Strength training 3x a week, with a desire to reduce my chances of getting diabetes.

In the first few months, I lost 7kg.

Everyone started to comment on how good I looked.

I felt proud of myself for putting my health first.

I could see how my body was changing and I knew it was good for my mental health.

The last few months, I’ve plateaued.

I’ve been the same weight and my body fat has stayed the same.

I’ve been going to the gym 4x a week.

So why wasn’t anything changing?

On a physiological level, you could say that the initial weight loss was because it was new for my body.

But on a psychological level, something had shifted.

That initial excitement (dopamine?) I got from losing fat had gone.

I was going to the gym, doing the exercises, but I wasn’t really focused on it anymore.

It became a chore rather than an intentional act of looking after myself.

I was trying to get through the exercises quickly, not tracking my calories, and my overall movement had reduced.

Instead of progressing, I just maintained.

This isn’t a post about fat loss.

It’s about how easy it is to plateau in all areas of our life.

Whether it’s health, work or love, it sometimes creeps up on us without us knowing.

Especially if our focus is elsewhere.

We lose that initial excitement and it becomes something we just do for the sake of it.

The same thing can happen in relationships: you become really comfortable with someone and you stop going on date night.

Or you get used to what you do at work and you don’t challenge yourself anymore.

Until one day, you realise you’re going through the motions but not seeing the results.

And at first, the excuses start.

I started to question whether the programme I was on was working for me.

Or is it because I’ve started iron tablets and they’re stopping me from losing weight?

I think my favourite is “but I’m in my luteal phase.”

But after looking at all the variables, I realised it wasn’t any of these things. It was my intention towards it.

If I was intentional with my health and fitness goals, I wouldn’t just do a slapdash version of the programme and eat like crap.

I’d push myself to do the extra rep and make sure to have more protein in my diet, like I did in the beginning.

But somewhere along the way, my focus changed.

Being a balanced human being is an extreme sport.

Sometimes our focus is more on relationships. Sometimes on work.

And it’s easy to give something our full attention and, in the process, neglect other areas of our life.

That’s not something I’m willing to compromise on anymore.

So I’m starting again.

Not from scratch.

But from that beginner mentality.

I have a starting point, and the goal is to move that needle.

Because I deserve more than a plateau.

I deserve to design my health intentionally.

By design, not by default.

I titled it “Devika v29” and I wrote how I was no longer going to rely on external validation and I was going to be confident in my own abilities.

I even went as far as vowing that I was going to build IP that would transform people’s lives.

Part declaration, part manifesto, mainly hopes and desires.

This weekend I read the note, eleven days before I turn thirty. I started beaming with pride, it was one of those ‘she said she would do she did’ moments.

Now it didn’t happen overnight. If you’d asked me at almost any point over those ten months how I was doing, I’d have told you about what wasn’t working yet.

The thing I was still struggling with. The ways I felt behind. That’s the honest truth of how it felt from the inside: like effort, and doubt, and not quite there yet.

And that gap, between how the year sometimes felt and what the page revealed is the thing I want to write about. Because I think it’s one of the most misunderstood things about how humans actually change.

We think development is linear. It isn’t. It’s longitudinal.

Linear implies a straight line: steady, visible, measurable progress, forward each day.

It’s the model most of us secretly hold ourselves to. We expect to be able to look at ourselves on a Tuesday and see that we’re further along than we were on Monday.

But that’s not how it works, and holding yourself to it is quietly brutal, because on any given Tuesday, you mostly can’t see it. You’re too close. You’re inside the frame.

Longitudinal is a different idea entirely. It’s a word from research, a longitudinal study is one that tracks the same subjects over a long stretch of time, precisely because the meaningful change only becomes visible across the span, never in a single moment.

You can’t see it in the snapshot. You can only see it in the trajectory.

Personal development is the same. The change is real, but it’s not legible in the moment you’re living. It only shows up when you can stand far enough back to see the arc.

This is why we’re so unreliable as witnesses to our own growth.

We judge ourselves from the snapshot.

Why am I still struggling with this?

Shouldn’t I be further ahead by now?

Have I actually changed at all?

And from inside a single day, the answer always looks like “not enough.”

The snapshot is a terrible measure, because it can only ever show you where you are, never how far you’ve travelled to get there.

So where do you actually see the growth?

It’s in the decisions you now make differently, the ones that would have taken you weeks of agonising a year ago and take you an afternoon now.

It’s in the things you no longer tolerate, the ones you’d have quietly absorbed before.

It’s in the way you speak to yourself when something goes wrong.

It’s in the risks you’re now willing to take, the asks you’re now willing to make, the rooms you now walk into differently.

This is what reflection is actually for.

Not journaling as a nice habit. Reflection as the instrument, the thing that gives you access to progress you genuinely could not see while you were living it.

That’s what v29 did for me, and I didn’t even know it at the time.

What it actually became was a reference point, a marker I could stand at ten months later and measure the distance from.

Without the page, I’d have had only the snapshot, and the snapshot might have told a different story.

With it, I could see the whole trajectory, and the trajectory told the truth.

So here’s the practice, if you want it: write down the person you’re growing into. Not your goals, not what you want to achieve. The person.

Then keep it, and read it back in a year. Not to check it off like a list, but to see how much of you’ve quietly become without noticing.

V29, completed it mate.

Now I’m writing v30.

Positivity insists everything is fine. Optimism looks at what’s possible and moves towards it, without pretending the obstacles aren’t real.

I think about what could be. I’m just not naive enough to believe a good attitude is always enough to get me there.

I met mindset as a concept properly in my first career, in sales and marketing. A high-performance environment, the kind where belief is treated as a skill you train.

On paper, it made complete sense. It’s the same thing sport has known for decades: a winning mentality primes you for success. Prime the mind, and the body follows. I understood it and I’m not saying it didn’t make a difference.

One of the first things you learn in face-to-face sales is the difference between what you can and can’t control. You can’t control the weather, the territory, the footfall. But you can control your pitch, your pace and your attitude. Focus on those three, the thinking goes, and let the rest go. I heard it, I believed it, and I taught it.

Three years on, I keep catching on the same snag. Some of the things we were told we couldn’t control could actually have been controlled.

The territory you’re given. The footfall of the spot you’re sent to. Someone chose those. And if the conditions can be chosen, then “focus on what you can control” quietly becomes a way of making peace with conditions that were never ideal in the first place.

Which raises a question I can’t unsee now. Why do we make things unnecessarily hard for ourselves? Why do we keep priming our attitude to survive rooms we could have simply chosen not to stand in?

It’s the same pattern as an organisation that trains you to be more resilient while the environment stays quietly toxic.

Resilience is real and it matters. But it can also be the thing that keeps you enduring something that’s not good for you anyway.

I call these things conditions. And the work that actually moves your life isn’t out-thinking bad conditions. It’s designing better ones. Where you are. Who you’re around. What you’re standing in when you’re asked to perform.

Mindset can help you see the conditions clearly. It can’t, on its own, change them.

So sometimes, your mindset isn’t enough.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is to leave an environment that no longer suits you.

It got to a point that I didn’t want my results to be influenced by someone else’s decisions.

In a world where there is so many variables, I want to set myself up to win.

Having a better mindset wasn’t enough.

So here’s the question I want to ask you.

What have you been trying to think your way out of, when the honest answer is that something around you needs to actually change?

50,274 messages. 931 conversations.

Or, as I’ve started calling it, “my development arc.”

Yesterday I exported all of it into Claude.

35 sonnet agents later and Claude had synthesised the last couple of years into 6 eras.

Now for someone who is obsessed with self understanding and human development, I was super intrigued to see the synopsis of the last few years.

You might be wondering why Claude needs to know all that context.

I’m writing a book called ‘Stop overriding yourself. Reclaiming agency in an ever-changing world’ so this wasn’t just “AI slop”, this was golden source material of my lived experience.

Three years of conversations about work, identity, relationships, ambition, ADHD, burnout and money is actually really relevant source material.

I’m a reflective person in general. But seeing my journey mapped chronologically reminded me how much I have actually evolved.

It also showed me how long I have been circling the same ideas.

The first workshop I ever named was called ‘Design Your Life.’ My brand is now By Design.

I always say there are clues in the past. Seeing those clues presented back to me as hard fact was validating in so many ways.

For those of us building a body of work, it often begins with a body of thought.

And turns out, going through your own archives can remind you how far you have really come.

Here’s to building on the next phase of my development arc!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not claiming that ADHD is a superpower. But instead of spending all my energy focusing on my deficits, I’ve learned to recognise what I’m naturally good at and double down on those things.

That being said, it has been three years since my ADHD diagnosis, and I have felt all the emotions.

Validation.
Grief.
Rage.
Relief.
Sadness.
Acceptance.

But one of the best things my diagnosis invoked in me was grace.

For most of my teens and twenties, I was incredibly self-critical.

I was so desperate to be a “functioning adult” that I couldn’t understand why I found certain things so challenging.

Why were my emotions so intense?

Why could I have incredible ideas but struggle to follow through on them?

Why did ordinary parts of life seem to require so much effort?

Looking back now, I seem so textbook that I sometimes wonder how nobody noticed.

University was one of the clearest examples.

When I went to university at 18, I wasn’t only being asked to attend lectures and complete assignments.

I was suddenly responsible for feeding myself, doing my washing, keeping my room tidy, managing my time, maintaining friendships, regulating my emotions and completing academic work without much external structure.

It was too many moving parts for my ADHD brain.

While it seemed as though everyone else was simply getting on with adulthood, I became completely overwhelmed.

I slept on the floor because putting my duvet on was too much. I became incredibly anxious and I drank my way through much of first year.

And I felt so much shame.

I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t keep my sh*t together while everyone else appeared to be cracking on.

It took me five years to complete university.

Throughout that time, I struggled with handing in assignments, maintaining interpersonal relationships, keeping myself organised and managing the basic demands of everyday life.

I genuinely believed I just had poor mental health.

My mental health was certainly part of it. But looking back retrospectively, I can now see how I just struggled with “the basics”.

I later came across the idea that people with ADHD can experience a developmental lag in executive functioning.

The commonly quoted “30% rule” is only a rough way of explaining that lag, not a literal measurement of somebody’s maturity.

But when I thought about what it might have meant for me to arrive at university at 18 with executive-functioning skills that were still developing, something finally clicked.

Perhaps I wasn’t failing at adulthood.

Perhaps I had been given adult-sized demands without the scaffolding I needed to manage them.

Six years later, when I started living with my partner, the same patterns appeared again.

I struggled to maintain tidiness. I constantly switched between tasks. I found it difficult to prioritise, organise and do things in a linear order.

Again, I felt ashamed.

When I began properly learning about executive functioning, it was like a light-bulb moment.

I wasn’t simply lazy.

I wasn’t just careless.

I wasn’t just a messy cow (that one may still be debatable).

I genuinely find prioritising, sequencing, initiating and completing tasks difficult.

Now executive functioning is so much richer than organisation and tidiness.

So I have to acknowledge that even though I struggle in some areas, I’m advanced in others.

This is not a self-deprecating essay.

It is just acknowledging that the lens of self-understanding has completely changed the relationship I have with myself.

I no longer have to interpret every difficulty as a character flaw.

I no longer have to feel ashamed of the ways I struggle.

I no longer have to punish myself for not functioning in exactly the same way as somebody else.

Self-understanding has been my saving grace.

It has helped me recognise where I need support, where I need structure and where I need to remove unnecessary friction from my life.

Now, as a woman approaching 30, I can acknowledge that some parts of my executive functioning may resemble those of somebody younger than me, while other parts of me are highly developed.

I don’t need to reduce myself to either one.

I can be insightful and disorganised.

Emotionally intelligent and easily overwhelmed.

Full of ideas and still require support to execute them.

Both can be true.

And instead of becoming frustrated with myself, I can use that understanding to scaffold myself.

I can build external structure.

I can reduce the number of steps between intention and action.

I can create environments that support how I actually operate rather than constantly trying to force myself into a way of functioning that has never fit.

That is what self-understanding does.

It allows us to see ourselves more objectively.

It helps us release some of the shame we have been carrying.

It gives us the opportunity to reconcile the relationship we have with ourselves.

And, perhaps most importantly, it gives us grace.

That belief sits at the heart of my work.

My names Devika and I help people understand themselves deeply so they can design a life that fits.

I’m not really a traditional content creator, but as someone who has been actively working on my health and wellness, I was open to see if there was a product that fits my lifestyle.

When something came up that actually suited me, I applied. They asked me why I’d be good for it and I said because it would be a natural fit in terms of the life I’m creating.

They accepted me. And then they sent the script.

The script asked me to say I had a thyroid condition, that medicine wasn’t getting rid of the symptoms and this supplement was the cure to all of that.

I don’t have a thyroid condition.

I was really confused and I replied saying I didn’t have this condition and wouldn’t be comfortable making something like this up.

They asked to get on a call with me. I thought great, maybe this was a communication and they wanted to apologise for the mistake.

I told them I wasn’t willing to lie or make a medical claim I had no business making. And because I actually believe in honest marketing, I didn’t just refuse, I offered a better way.

Here’s how I could talk about this truthfully and authentically. I even offered some insight into paid ads as I’ve spent the last year being the face of my partners mushroom brand.

They appreciated my honesty and took it back to the brand.

They came back with ‘good news’.

The brand said I didn’t have to say I have the thyroid condition but to talk about a friend who has the condition.

I was really baffled.

The brand didn’t say “good point, let’s do it honestly.”

They came back with a workaround.

A workaround that made me realise that this is not a brand I want to work with.

This wasn’t a compromise. It would still have been lying.

This really disappointed me.

There’s so much rhetoric about “difficult creators”.

What about brands who are so desperate to market their product, their strategy is to lie.

It’s scary how normal it is.

I could have really done with that £300. But not at the price of my integrity.

Maybe the product really does help people with a thyroid problem.

But I am not the person to promote it.

It’s scary.

Scary to think we live in a world that people have quietly decided honesty is negotiable, and assumes the people it works with have decided the same.

So I turned it down.

The script asked me to lie. Then it asked me to lie about a friend.

I said no. Twice. And I’d do it again.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love a fresh start.

But I think we often rush towards reinvention before we have taken the time to understand who we already are.

I ran an end of year workshop for my friends community just before the new year.

Instead of the usual vision boards and manifestation exercises, I facilitated a space where people could reconnect with themselves.

Not who they thought they should become.

Not the version of themselves that looked best on paper.

Who they already were.

I invited them to think about their Personal Operating System — a framework I’ve developed to help people understand how they show up in the world.

How they process.

What gives them energy.

What drains them.

What pace works for them.

What they value.

What conditions allow them to function well.

Because you cannot design a life you want if you do not really understand the person you are designing it for.

Seven months on, my stance has not changed.

If anything, it has deepened.

I still believe reconnection matters.

But I now think there is another step we do not talk about enough.

Consolidation.

Reconnection helps you remember yourself

When you reconnect with yourself, you start noticing what has always mattered to you.

The interests that keep returning.

The environments that make you come alive.

Your inherent strengths.

The ways of operating you have spent years trying to correct.

Reconnection is the moment you stop asking,

Who should I become?

And start asking,

What has been true about me all along?

But awareness on its own is not always enough.

At some point, you have to build from what you have remembered.

That is where consolidation comes in.

Consolidation is not the same as settling

Consolidation can sound unexciting.

We are used to celebrating the launch, the pivot, the transformation and the dramatic new beginning.

Consolidation is quieter.

It is bringing together what already exists.

It is recognising the patterns in your interests, experiences, strengths and ways of operating.

It is organising the parts of yourself that you once thought were unrelated.

It is choosing to deepen something instead of abandoning it for the next exciting identity.

It is saying:

I do not need to become someone else. I need to build a more coherent relationship with who I already am.

Constant reinvention can become avoidance

Sometimes reinvention is necessary.

We outgrow roles, relationships, businesses and beliefs.

There are moments when change requires us to release an identity that no longer fits.

But reinvention can also become a way of avoiding depth.

We change the language before giving the idea time to develop.

We change our niche before allowing people to associate us with the first one.

We create a new identity because the current one has reached the uncomfortable stage where it needs commitment, repetition and refinement.

We convince ourselves the problem is that we have not found the right version of ourselves yet.

So we reinvent.

Each new beginning gives us a temporary feeling of possibility.

But eventually, we are left surrounded by unfinished versions of ourselves.

Consolidation asks something harder.

It asks us to stay.

To look at the evidence.

To notice what has lasted beyond the initial excitement.

To trust what keeps returning.

To build enough structure around it that it can become a body of work, a way of living or a stronger sense of self.

A stronger sense of self is built through coherence

For me, consolidation has become the driving force behind developing a stronger sense of self.

Building a more coherent relationship with who I am.

I am less interested in forcing every part of myself into a neat category.

But I realised I am the category.

A stronger sense of self does not mean never changing.

It means change no longer requires you to abandon yourself.

You can evolve without becoming unrecognisable to yourself.

You can expand without pretending your previous work had no value.

You can change direction while still understanding the path that brought you there.

Before you reinvent yourself, ask these questions

What interests have followed me for years?

What strengths keep appearing across different roles and environments?

What parts of myself have I dismissed because they did not fit neatly into one label?

What have my previous experiences been trying to teach me?

Where am I genuinely being called to change?

And where am I simply uncomfortable with the depth, repetition or commitment required to continue?

You may still decide that something needs to end.

You may still choose a new direction.

But at least the decision will come from self-understanding rather than self-rejection.

Maybe you do not need another new beginning

You might not need a complete reinvention.

You might need to gather the pieces.

To stop scattering the evidence of who you already are.

To bring together the skills, interests, values and experiences that have followed you across different chapters.

To create a life large enough to hold the person you have already become.

Reconnection helps you remember yourself.

Consolidation helps you build from that self.

And maybe that is the next stage of growth.

Not becoming someone new.

Finally giving everything you already are a coherent home.

I had spent most of my life struggling in one way, shape or form, and I refused to carry on.

I had outgrown the identity. It wasn’t serving me anymore.

A year ago, I would find myself saying,

“I’m just trying to survive the day.”

And when I did, I would almost give myself a pat on the back.

I survived it.

I got through it.

I made it to the end.

Well done, me.

But eventually, I had to ask myself…

Is survival really what I want to keep celebrating?

I don’t want my life to be one long story about how much I endured.

I don’t want every achievement to be framed by how exhausted I was while reaching it.

I don’t want to keep building an identity around being the person who can cope with anything.

At some point, coping stopped feeling empowering.

Resilience felt like a sick joke.

I was tired.

The founder struggle narrative

A lot of people seem to believe struggle is simply part of the founder journey.

Struggle. Sacrifice. Burnout.

Working every hour.

Ignoring your health.

Neglecting your relationships.

Constantly worrying about money.

Turning your nervous system into collateral damage for the sake of building something.

And we’re supposed to accept this as ambition?

F*ck that.

I didn’t get into business to sacrifice myself.

I didn’t choose entrepreneurship so I could create a life I constantly needed to recover from.

I understand that building something requires effort.

It requires patience, consistency and courage.

I’m not saying it’s easy.

But struggle and effort are not the same thing.

Effort says,

‘This matters to me, so I’m willing to work for it.’

Struggle says,

‘This is destroying me, but I’m scared to stop.’

Those are not the same experience.

When I reach the point of thinking, “I don’t want that for my life anymore”, it’s done.

Maybe not immediately in practice. There may still be habits to unlearn, decisions to make and consequences to navigate.

But internally, something has already shifted. I can no longer unknow what I know.

Once I recognised that struggle was no longer an identity I wanted to carry, I couldn’t romanticise it in the same way.

I couldn’t keep calling burnout dedication.

I couldn’t keep calling anxiety ambition.

I couldn’t keep treating exhaustion as proof that I was taking my future seriously.

I wanted to build from a place of stability, rather than repeatedly building myself back up from depletion.

Ease felt strange at first

When hard has become familiar, ease can make you suspicious.

When you’re used to chaos, calm can feel empty.

When your identity has been built around overcoming, peace can leave you wondering who you are without a problem to solve.

Sometimes I would feel guilty for resting.

Sometimes I would create urgency where none existed, because urgency made me feel productive.

Sometimes I would assume that if something felt easier, I must not be taking it seriously enough.

That is the strange thing about struggle.

You can consciously reject it and still have a nervous system that expects it.

You can choose ease and then panic when life stops feeling difficult.

So this hasn’t simply been a mindset shift.

It has been a process of teaching myself that I am allowed to build a good life without first destroying myself to earn it.

I no longer believe pain is automatically evidence that I’m on the right path.

I no longer believe the hardest route is the most admirable one.

I no longer believe ambition should require self-abandonment.

Some things are difficult because they matter.

Other things are difficult because they are badly designed.

Those are not the same.

I am still ambitious. I still want to build meaningful work, financial success, freedom, a body of work I’m proud of.

But I want to be present enough to experience it.

I want a life that feels good while I’m actually living it.

That doesn’t mean every day will be easy.

It means difficulty will no longer be the entire design.

I am still willing to make an effort.

But I am no longer willing to sacrifice myself.

The opening line was:

“You don’t need to reinvent your life overnight.”

It went further than anything I had posted before.

More than 875,000 impressions.

More than 419,000 people reached.

Over 100,000 video views.

And a month later, it is still reaching people.

Of course, the numbers were exciting.

But they were not the part I found most interesting.

What interested me was the message that travelled.

In a world constantly telling us to rebrand, reinvent ourselves and start from scratch, the thing people seemed to respond to was permission not to do that.

Permission to reconnect with themselves before trying to reinvent themselves.

We live in a culture that often presents reinvention as the answer.

Leave the job.

Change the city.

Rebrand the business.

Start the new routine.

Become the new version of yourself.

But that advice does not always take people’s reality into account.

The video came from a conversation with a 50-year-old married man with children, who asked how he was supposed to redesign his life when he had so many responsibilities.

My response was:

“I understand that not everyone has the privilege of going to Bali for three months to work out who they are.”

Because that is the reality.

Most people cannot abandon their responsibilities in pursuit of a dramatic reset.

But he could take 30 minutes to reconnect with himself.

He could reflect on who he had been before life became dominated by roles, responsibilities and expectations.

He could ask what still felt true.

Showing up to that workshop and creating space for self-reflection was his version of going to Bali.

Less dramatic, perhaps.

But far more viable.

The more my work matures, the more I realise that reinvention is not always the answer.

The question is not always:

Who should I become next?

Sometimes the better question is:

Who am I?

What gives me energy?

What drains me?

What do I value when nobody else is watching?

What parts of myself have I stopped listening to?

These questions are less dramatic than announcing a new identity.

They are also more honest.

Because before you redesign your life, you need to understand the person who has to live it.

So this is what going viral taught me.

Not how to make another viral video.

But how deeply people seem to need permission not to reinvent themselves overnight.

Every building seemed to offer the same things: gyms, co-working spaces, cinema rooms, rooftop terraces and resident events.

Don’t get me wrong, they all have their place. The buildings are beautiful, and those spaces genuinely add value.

But after living in Build to Rent for the past six years, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was missing.

What if, instead of only entertaining residents, we also invested in developing them?

A year ago, I had the idea of becoming a Resident Life Design Coach. At first, my vision was simple, find a building that would let me run a workshop once a month.

But after speaking to operators and learning more about the industry, I realised the opportunity was much bigger.

The gap wasn’t another event.

It was Resident Development.

A structured programme that supports residents over time while giving operators meaningful insight into the people who live in their buildings.

In a market where many amenities are becoming expected, I believe that’s a genuine differentiator. Not because it replaces what’s already there, but because it signals that an operator isn’t just investing in the building, it’s investing in the people living inside it.

The interesting part is that I’m not just selling a service.

I’m trying to explain a way of thinking that people haven’t seen before.

And that’s taught me far more than I expected.

The irony is that, in my personal life, I’m actively working on not over-explaining myself.

Whether it’s ADHD, my personality or just how I’m wired, I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to make people understand my experience.

Building something new has forced me to separate those two things.

If someone doesn’t understand the idea, it doesn’t mean they don’t understand me.

That’s feedback on the explanation, not my worth.

I’ve also realised I’ve been living with this idea every day for the past six months.

I’ve had hundreds of internal conversations that nobody else has been part of.

Of course what feels obvious to me isn’t obvious to someone hearing it for the first time.

That’s not their fault.

It’s my job to translate.

I’m not abandoning the concept to fit existing boxes.

I’m learning how to explain it in a way that earns the next conversation.

Some people want the philosophy.

Others want the commercial model.

Some care about outcomes.

Others care about price.

The idea hasn’t changed.

The language has.

And that’s probably been the biggest lesson of all.

I used to think the hardest part of building something new was having the idea.

Now I think it’s helping other people see it.

So if you’re sitting on an idea you’ve been putting off sharing, send the proposal. Write the email. Ask for the meeting.

Not because everyone will say yes.

They won’t.

Some people won’t understand it.

Some won’t believe in it.

Some simply won’t need it.

That’s part of building anything worthwhile.

Every category we recognise today started with someone trying to explain something that didn’t neatly fit the existing boxes.

Someone had to send the first proposal.

Someone had to hear, “I don’t quite get it,” and keep going anyway.

Maybe that’s what creating something new actually is.

Not having all the answers.

Having the courage to explain the same idea a little more clearly, one conversation at a time.

And I love them.

There’s something special about watching a room full of strangers slowly become more honest with themselves.

I love seeing the lightbulb moments.

The conversations that continue after everyone should have gone home.

The “I’ve never thought about it like that” moments.

But recently, I’ve found myself thinking about what happens after everyone leaves the room.

The workshop ends.

People go home.

Life resumes.

And I started wondering whether I’d been asking too small a question.

Not because workshops don’t work.

They can be life-changing.

But I realised the workshop was never the destination.

It was always the beginning.

I’ve lived in Build to Rent buildings for almost six years.

During that time I’ve watched the sector evolve.

The buildings are beautiful.

The gyms.

The co-working spaces.

The cinema rooms.

The rooftop terraces.

The resident lounges.

Every detail has been thoughtfully designed.

Built to encourage connection, convenience and community.

And then one question kept appearing in my head.

Who’s designing the conditions that help the people living there actually thrive?

We spend millions designing buildings.

We think carefully about lighting.

Furniture.

Amenities.

Layouts.

Experiences.

But I don’t think we spend nearly as much time thinking about what those environments make possible.

Because people don’t just move into apartments.

They move into new chapters.

Some have just ended relationships.

Some are building businesses.

Some have moved cities.

Some are trying to make friends.

Some are navigating burnout.

Some are quietly wondering who they want to become next.

A building can’t answer those questions.

But perhaps it can create conditions that make answering them a little easier.

As a Life Design Coach, that’s the work I’ve always been interested in.

Helping people understand how they operate.

Designing routines that actually fit them.

Creating environments that support the behaviours they want to repeat.

Helping ambitious people stop overriding themselves.

Because lasting change rarely comes from trying harder.

It comes from understanding yourself better.

Maybe that’s why this idea wouldn’t leave me alone.

Because I don’t just see buildings anymore.

I see ecosystems.

Buildings already invest in resident experience.

But I think there’s another layer.

One that asks a different question.

Resident experience asks:

“Did people enjoy living here?”

Resident development asks:

“Who did people become while they lived here?”

To me, those are two very different questions.

And the second one is the one I can’t stop thinking about.

This isn’t really just about Build to Rent.

It’s about something much bigger.

What if every environment asked the same question?

Not…

“How do we make this look good?”

But…

“How do we help people flourish here?”

Homes.

Workplaces.

Universities.

Communities.

The question stays the same.

Over the past six months I’ve been speaking to operators, testing ideas and quietly building what has become Live by Design.

A structured resident development programme designed to help people build lives that fit them, not just places to live.

This category doesn’t exist yet.

But I think it should.

Because the future isn’t just about designing better spaces.

It’s about designing the conditions that help people thrive inside them.

And if that’s where we’re heading…

I think we’re only just getting started.

They told me that my skillet really aligned with the role.

Even though I have my own business, my brain started connecting the dots and I started to figure out how I could “make it work” on a consultancy basis.

I have no issues with identifying opportunities. They are everywhere.

But this year, I’ve realised something.

Not every opportunity is your opportunity.

And just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

We’ve been taught to believe that successful people collect opportunities.

Say yes.
Network more.
Take the meeting.
Go to the event.
Accept the offer.

But every “opportunity” asks for something in return.

Not just your time.

Your attention.

Your energy.

Your creativity.

Your momentum.

Every “yes” quietly says “no” to something else.

When I turned down that role, it wasn’t because I thought I was above the job.

It was because I asked myself a different question.

Not…

“Is this a good opportunity?”

But…

“Does this move me closer to the life I’m trying to build?”

Those are completely different questions.

Am I making this decision because it aligns with where I’m going…

Or because I’m afraid of being left behind?

The older I get, I’m realising the importance of discernment.

Because life isn’t a game of collecting the most opportunities.

It’s about recognising which ones are actually yours.

“So… what do you do?”

I take a deep breath in

It’s never been because I don’t know what I do.

It’s because every answer feels incomplete.

A coach.

A facilitator.

A speaker.

A writer.

At one point I even started exploring the title “Human Development Practitioner.”

Every label captured something about my work.

None of them captured all of it.

I thought this was a branding problem.

Because should it really be that difficult to articulate?

I watched other people introduce themselves with certainty.

“I’m a leadership coach.”

“I’m a keynote speaker.”

“I’m a consultant.”

“I’m a therapist.”

Meanwhile, I felt like picking one thing was a disservice.

It described how I deliver my work.

It didn’t describe the work itself.

Coaching is something I do.

Speaking is something I do.

Facilitating is something I do.

Writing is something I do.

Designing workshops is something I do.

And to give someone a quick one word answer just doesn’t feel right.

Despite the method of delivery…

“The thing” has always been helping people understand themselves.

Helping ambitious people stop overriding themselves.

Helping people build lives, careers and ways of working that fit who they actually are, not who they think they should be.

The coaching sessions.

The workshops.

The frameworks.

The writing.

They’re all different expressions of the same idea.

I don’t wake up thinking, I want to coach today.

I wake up wondering why so many capable people are exhausted by trying to become someone they’re not.

I wonder why we spend more time learning productivity systems than understanding our own operating system.

I wonder why success is still measured by how much we can tolerate rather than how well our lives actually fit.

Those questions have quietly connected everything I’ve built.

For a long time, I thought I lacked focus.

Now I think I was simply building something before I had language for it.

We spend so much time trying to fit ourselves into existing categories.

But what if the categories haven’t caught up yet?

Some of the most meaningful work happens in the spaces between disciplines.

Between psychology and business.

Between wellbeing and performance.

Between coaching and education.

Between personal development and organisational change.

That’s where I’ve always found myself.

Not because I couldn’t decide.

Because that’s where the questions I care about live.

Ironically, the more I’ve stopped trying to force a label, the clearer my work has become.

Instead of asking, What should I call myself?

I’ve started asking,

What problem am I trying to solve?

The answer hasn’t changed.

Maybe the appropriate label will come one day.

Maybe it won’t.

Either way, I’ve stopped waiting for the perfect title before allowing myself to build the work.

And perhaps that’s why I’ve always struggled with labels.

Not because I lacked clarity.

But because I was trying to name something that was still being created.

And I agreed.

Not because things are perfect. Not because my career is popping off or my bank balance is doing anything impressive. If you measured me by the numbers everyone assumes “doing well” means, you might wonder what I was agreeing to.

I agreed because my life has become coherent. And I’ve come to think that’s the truest measure of “doing well” I have.

Let me explain how I got here, because it took most of my twenties.

When I was younger, I did acceptance and commitment therapy. A lot of it centres on your values, the idea being that once you know what you truly value, you can commit to living in line with it.

I remember sitting there, being asked to name my values, and not being able to. I reached for them and found nothing. I knew they were supposed to be in there somewhere, but I couldn’t pin a single one down.

For years I thought that meant I didn’t have a strong sense of self. Getting an ADHD diagnosis confirmed that. Until recently.

What I’ve realised is that my values were never missing. They were just easier to see in my work than in myself.

Because when I look back at everything I’ve made, the blog posts, the poems, the essays, the half-finished notes, the same values are everywhere.

They run through all of my posts like a watermark. Freedom. Depth. Authenticity. Coherence. They were completely clear on the page. I could see exactly what I believed the moment I wrote it down. The work knew who I was long before I did.

And here is the irony that took me the longest to sit with.

Even when my values became clear, I still couldn’t keep to them. I’d know, plainly, what mattered to me, and then live in a way that contradicted it.

I valued space but filled every hour. I valued depth and found myself with superficial people. I valued rest and treated it as something to earn. I valued authenticity and performed competence. I could name the thing and override it in the same breath.

There is a word for that quiet tension between what you believe and how you live.

Dissonance.

I lived in it for years not knowing how to change it. What I believed and what I did were always at wars with one another.

What changed wasn’t that I found new values.

It’s that I finally took the time to understand the ones that were always there, and then, slowly, started designing a life that actually reflected them.

There’s a word for that too, and it’s the one I keep returning to. Coherence is what happens when your values, your work, your relationships, your energy and your behaviour all begin telling the same story.

That’s the part nobody teaches you.

Understanding your values is only half of it. The challenge is closing the gap between knowing them and living them. Between what you believe and how you actually spend your days.

That gap is where most of our exhaustion lives, and no amount of clarity closes it on its own.

You have to design for it.

That is what life design has been for me.

Not becoming someone new.

Bridging the gap between the person my work always knew I was, and the life I was actually living. Moving with intention, from dissonance to coherence.

The irony is coherence is not just where I’ve been trying to get to. It’s one of my deepest values.

I don’t think most people are lost. I think most people are living in dissonance.

My job as a Life Design Coach is to facilitate a space where people can understand themselves deeply but then having the courage to build a life that actually reflects their values.

That’s what I meant when I said I was “doing well.”

Not that everything is sorted.

That the different parts of my life have finally stopped fighting each other.

Living by design, not by default.

Some of it was circumstance. Some of it was outside my control.

But looking back, much of it came from never really understanding how I actually operate.

I was living against my own grain. The wrong routines. The wrong pace. Environments that drained me. Work that fought my nature.

I was pushing a boulder uphill and then wondering why I was so exhausted.

Struggling became my norm and I thought hard mode was just what functioning adulthood felt like.

Until I burnt out again.

And something in me refused to do this again.

I didn’t want to push through anymore. I didn’t want to keep calling struggle normal.

And running a business only turned the volume up on all of it.

Everything I’d learned about being an entrepreneur said the same thing… hustle, grind, sacrifice, and one day it will all be worth it. Suffering as proof you’re serious. Struggle as the entry fee.

It doesn’t sit right with me. It never has.

So I decided to do something that felt almost rebellious.

Instead of asking how I make my life and my business better, I asked a different question.

How do I make it easier?

When I told people I wanted a life of ease, I think they thought I was unserious. That I wanted to do less. That I wasn’t willing to put in the work.

They were wrong. I have never thought that I could sit on the sofa and will a life into being. I know building something meaningful takes effort. I just didn’t want to break my back while I did it.

My ancestors already did that. They came from India and worked sixteen-hour days. They broke their backs so that the people who came after them wouldn’t have to.

So when I drive myself into the ground in the name of ambition, I’m not honouring that. I’m ignoring the entire point of it.

Their struggle was supposed to buy ease somewhere down the line. I think I’m allowed to be the somewhere.

So that is what I set out to do.

Not design a better life, but an easier one.

One that removes the friction I had been treating as normal.

And here is what nobody tells you.

When you stop fighting yourself, you do not become less ambitious. You become more effective.

The energy you were spending overriding your own nature comes back to you.

We have been sold a lie that the good life is something you earn through suffering.

We have been taught to treat ease as something you’re allowed only after you have worked hard enough for it.

I think it’s the opposite.

Ease, the real kind, the kind that comes from designing conditions that fit you, is not the reward at the end of the work. It is the thing that lets the work last at all.

I stopped trying to design a better life.I started trying to design an easier one.

And it turns out those were the same thing.

Living by design, not by default.

That somewhere along the way, something in them went wrong, and if they could just find the flaw and fix it, everything else would fall into place.

They don’t say it like that.

They say it in smaller ways.

“I just need to be more disciplined.”

“I can’t seem to stay consistent.”

“I don’t know why I keep self-sabotaging.”

Underneath all of it is the same assumption, I am the problem, and I need to be fixed.

It’s a complete lie.

Most people don’t lack ambition.

They don’t lack discipline.

They don’t lack potential.

They are simply trying to function in environments that were never built for who they are.

We have been handed one story about how change works, and it goes like this.

If something isn’t working, the problem is you, and the solution is effort.

Push harder. Optimise more. Build better habits. Want it more.

It is a story that puts the entire weight of a life on the individual and never once asks whether the conditions around them are sound.

So we do the work. We buy the planners and download the apps and set the alarms.

And when it doesn’t hold, we don’t question the story. We just decide we are the thing that failed. Again.

But I’ve started asking a different question. Not “what’s wrong with me?” but “what conditions would let me thrive?”

It is a small shift and it changes everything, because it moves the question from your character to your context.

From who you are to what surrounds you.

And once you start looking at the conditions, you begin to notice how much of what you’d labelled a personal failing was really just a mismatch.

The job that drained you wasn’t proof you couldn’t cope. It was proof the job didn’t fit. The routine you couldn’t stick to wasn’t a discipline problem. It was built for a version of you that doesn’t exist.

This is why, when I work with someone, I don’t start with their goals. I start with understanding how they actually operate. Their energy, and where it genuinely comes from. Their pace, not the one they think they should keep. Their values, the real ones, not the borrowed ones. The way they process the world.

Because you cannot design a life that fits until you understand the person you are designing it for.

And most of us have never been given the space to do that.

We were taught to manage ourselves, not to understand ourselves. To push through our own signals rather than listen to them. So we end up overriding the very information that would tell us what we need.

When you understand how you work, something changes. You stop trying to become someone else.

You stop treating your nature as a bug to be patched. And you start doing the quieter, more radical thing, which is building a life that works with who you are rather than against it.

That is not lowering the bar. It is not giving up on growth. It is the opposite. It is realising that the most ambitious thing you can do is stop fighting yourself, and start designing the conditions that let the person you already are actually thrive.

You were never broken. You were just unsupported.

And that is a far more hopeful problem to have, because conditions can be changed.

Living by design, not by default.

Here’s what ACTUALLY worked.

1) I stopped trying to “push through” and started accepting my capacity isn’t linear. I accepted that my state will change throughout the month and that I didn’t need to be 10/10 all the time.

2. I stopped running on smoke. I stopped trying to be so urgent and started pacing myself. I’m not Usain Bolt and I never will be

3. I stopped going for coffee with everyone and anyone. Networking is important but so is protecting my energy and my peace

4. I stopped giving my coaching for free / heavily discounted. If you want guidance, it’s a service (unless I’ve stated otherwise)

5. I started to design my week with spaciousness in mind. I don’t like stacking things all in one day. I need time to think, write, synthesise.

6. I started externalising everything. Instead of having 17 mental tabs open I started brain dumping into Claude so I could get everything in one place.

7. I stopped trying to get people to understand me. I used that energy to start understanding myself and how I’m wired

8. I got support with the things I struggled with. I got a PT, a therapist and asked for help when I needed it

9. I stopped trying to optimise my life and started building a good baseline. I did some blood tests to realise what I actually needed to support me

10. I stopped overriding myself. I got good at listening to my intuition. Stopped saying yes to appease others and tuned into what I wanted.

It’s taken me nearly 3 decades to get to this point but I am so grateful that I did.

My advice to anyone is to take some time to understand how you operate, what support you need and stop overriding yourself.

For decades, we’ve recognised that children are shaped by the environments they grow up in. Their parents. Their teachers. Their friendships. Their home. The opportunities they’re given, and the ones they aren’t.

We accept, almost without question, that the conditions around a child matter. That a child who is supported, seen, and given the right environment will grow differently than one who isn’t.

We build whole systems around this belief, schools, safeguarding, early years support. We know that nurture counts.

But then something interesting happens.

At some invisible threshold, roughly the moment we become “adults”, we stop talking about nurture altogether.

The conversation changes. It stops being about the conditions around us, and starts being about what’s wrong with us.

Be more resilient.

Improve your mindset.

Push through.

Optimise yourself.

It’s as though we quietly decide that adults should be able to thrive in almost any environment.

That if you’re struggling, the problem is you. Your mindset, your discipline, your resilience, rather than anything about the conditions you’re in.

But why would that be true?

Our environments don’t suddenly stop shaping us at 18.

The people we work with. The pace we live at. The managers we answer to. The expectations we carry. Whether we feel psychologically safe.

All of it still shapes how we think, how we feel, and how we perform. Just as much as it did when we were children. We’ve simply stopped naming it.

So maybe the question we keep asking is the wrong one.

Maybe it isn’t “How can I become a better version of myself?”

Maybe it’s “What conditions help this version of me thrive?”

That’s a very different question. The first assumes you’re the problem to be fixed.

The second assumes you’re already whole, and asks what environment would let that whole self actually function.

Because human development never really stops.

As children, we depend on other people to build the conditions that help us grow.

We have very little say in it.

As adults, the difference is that we have more opportunity and more responsibility to design those conditions ourselves.

Not to override who we are until we fit the environment, but to shape the environment until it fits who we are.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become so interested in helping people understand how they actually operate, so they can design their environment accordingly.

Not so they can optimise themselves.

But so they can build a life that actually fits.

I said no.

Not because I didn’t want to go. I did. But because the sensible decision, the one that actually served me in terms of where I was at, was to hold back. I decided to let it be next year’s goal instead of this year’s stretch.

Did I feel FOMO watching everyone post from there? Of course I did.

But here’s what I noticed about that FOMO, once I actually sat with it.

It was never really about rubbing shoulders with the big names in the room.

It was about what being in that room does to your brain.

People I know who went came back changed.

Not because of who they met or what opportunity they generated, but because something in them had shifted.

I saw a video of an attendee talking about the neuroscience of attending, the way proximity to bold thinking can genuinely rewire what your brain believes is possible.

And that’s the real value. Because if you take away Oprah and Tina Knowles, the people who gained the most will be the people who changed how they think. Not the people who collected the most business cards. The people whose internal sense of what’s possible quietly expanded.

So the FOMO comes from being in a room that shifts your thinking. Not from missing the room itself.

Then I thought about it differently.

You don’t need to be in the biggest room for this to work.

A few weeks ago I went to an event hosted by Isobelle Panton and Stefanie Sword-Williams. Smaller room, but 100 ambitious women in it.

For me, that was my Cannes Lions moment. It didn’t break the bank, but it was worth its weight in gold.

Since that evening, I’ve been more audacious in what I do. Sending bigger proposals. Being more willing to ask for what I’m worth. Purely because of the audacity I watched them carry so naturally in that room. Something about being near that energy moved something in me too.

So no, you don’t need to be at the biggest, most talked-about event in the world to get the wiring. You just need to be selective about which rooms shape you, and intentional about seeking out the ones that actually move you forward.

This is the tension I keep coming back to, in my own life and in the work I do with others.

Sometimes the most ambitious thing you can do is wait. Build the conditions properly. Go when it’s actually aligned, not just available.

Cannes will still be there next year. And I’ll walk into that room a different version of myself, not because I rushed to get there, but because I trusted the timing enough not to.

Maybe that’s exactly why all of my work now is about this. Creating spaces that help people thrive. Designing a life that actually fits, rather than chasing every room that looks like it might.

You don’t need to be everywhere. You just need to be somewhere that moves you.

Living By Design, Not By Default

If I couldn’t keep up the routine, I needed more discipline.

If I was tired, I needed to push through.

If I kept falling short of the version of myself I had in my head, I needed to become more productive, more consistent, more capable of holding it all.

The answer was always to fix me.

One of the biggest shifts I have made over the past few years is giving that up.

I stopped trying to fix myself.

Instead, I started designing better conditions to help me function.

Not optimisation, but a good baseline,

Now, when something isn’t working, I ask a different question. Not “what is wrong with me?” but “what conditions would support me to showing up successfully?”

It sounds like a small change. It changed everything.

Take my own energy. For years I treated it as a fixed resource I was simply failing to manage well enough. Then I started paying attention, and realised it was never constant. It moves, across a day, across a month, in patterns I had been overriding rather than working with.

The moment I stopped forcing the same output from myself every single day and started building my work around my actual rhythm, I didn't become less. I became more myself.

Nothing about me had changed. The conditions had.

That is what life design actually is. Not a destination you eventually arrive at, fixed and finished, but an ongoing practice of returning to the drawing board. Pausing. Noticing what has changed. Redesigning accordingly.

Because as you evolve, your life has to evolve with you.

Every so often, you will find yourself in a liminal space.

The old version of your life no longer fits. The new one hasn’t quite taken shape.

That is not a sign you are lost. It is an invitation to recalibrate. To redesign. To ask better questions.

And in those spaces, if you let them do their work, you become clearer. About what you want, and just as importantly, what you don’t. What you are no longer willing to negotiate. What you are no longer willing to override.

Here is what I have come to believe. Thriving rarely comes from trying harder. It comes from creating the conditions that make showing up feel natural, the right environment, the right boundaries, the right pace, the right relationships, the right work, the right rhythms.

Not forcing yourself into a life built for someone you no longer are, but building one that fits the person you are actually becoming.

Because life design was never about turning yourself into somebody else. It is about building a life that allows you to become more of who you already are.

With clarity comes conviction. And with conviction, you stop overriding yourself.

You start living by design.

Living by design, not by default.