in the past, writing to my clients after they had ghosted me. I used to be perplexed about why some people would suddenly abandon their journey in the Vision Program just before it was complete. With more experience, however, I noticed it would happen around the same point in the process. They stopped showing up when they were asked to put thei...