A friend of mine told me recently that he does not believe everybody has a purpose.

He is in the world of personal development, a coach and facilitator, someone who spends his working life helping other people get clearer about what they are doing here.

So I asked him what he meant by that. Whether it was the word he had a problem with, or something else.

What he went onto explain is that his problem is with how the word gets attributed.

There are people doing amazing things, noble things, looking after their families, paying off the mortgage, getting the kids through school, holding down responsibilities that other people are relying on.

Those same people are privately asking themselves whether they are living their purpose, because they have a nine to five, because the shape of their life does not match the shape they have been told purpose is supposed to take.

My point back to him was this.

If that life is in alignment with you, and you are doing it intentionally, and you are consciously aware of it, aligned with your values, your intention and what you are giving you energy (attention) to, and you are getting fulfilment, then you are living your purpose.

You are being purposeful.

What we were really circling was how you turn the noun into a verb.

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Purpose as a noun is a thing out there, something separate from us, waiting to be found.

There have been enough personal development books written about finding your purpose and living your purpose.

Most of these (at least the ones I’ve read) are resting on the same assumption, that there is something predefined waiting for you, and once you find it everything falls into place, you live your best life, you become the person you were supposed to be.

I do not buy into it.

At best I think it is misleading. The part that never resolved for me is the assumption underneath the whole thing, that there is something disconnected from us that we have to go and locate before we are whole.

We cannot be separate from life. IMO the purpose of life is living, experiencing life in her fullness.

That is it, that is the largest part of it.

However, there is another side to this that I do not want to wave away. Older cultures did hold purpose as something given rather than made.

In Hindu thought there is dharma, and inside it svadharma, your own law of action, the path that belongs to your particular nature.

The Gita puts it plainly, that it is better to follow your own law imperfectly than to follow somebody else's law perfectly.

Among the Yoruba there is ori, the inner head, carrying the shape of a life.

The Akan have nkrabea, a destiny assigned before birth and carried in the soul, with ancestors understood to help a person come into alignment with it.

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What strikes me is that none of this is fatalism. There is no sense in either tradition that a destiny is a sentence you are serving, or that it is good or bad.

The destiny is designed before birth, then the person works it out day after day for the rest of their life.

Destiny is the potential, and character is the means by which that potential gets actualised, built in ordinary hours by ordinary decisions. Not by doing some extraordinary or exceptional vocation.

In the Yoruba telling, the ori is chosen before you arrive, and you are the one doing the choosing, which makes it as much a choice as a given.

This puts the whole thing much closer to what I have been innerstanding for decades even before I had language for it.

None of those traditions stop at the noun.

Something is there, then you spend your days working it out. They held the noun and the verb together. What we have inherited and kept is the noun and let the verb go.

I am not saying that I agree with or disagree with what these ancient cultures believed.

It is not for me or for anybody else to tell a person whether they have a purpose.

If someone feels they have one, let them go looking. If someone feels they do not have one, that does not mean they are not living on purpose.

What surprises me is that I have been having this conversation for decades.

Almost twenty years on from when I was trying to work it out for myself, sitting there in a job that looked successful from the outside, and the same argument is still running.

There is a whole industry behind it now, and in some circles remains contentious.

What I sense is it does a disservice to people who are living good lives, living from a place of integrity, who have been left with a feeling that they should be doing something else without any idea what that something is.

They miss the fulfilment available to them where they already are, because they are measuring themselves against where they think they should be instead.

Back then, for me was not a question. It was a statement, coming up from somewhere underneath the thinking mind, “there is more to life than this.”

I spent a long time treating it as a question, working out what the more was and where I might find it.

Then I travelled, and I did the work, and I came back, and I recognised that corporate was exactly where I needed to be right then.

That was my purpose for then. It did not have to be the same from the start of my life to the finish of it.

My children were young then, my wife was at home with them, which is a full time job in itself, and I was out doing my sales role.

We were both being purposeful and living on purpose.

The season changed later, and I became what I call a SOULpreneur, and that is its own chapter.

In another decade there may well be a new season again.

When we go looking for purpose as a thing, we often reassign being purposeful to something less constructive and positive.

The looking takes our attention outward, away from what is already in front of us.

Even the act of worrying can be seen as being purposeful but maybe not in the way it’s been sold to us. Because it’s often a misalignment of what we really want and what we’re trying to avoid… giving our focus and energy to the latter.

Once we are aligned with our awareness and our intention, and we pay attention to that, and we act in line with it, that is what we give purpose to.

Purpose gets assigned by us, to the things we choose.

What are you still waiting to find?

Earl Talbot is a guide for solopreneurs, founders and leaders navigating the gap of being and becoming. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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This piece was developed with an AI as editorial companion. All ideas, experience, and voice are Earl's.

I heard an MMA fighter being interviewed before a fight, and the interviewer kept circling the same point, his opponent is fast, he’s got the speed, he’s fast.

The fighter said timing trumps speed every time. Speed is great, if you’ve got timing it will neutralise speed.

There’s a version of this in the F1 film too, slow is precise and precise is fast.

In the world of solopreneurship we’ve been handed fail fast, fail fast, fail fast.

There is real value in that in certain contexts, especially if you’re building something and you want to get through as many iterations as you can.

Managing your energy is a different question.

Sustainable performance is variable, sometimes high, sometimes medium, sometimes low, and low is sometimes the appropriate one.

What I find is that alignment trumps activity.

When I look back, it’s never one moment that does it, it’s the pattern, and the pattern always starts in the same place, external forces.

What other people want of me, what they think I should be doing, their timescales, their deliverables.

Each strand can only see its own strand. My wife, a client, my mother, my kids, a friend, none of them can see everything I’m carrying, so their small ask genuinely is a small ask.

It’s another straw on the camel’s back all the same. Getting the information back to the accountant for the taxman, cancelling the outdated subscriptions, all of it adds up, multiple tabs open that I need to address.

I feel like I’m running like the hare, but on ice. There’s a lot of movement, not a lot of traction, not a lot of progress even though my legs are going, because most of the movement is toward other people’s demands rather than where I’m going.

Misalignment is what that produces. High activity, then stress, then overwhelm, then I stop making decisions altogether and switch off.

I know I’m on the ice because the “5 Intelligences” start going offline, usually in order.

My executive function clouds first, I have tasks that are easily executable and I don’t action them.

I get frustrated and shorter with the people I love, and even when what I’m saying to them is correct, the delivery isn’t.

I stop walking in nature, I stop going to the gym, I snack badly.

My intuition either goes quiet or I drown it out with the noise of what I need to do next (it’s almost certainly that I drown it out).

I spend more time at the desk, I see an incoming call and don’t feel resourced enough to take it.

Something I only noticed recently is that nothing on that list gets broken by me deciding to stop.

But know when to step back doesn’t come easily.

What usually breaks the cycle is when I’m so uncomfortable in my own skin that I’m forced out of the door.

When the computer meltdown mid-document and I have no choice but to step back, or when my wife notices I’ve snapped at the kids and I see in their faces I think what have I just done.

The intervention always arrives from outside my own executive function, which is precisely the function that’s gone offline.

Which is why I built the rituals in the first place. How I block the diary, when I go to the gym, the walk, the journal, the coffee in the garden on a morning where I’ve protected enough space to have one.

Those things hold the line when my cognitive intelligence can’t.

What takes my rituals and habits off-line is the structure breaks first.

An emergency, a bad night’s sleep, something my mother needs dropping off, one thing knocks the rhythm out and then another.

Once I’m detached from the rituals I’m at the mercy of whatever comes at me next. Literally trying to run on ice (with flat shoes).

However, having my rituals in my calendar, I don’t have to “think” about finding traction again.. it will be in my diary the next, day the day after that and the day after that.

In F1 the fastest car doesn’t always win the race. An experienced driver in a slower car (tortoise), with a good sense of when to pit, when to brake, when to accelerate, will beat the faster one.

Speed is just speed. Timing is holding the line. What matter is when you cross the line and you have enough juice to do so.

So where in your week are you running fast, and where are you running on ice?

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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This piece was developed with an AI as editorial companion. All ideas, experience, and voice are Earl’s.

Some years ago a mentor of mine told me I should double the price of my one to one sessions.

He wasn’t guessing, he had been in the market a long time, he knew what other people were charging, and he knew the level of training, experience and expertise I had put into the work. His point was that even at double, I would still be cheaper than a lot of people carrying the mantle of coach.

It felt scary, and I couldn’t do it.

I went up by fifty percent instead, and even that was a stretch. It took another two years before the new number felt like it was actually mine.

The reason had very little to do with the market. I couldn’t rationalise the number to myself, so I couldn’t put it in front of anybody else.

Versions of this conversation have been coming up a lot recently, with potential clients, with people I collaborate with, with others doing work like mine. There is a pull towards the bottom happening, people trimming their numbers before anyone has asked them to.

I know that instinct well, somebody pauses after hearing a price and the urge arrives to fill that pause with a discount, to make the moment less uncomfortable.

That urge takes a toll, and the toll is rarely about the money.

Every time we devalue the work without a structure behind the decision, without understanding why we are doing it, there is a meta message in the act and the message goes to us. We hear something about our own worth whether we meant to say it or not.

This is not only a founder thing. It happens to anyone who has ever named a fee, asked for a raise, quoted for a job, or put a price on something they made with their own hands.

Recently I was talking someone through my offer, The Inner Compass. They were not questioning the price, I could see them doing the sum in their head, working out the value of the proposal I gave them.

What the don’t see behind the proposal is years of building the thing in the first place, the design, the testing, the architecture around it. Underneath all of that sit the thousands of hours of training, the thousands of hours of guiding (retreats, workshops and 1-2-1’s), the lived experience that decides which pattern in someone’s answers matters and which one is noise.

A price is rarely a reflection of the thing being handed over, it reflects everything that had to exist before it.

It reminds me of the old story about a ship that most people have heard some version of.

The ship is tied up at the dock with a dead engine, the crew try everything they know and nothing brings it back.

Cargo is waiting and spoiling, the schedule is slipping, money is going out of the door every day the vessel does not move.

Eventually the owner calls in an old engineer. He walks the engine room slowly with his small case, listens, puts a hand on a few parts of the machine. After a while he takes a small hammer out of his case and taps one spot.

The engine turns over and runs.

His invoice arrives a few days later for £10,000. The owner writes back asking for it to be itemised, given the man was on board less than an hour.

He sends back a second invoice, itemised. £10 for tapping with a hammer. £9,990 for knowing where to tap.

Most people hear that story and understand the engineer knew exactly where his value lies and he was confident in sticking by his price, but still struggle to know how to apply it to themselves.

There is another part of the story that gets my attention is what the owner was actually buying. He was buying back every day that ship would have sat there serving nobody, a very valuable vessel and cargo, dead in the water.

Value isn’t always about the price and can be the cost of what is lost or potential not realised.

None of this means nobody should ever discount, I do discount. There are charities I work with where the referral itself tells me what I need to know, there are students, and there are people who have recently been laid off, I understand what it is to live off your savings while you work out what comes next.

The difference is that those decisions were made in advance, when I was under no pressure at all. I had already worked out who and why.

A discount that arrives in the moment, in response to a pause on a call, is a different animal entirely.

What gets shaved off in those moments sits in us rather than in the invoice, and it turns up later in how we come to the work we do.

Sometimes it arrives as resentment, other times as a sense that the exchange is not reciprocal, that it does not feel like a win on both sides.

Something else I have noticed since getting clearer about who the work is actually for. The people I have been working with recently do not quibble about the price.

Either it sits within what they can do and they can see what it is for, or it does not, and that is an honest conversation to have. Cash flow is its own thing and can usually be worked around.

You can buy a watch for £20 or you can buy a watch for £200,000, both of them tell the time. For the two people buying them they do entirely different jobs, one of them tells you the hour, the other one says something about the person wearing it.

When somebody quibbles about the value itself, and not the process, timing or logistics, they are probably not the client for me.

If you can rationalise your price to yourself, you never have to justify it to anybody. That is my view, at least. The justifying tends to start when the internal work has not been done.

That work is real work. Reconciling what you have built, what you invested to build it, the depth of what you have learned, the years it took, all of it held against what the market says and against who the work is genuinely for.

There is a version of that engineer’s second invoice for every one of us. Most of us are still writing the first line and not acknowledging the second one line.

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*Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.*

*This piece was developed with an AI language model as editorial companion. All ideas, experience, and voice are Earl’s.*

Mastermind or Mindset

I drafted this piece before the tragic events with Professor Jason Arday (RIP) happened. I want to call that out. What his death did was make me pause and understand the magnitude of writing this piece.

I didn’t know Jason personally. I know him through the lens of other people. What his death did was make me look again at why I do this particular work, and why I start with mindset.

Whilst it ended up with Jason dying by suicide, a lot of people don’t go that far. It’s not that event that happens, instead they slowly self destruct. It’s a slower kind of death, and it happens to a lot of people who have been in that position where they’ve done everything by the rules or not necessarily by the rules. because often sometimes those rules were made to exclude us.

They’ve done what what’s been asked of them. sometimes twice as much because the game was rigged against them. Then if they make a mistake and even if they don’t make a mistake, but god forbid they make a mistake, they are not afforded the same graces as other people from other ethnicities.

It doesn’t stop at that though because then the agents of the Matrix are coming at you and they are relentless in your professional and personal destruction. The agents can be people serving the media, the police, the institutions and organisation that employ you and some unwittingly and some wittingly members of the public that are quick to commentate on the socials.

I’m specifically talking about Black people of the diaspora here. People who born in a country that still see them as an “other” due to ethnic heritage. I’ve seen it happen so many times, and I’ve been connected to so many stories.

This isn’t really all about Jason as I mentioned I had originally wrote it before that situation happen and I don’t know what support he had or what he didn’t have.

I’m part of a group that is what I call a mindset mastery group. It’s a men’s group, invite only, and we use the analogy iron sharpens iron, steel sharpens steel.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about the benefits of it. He asked me the question, what is the difference between a mastermind group and a mindset mastery group?

It’s not easy to answer that question, because most of the groups I’ve been a part of have been quite different. This has mainly been mastermind groups.

The biggest thing for me is that a mastermind group is primarily focused around business, and around holding each other accountable to setting and meeting or overachieving on the business plans and objectives and goals and all that stuff, in a structured way. People can do their own research on a mastermind group, but generally that’s how it’s been for me.

What I noticed in mastermind groups is that often people would fall out. Fall out of the group, and fall out with each other.

What I saw tripping people up was other people holding people to account aggressively without empathy, not really understanding certain context and what was happening in the background.

What would mainly drop people out isn’t anything to do with the business. It would be other things that are happening in their life, and their mindset around those things, that would then translate and contaminate the business element of it as well.

A nicer way of saying that is some people let their bad habits in their personal life, because of challenges and trauma and conflicts that needed to be resolved, come into the mastermind group. That mastermind group might be one or two hours a week. For the rest of that seven day week, they’re living their everyday life.

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The people that had more of a mindset mastery approach, in my opinion, were much more successful in achieving and delivering on what their systems and projects were. Not in a forced controlling way, but in an expansive, generative, opportunistic way of showing up, being relevant, being present. When an opportunity came up, they were able to translate that into a meaningful conversation or a pitch, a useful collaboration, whatever it might be.

Maybe it’s me being somewhat neurodiverse, and seeing with my NLP training what the pattern under the surface is. It was a mindset thing.

I see so many Black men who have certain values around being the significant income person in the house, trying to lead the family, and the pressures that come with that. Not to say that’s the best way or the right way.

It often starts through the cultural inheritance. There are still a lot of those values and narratives that still play out. The reckoning of trying to navigate that can be a very heavy burden to carry.

I don’t think that’s exclusive to Black men. It happens to other men and women. In environments and institutions where we don’t belong, or where we’re perceived as not belonging, that’s where it becomes much more challenging.

There are lots of challenges that many people have. When you’ve worked twice as hard, when you’ve jumped through all the hoops, and the thing that makes you stand out is the visibility and how you have to navigate that, that’s the difference. Those places and spaces make it heavier to wear.

The mindset mastery and mastermind thing is valid, because people do try to find places and spaces that can help them navigate it. If the mindset mastery is not there, then it’s going to be challenging.

That’s the reason why I started mindset mastery groups back in 2012. I set up the Creative Muscle Mindset Mastery Group. Again, it was just for men.

I think mindset mastery requires certain things. It asks you to stay open minded, there has to be empathy in it, it has to be generative and needs to be flexible, not fixed .

It needs to engage in curiosity and wonder. We have to be able to embrace our limitations and unique abilities which requires integrity and authenticity.

It also requires what I call radical self honesty and humble acceptance.

Which I call being HAaRSH.

Humble acceptance is accepting life as it is. It is what it is. Stuff happens, and we’ve got to get on with it.

Radical self honesty is what’s within my control. How do I feel about this? What am I going to do about it? Being really honest with yourself and not bullshitting yourself is the key thing.

In masterminds, quite often there is a hope or a desire that the mindset you get from the mastermind group will cross over into other areas of real life, to create a discipline in everything else. Generally speaking, that’s not my observation.

If you’ve got a strong mindset already, then yes, you will stay on target. If your mindset isn’t what I would call strong or resilient, then it tends to affect it.

Whereas when you start with the mindset mastery, that tends to permeate all areas of your life. Your business, your relationships, and everything else. That’s why I tend to start at that level, at that entry point, and bring that to groups, individuals, retreats, and everything else.

Nobody’s inner work should have to compensate for a mainstream and social media frenzy or an institution that decided who we were before they knew us, and it’s an obscenity that we are even discussing the burden at the level of the individual.

What it does is change what you are able to hold, and for how long. Steel sharpens steel when both pieces are held steady. Held wrong, they take chips out of each other.

It’s how job to hold ourselves and each other steady.

Earl Talbot is a guide for leaders and founders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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This piece was developed with an AI language model as editorial companion. All ideas, experience, and voice are Earl's.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the Arday family and those who have lost someone to that quiet despair. They are more than statistics they are men that have carried a burden that no one person was meant to carry, nor should they.

Yesterday afternoon, sitting in the dark, my son next to me and a bucket of popcorn that neither of us really wanted (but ate it anyway).

We'd gone to see the new Spider-Man. Two hours sharing an experience and hardly talking. Taking on all the messages, metaphors, plots while being entertained.

Early on there's a scene at a graveside (no spoilers), Peter Parker is standing at his Aunt May's grave, and the camera holds on the headstone long enough for you to read what's carved into it.

"When you help someone, you help everyone."

I've since learned that inscription has been there in an earlier film that I hadn’t noticed before. It was there all along. Yesterday was the first time I actually read it.

It has taken me a minute to work out why it reached me now and not before.

A lot of the conversations I'm in at the moment carry the same theme, a disaster in one place, a conflict in another, something in the feed each morning that makes the world feel like it's coming apart faster than any of us can absorb.

Friends, clients, people I meet at retreats, parents working out what on earth to say to their children about any of it.

I've felt it myself, that insignificance that comes when the scale of what's wrong sits so far beyond anything you could personally affect.

The thing that tends to follow, for me at least, is a strange sort of stillness (the unhelpful kind).

It isn't rest, it's more like standing at the edge of something enormous and deciding there's no point wading in.

Running alongside that is the other thing I notice, the pressure to be seen doing something proportionate to the size of it, marching, posting, declaring where you stand, saving a nation or a race or a planet.

None of that is something I would argue against. People find their own way in, and some of those ways are loud for good reason. What I've started to wonder about is the arithmetic underneath it.

A handful of people trying to help millions will always add up to less than millions of people each helping somebody.

For me who that somebody is changes depending on the week. It might be a client in front or a person at a retreat, someone I mentor, a neighbour, a stranger.

None of it feels like much while it's happening. The compound effect of doing it regularly, over years, across everyone you come into contact with, is not something you can see from inside it.

My son said nothing about the inscription. I don't know whether he noticed it.

What I found myself thinking about, sitting there in the dark next to him, is that he already lives that way.

He's the one putting himself out for people, without being asked, not as a role or a job but as an human and without making anything of it.

Nobody sat him down and explained the virtue of it, he simply does it.

I felt proud to be his father in that moment.

We came out into the light of the afternoon and talked about the movie but not the specifically about inscription.

Now I’m reflecting, I think what the inscription tells me is anyone is someone and someone is everyone.

And that we shouldn’t allow politics, religion, ethnicity, whatever excuse to stop us from helping anyone.

Because we are all someone.

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they've been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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On Saturday I went to the Roots Picnic festival in London. I was back at a festival for the first time in a looong time.

It was an experience of so many different modalities. You had the crowd moving, the sound of the music going through you, me moving to the music myself, the smells of the food, the people singing along.

I could almost call it a spiritual experience, feeling so many different things at the same time and it was so invigorating.

I felt alive, in ways you can’t get from just sitting in front of a screen, watching Netflix or something. It’s a very different experience, it’s a real experience.

Something else was true in that festival though. Even though I was surrounded by people, I was still alone in a way, because I didn’t know many of them other than the friends I’d connected with.

The next day gave me something different.

It was my son’s birthday, so we had family over. Three generations of family together, from the grandparents to my children. Spending time with intimate family members like that, has a deep and nourishing wisdom that comes from that family constellation.

The interactions from the young and the old, sharing stories, supporting each other, the parents looking after the grandparents and the children.

Watching that system operating, seeing how valuable community is in that way, it’s a different take from many of the superficial and transactional connections in our fast paced world.

The festival was an experience of group of people who had shared values of the music and culture, in terms of going to the festival. The family experience is a different configuration, and it’s shared wisdom, it’s shared love in a very visual way.

It was really beautiful watching the interactions between those multigenerational connections, and it reminded me of the importance of family, from the roots to the fruits.

Then yesterday we went to the cinema as a family. It was my son’s choice of film, The Odyssey, a film about mythology which he likes.

I enjoyed absorbing it through the art form of what it is, film, an appreciation of it. The movie was good, and I knew the story already.

The conversation after the film was really enriching, being able to discuss it, reflect on it, why we liked it and what we didn’t like.

My sons were focused on the acting, rather than the special effects and the action which was a new experience for me.

One thing stood out to me. My elder son said Odysseus’ monologue was probably his favourite part in the movie, and I found that surprising in a very positive way.

I’m not just sharing this to give you a rundown of my weekend. I was reminded of some of the things that are really important in my life.

Things that have nothing to do with the AI and the digital world and making things bigger, faster, better.

Across all of these events there is something that’s touched but not easy to explain.

I remembered the reason for me supporting people on their journey of being a SOULpreneur.

There is an essential quality, an essential part of ourselves, that sometimes we can’t necessarily name but we can experience.

It’s our essence, our unique essence. How do we keep that spark, that flame, alive and active and fed and nourished?

It’s the spark behind the eyes, this thing that keeps us alive.

Coming back to the grandparents, them seeing their children interact with their grandchildren, when they see them supporting and looking after each other.

I see the spark in their eyes, I see it bring them to life.

The same spark is there when people are dancing and listening to the music, even if we don’t know the song, but the music moves us that helps feed it.

So that essence is hard for us to put our finger on, hard to easily identify, because it’s dynamic, spontaneous constantly moving but it’s definitely something that needs nourishing and, I would say, protecting.

Because otherwise life seems quite bland and one dimensional. We try to plan and optimise life like a spreadsheet, we’re always trying to be productive.

Nothing I did this weekend was productive, but it was fulfilling. While it meant I was spending money with no tangible ROI, the experiences I got from all of it are invaluable.

Those experiences and memories this weekend has brought me are priceless.

How are you keeping your own spark alive and fed and nourished?

Earl Talbot is a guide for leaders and founders moving through change without losing themselves. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs, under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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To become something other than were born to be.

That “success” with all its trappings validates us, makes us worthy and happy.

That’s not the truth for me.

The fact we’re here we already made it.

We were born successful and validated by the Divine powers that created us.

Our purpose isn’t something we have to seek out and look for.

We were born to be.

We give purpose to how we show up and what we give our attention and energy to intentionally.

We are our purpose.

Our purpose is noble if we remember we are noble.

Our purpose is charitable if we are giving.

Our purpose is impactful if we are powerful.

So the question is not whether you will make it?

It’s if you remember you’ve already made it?

Because it already made you.

Earl Talbot is a guide for leaders and founders to navigate the challenges with those roles.

He works through recoded resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd

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I actually picked it up twice, years apart, once in Peru and once in Southeast Asia.

Both times I knew what it was before anyone confirmed it, because of the burping, which comes up smelling of rotten eggs and is unmistakable once you have had it.

Giardia is a parasite, microscopic and waterborne, easy enough to swallow without noticing a thing, and once it is in you it settles into the small intestine and makes itself at home.

What has stayed useful to me is that unlike other parasites is giardia is not attacking you.

There is no ill intention toward you whatsoever. It is a foreign body in an environment it was never made for, and my body, doing exactly what a body is supposed to do, wanted it gone.

Every meal set it off again, every glass of water, and the whole system went into purge from both ends of me for days on end.

The parasite itself was survivable. The dehydration was the thing that could have taken me down, my own defences running so hard that it cost me more than the invader ever did. There can be serious consequences from dehydration!

While learning NLP(Neuro linguistic programming)I remember Robert Dilts talking about “mind viruses”, and I have not found a better description for something I see happening everyday.

Unlike Giardia, a mind virus is not biological.

I would call it psychological and energetic, though it produces a physiological response soon enough.

It is a thought or a notion or an idea that arrived from outside us, usually handed over by somebody else, often by somebody who had no idea what they were handing over.

There are two forms I keep seeing it take.

The first is internalised, pointed inward at the self. Let me set the scene.

I was at college and a lecturer came looking for me because I had not been in class.

She told me I was an underachiever, that I was not living up to the expectations she had of me, and I was taken aback by it.

Some of that was a compliment turned inside out and I could hear that even at the time, though what I walked away with was the noun rather than the concern sitting behind it.

Underachiever stopped describing a term of missed lectures and started describing me.

A mind virus propagates because we believe it, and I believed her. After all she was experienced and in authority.

Years later I was in a sales role and got put forward for an account nobody wanted. It was a large, high profile account (£££££) that the senior leadership had a keen interest but it was one of the problematic ones.

It was already agreed that I would manage the account and then somebody in the room raised a concern about whether I was the right person for it, and I said nothing.

I did not challenge them, I did not tell them I could handle it, and truth be told I had no idea at that point whether I could.

The underachiever was what I was protecting.

What I had actually taken from that lecturer wasn’t that she cared and was willing to find me but her disappointment, and disappointment was the thing I could not go near again.

If I let people put me somewhere I might genuinely help them, I might let them down. Backing out was cheaper than finding out.

The virus does its own work from there. We go looking for evidence that confirms it, and evidence is never hard to find when you already know what you want to prove.

From the outside a refusal like that can look like modesty, occasionally even like good judgement.

It becomes almost autoimmune, our own defences turned inward and doing damage to the host.

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The second form is externalised, and I would put this one under “extreme prejudice.”

Preference is healthy and we all have it, apples over oranges, one person’s company over another’s, and there is nothing wrong with any of that.

Prejudice is what happens when a preference hardens into a verdict about who somebody is.

I remember watching what came back at Brené Brown once her TED talks went worldwide.

People commented on her appearance rather than a word she had actually said, and it came from men and women both.

That last part is the bit I have never been able to file away neatly. It would be far simpler if it were one group doing it to another.

You see the same shape in football. A crowd will love a black player who is playing in the team, sing his name for ninety minutes, and the moment he misses, the thing they reach for is his colour. Some of them reach for it even when he scores. What are the children learning in the stands?

Which is why the word “virus” fits. These things are infectious, they move through newspapers and television and a timeline at three in the morning, and they do not stay in one host.

There is a clip from 1995 I keep thinking about. Venus Williams was fourteen and newly professional, being interviewed by John McKenzie - a middle aged white male (that is relevant in this story) for ABC News.

Venus said she knew she could beat her next opponent. He asked her why she said it so easily. She told him it was because she believed it, and he kept pressing.

Richard Williams stopped the interview. He told McKenzie his daughter had answered with confidence the first time and that he was going on and on, then he named what was actually happening in the room, that this was a little Black kid being asked (by an older white male who’s a seasoned journalist) to justify believing in herself.

Watched cold, it is a reporter just asking a follow-up question.

Seen through the eyes of a man who had spent decades being told his kind and his daughters did not belong in that sport, it is something else entirely.

He could recognise the transmission because he had been on the receiving end of it often enough to know its shape before it finished arriving.

If we have already accepted the virus, nobody needs to finish the sentence for us.

Someone looks at us as though we do not belong in the room, we agree with them, and we leave.

The ones who can name what is happening are the ones who get to choose if they want to go or stay.

Now to the word anchor, because this is where NLP earns its place for me.

An anchor is an association between a stimulus and a state, and most of them are laid down without anyone intending anything.

The smell of a certain dish can put me back in Jamaica, in a particular year, with particular people around me. I have done nothing to make that happen, it arrives whole and unasked for.

The wiring runs the other way just as easily. There was a food I ate while I had giardia, and I was sick on it, and for a long time afterwards the smell of it alone was enough to turn my stomach.

The state was wired to the stimulus, and the stimulus never had to explain itself.

Our mind viruses sit on the same wiring. The belief is the thing that got laid down.

The trigger is out in the world, a request, a face, a headline, a name in an inbox, a tone of voice from a parent and the internal dialogue arrives before we have had a thought about it, with whatever the body does alongside it.

I have watched good work stop short at exactly this point, and I want to be careful about how I say the next part.

I have had coaches who were extraordinary, people who genuinely altered the direction I was travelling in, so none of this is a swipe at the field.

What I am describing is my own experience, along with what a number of my clients have told me about work they did elsewhere before they found me.

A lot of it was working on the reaction. The response gets coached, sometimes beautifully, and the wiring underneath stays exactly where it has always been.

NLP is not therapy and I would not make that claim for it, though it does have tools for finding the association and understanding when it was set.

My sense is that the more standardised coaching becomes through certain accrediting bodies, the narrower the permission gets, and a practitioner who can only work inside a defined lane cannot always follow the thread to where it actually goes.

I could be wrong about how widespread that is (I am going on what I keep noticing, not on data).

It is one of the reasons I do not call myself a coach.

The other reason is simpler. Calling myself one would mean setting aside a couple of decades of everything else I have learned, at the exact moment a client needs it.

I use the word “SOULpreneur” for the people I work with, and the four letters have never felt more relevant than they do here.

Self-awareness comes first, because you cannot address something you have not noticed you are running.

Most of us can describe our behaviour long before we can describe what sits underneath it.

Ownership is the harder one. Nobody is coming to remove what somebody else installed. Finding a guide, or learning the tools yourself, all of it sits on the far side of deciding this is yours to deal with now.

Unique ability is where I would put Richard Williams. What allowed him to read that room was the same background being used against him, and people who assume you will not be much good hand you an angle they do not have themselves.

Legacy is the one I have had slightly wrong for years. I used to think of it entirely as outward, how you move through the world, what you leave behind for other people.

Turning up for yourself belongs in there too. If you cannot manage that, there is not a great deal to pass on.

Treating giardia was straightforward once I knew what I had. Something to deal with the organism, and a great deal of water to replace what my own body had thrown away trying to save me.

Much of what I have believed about myself over the years, I did not arrive at on my own.

I picked it up somewhere, from someone with no ill intentions and possibly who actually cared about me and still spreads the virus.

What are you still carrying that you never actually agreed to?

Earl Talbot is a guide for leaders and founders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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The Book I Keep Not Writing..

Thursday morning was blocked out for writing the draft of my book.

I know the chapter I’m writing, I know roughly what has to go in it, nobody needs anything from me until 11am.

By 9.10am I am reading a study I bookmarked three weeks ago. By 9.45am I am reworking a paragraph I already reworked on Tuesday.

The chapter I blocked time for has not moved.

From the outside none of it looks like avoidance. Research is useful, editing is necessary, both sit on the same list as the actual writing, and both let me close the laptop able to say I worked on the book today.

For months I have been calling this a discipline problem.

Then a video from Ashley Crockett came across my feed, talking about what she calls cognitive mode theory.

Her argument is that research is not the same activity as writing, writing asks something different again from execution, and execution has almost nothing in common with quality assurance.

Each one asks the brain to operate in a different mode. The friction we feel is rarely inside the task itself, it sits in the transition between modes, and that transition carries a cost most of us never account for.

See video at the beginning.

That explained my morning better than discipline ever had. I had not failed to work, I had spent two hours avoiding the price of a mode change.

I agree with all of it. What I keep turning over is what sits underneath the mode, before I even sit in front of the computer.

The mode I can reach on a given morning is decided long before I sit down.

My list gets written the night before by a version of me who assumed I would arrive uniformly available.

What actually arrives is whatever is left after the quality of sleep the night before.

The emotional energy after a conversation with my wife that went somewhere neither of us planned. My focus after the messages I read before I had any business reading them.

I can work down that list in the order I intended, or in the order my emotional availability allows. Most days it is the second, and for years I read that as a failure of structure.

We have inherited a way of working that treats the cognitive as the whole of a person’s capability.

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Since the Industrial Revolution the knowledge worker (thinking mind) has been the one we measure, develop, promote and pay for, while the other four go untrained or possibly not acknowledged.

Our “5 Intelligences” are running the whole time whether we attend to them or not, cognitive, emotional, somatic, intuitive, spiritual.

The emotional one decides how much of the cognitive one is available to me.

So does the somatic one, as anyone who has tried to think clearly on a few hours of sleep already knows without needing me to say it.

Have an argument before breakfast and then attempt precise analytical work.

Take bad news at nine and sit down to write at ten. The mode is not the obstacle, the state I brought to it is, and I had not been counting that as work.

I notice a larger version of this in the founders and leaders I sit with.

They are usually running something complicated, pricing that no longer covers the cost of delivery, a technical decision made two years ago that everything now depends on, a hiring sequence with no good order to it.

Complicated problems have a solution inside them somewhere. They yield to analysis, to expertise, to a long enough session at a whiteboard. Complicated belongs to the cognitive.

What is actually consuming them tends to be complex, the co-founder who has gone flat while insisting everything is fine, the team that agrees in the room and does something else by Thursday, their own reluctance to make a decision they have known was right for eight months.

None of that resolves through analysis. Complex primarily sits outside the cognitive arena, it asks for the intelligences nobody trained them to use.

Someone who has only ever been rewarded for cognitive intelligence will keep reaching for the tool that earned the reward.

They apply more analysis, another framework, a cleaner system. The problem was never in that arena, so the tool cannot reach it.

I have watched capable people lose years this way (I have lost more time than I’d like to mention myself).

I still sit down most mornings meaning to be productive.

Some days the work gets done. Other days I catch myself twenty minutes into something I do not need.

Now instead of arguing with myself about discipline I try to ask what I walked in carrying.

The answer is almost never about the book, the admin, the client outreach.

What are you calling a self-discipline problem that might be something else entirely?

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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I saw her in a hostel dormitory in Rarotonga, many moons ago now, when I was travelling in my early thirties.

She was petite, European, somewhere in her late sixties, and blind in one eye.

I didn’t pay much attention to her, we didn’t even speak as she looked like she was keeping herself to herself.

Her story reached me through other people in the dorm, the way stories do in those places.

The story goes her husband had never wanted to travel, she had always wanted to, and when he died she stopped waiting. She was sixty-seven when she booked the around the world tickets.

Everyone in that dorm called her brave. I don’t think I saw it that way, it just felt inspiring, which is a different thing altogether.

No doubt she was brave, I have no argument with that.

What I was responding to, though, was the thing that came before the bravery.

Something inspired her first, some pull toward growth and adventure and whatever sits on the other side of comfortable, and the courage turned up afterwards to do the practical work of getting her there.

That is the order I keep noticing in people. Inspiration moves you, then courage carries it.

Bear in mind I was in my early thirties and already felt old in those rooms, most of the people around me were gap year students just over half my age, and here was a woman nearly forty years older still moving through the world on her own terms.

She has been on my mind again recently, because of something I have started to want and haven’t fully accepted… yet.

Six to eight months of the year outside the UK. Running retreats, co-facilitating with people I trust, and in the gaps between them working from a laptop in whatever country I happen to be in.

It wouldn’t have to be six months in one stretch, two months somewhere, three months somewhere else, then home for a while to see family. There might still be a base (I’m still working all this out).

Part of it is freedom, which I suppose is obvious enough. The rest is harder to name.

I want to be in places where the pace is slower and the landscape is big enough to put me back in proportion, and there is the adventure of somewhere I have never been alongside the pull of returning to places that already know me.

Underneath that, though, there is a story I keep bumping into.

The story says that by now things should be settling down. More predictable, more stable, a life that has finished arranging itself.

It gets louder when you have children, because there is an assumption sitting under it that your life hands itself over to theirs, and that wanting something expansive for yourself at this stage is a form of selfishness.

At 57 I still haven’t bought this narrative, which is possibly why I couldn’t tell you exactly what people expect of me at this age and stage of my life.

Somewhere along the way I stopped listening.

What I notice, though, is how many people are still carrying it. Most of them are somewhere between forty-five and fifty-five, they followed the script they were handed, school then university then career then family, and they did it well.

What they tell me, in one form or another, is that they can already see exactly where the rest of it goes. They are on train tracks, and the tracks don’t deviate but they destination they’re heading to isn’t theirs.

Some are empty nesters with time and space they haven’t given themselves permission to use.

Others are in jobs that stopped valuing them years ago and can’t leave, because they know what the market does with people of a certain age. Especially if you’re not at a senior leadership level or looking for a NED role.

In this situation the only options (so they tell me 👀) is to use your experience to be a coach or consultant.

For the record, been there and done that.

A few have already been let go and are being told, very politely, that they are finished, while knowing with total certainty that they have another twenty good years in them.

My sense is that what sits underneath all of it is that we have stopped giving older, mature, middle aged (whatever they call us) people a role.

There are plenty of cultures where the grandparents have an active role, they hold the knowledge, they pass it on, and they are valued for wisdom, sometimes revered for it.

Where I live in the UK, grandparents often get called on for childcare and convenience, which is love of a sort, though it is a long way from being needed for what you know.

That is the narrative I am pushing back on.

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One of my core values is being of value, and I know what I can offer has not reduced with time.

Twenty-odd years of doing this work has made it sharper, and I’m not ready to retire.

The woman in Rarotonga wasn’t running from anything. She had spent decades waiting on somebody else’s no, and when that no was gone she answered what had been sitting in her the whole time.

In fact it’s not that I’m just not ready to retire, retirement isn’t in the plan.

I want to keep running retreats, keep mentoring, keep working with founders in the early scrappy stage where it matters most.

I do it because I love it, and because the older I get the more there is to bring to it.

That is what I mean by “Creative Muscle”, (my company name) the capacity to imagine a life you were never handed.

So if any of this sounds like your own, the question I would leave you with is whether the tracks you are on are actually tracks.

What else might be there, if you let yourself ask?

Earl Talbot is a guide for leaders and founders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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I walked into more boardrooms than I can count without ever quite walking in as myself.

Something in me learned early how to soften an accent, hold back an opinion, wait to be given the floor rather than take it.

I don’t think anyone had to tell me to do it, I think I just watched enough rooms and understood what got rewarded and what didn’t, and I adjusted.

Many of us from the African diaspora who came up inside corporate structures know exactly what I’m describing without me needing to explain it further.

That’s a different thing to hating the work. I didn’t hate the work, not most of it. What I couldn’t shake, over years, was the sense that the room itself wasn’t built with someone like me standing in the middle of it.

You learn to perform belonging in a space you were never quite the template for. It’s exhausting in a way that never registers anywhere and never registers in your output.

A client told me something a few weeks ago that put words to a feeling had for many years in the corporate world.

He said the corporate world had done to him what the Prison does to the characters in Shawshank Redemption.

He knew the walls weren’t right for him, had known it for years, but something in him had got so used to the walls that leaving felt more frightening than staying.

I told him I knew exactly what he meant.

I wasn’t pushed out gently either. I didn’t leap, if I’m honest. I was made redundant and I chose to go with it rather than claw my way back to a version of comfort I already knew wasn’t right for me.

What I didn’t expect, and what nobody tells you, is that leaving the building is the easy part. It took me somewhere between eighteen months and two years to actually free my mindset from it.

Longer than that to reclaim the parts of my identity I’d handed over, piece by piece over decades.

Stay long enough inside a structure that wasn’t built for you, and you start to question your own agency, your autonomy, even who you are underneath the role.

Comfort and rightness aren’t the same thing, but the longer you choose the first over the second, the more of yourself you hand over without noticing.

John Werner wrote a piece for Forbes this month making the outside case for leaving better than it’s been made in years.

Single-founder company filings are now at 63%. Solo business applications in AI-heavy sectors are up 27%.

Solo self-employment in roles AI touches has grown 20% since 2022. His argument is that AI has flipped which path counts as safe. Corporate no longer automatically wins that title.

For those of us from the diaspora, the numbers tell a slightly different, and in some ways more striking, story.

LinkedIn’s own 2022 survey of Black entrepreneurs found 54% cited financial security and independence as their motivation, with 43% pointing to generational wealth and 1 in 5 saying their job wasn’t investing in their growth.

Brookings research has found that Black Americans score above the national average on entrepreneurial traits linked to business success, even as structural barriers continue to limit ownership.

Black-owned employer businesses in the US grew 62% between 2017 and 2023, crossing 200,000 for the first time.

Even with all of that growth, Black Americans still own just 3.4% of employer businesses in a country where we make up 14.4% of the population.

The outside case for leaving keeps strengthening. The outside barriers, funding chief among them, haven’t gone anywhere.

I’m UK based, so it’s worth putting the same lens on this side of the Atlantic.

The picture here is harder to line up directly, most British data tracks “minority ethnic” broadly rather than Black professionals specifically, so treat these numbers as a shape rather than a precise mirror of the American ones.

The 2026 UK Black Business Entrepreneur Report estimates 194,347 Black-led businesses now operating in Britain, with more than 87% surviving beyond five years.

The ONS puts around 11% of UK self-employed business owners as minority ethnic, and separate research found non-White people in the UK economy were roughly twice as likely as White people to be early-stage entrepreneurs in 2023.

Yet only 6% of SMEs that actually employ people are led by someone from a minority ethnic group.

The instinct to start the entrepreneurial journey seems to be there on both sides of the Atlantic.

It’s important to say that I don’t believe AI is primarily driving this nor is it a silver-bullet for making the entrepreneurial journey successful.

I really believe this trend would happen anyway and that the AI is accelerating it.

Making a seemingly complex decision simple and the dream of freedom tangible. This is what AI does, but with confirmation bias it could be setting unsuspecting Solopreneurs up for failure.

None of that touches the inside of the decision.

The inside of the decision to leave is rarely just about risk tolerance or market timing. It’s about who gets to exist as themselves at work, and what it costs when they can’t.

The external landscape might finally be ready. The question is whether the internal one has caught up, and how long you’re willing to give yourself to find out.

Once you leave is when the inner adventure begins.

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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Sources

1. John Werner, “AI Startups, Solopreneurs And Actual Numbers,” Forbes, July 18, 2026 — https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnwerner/2026/07/18/ai-startups-solopreneurs-and-actual-numbers/

2. LinkedIn, “Black History Month: Advancing Equity for Black Entrepreneurs in the Workplace and Beyond,” LinkedIn Official Blog, February 14, 2022 — https://blog.linkedin.com/2022/february/15/advancing-equity-for-black-entrepreneurs

3. Hannah Stephens and Andre M. Perry, “The Shifting Landscape for Black-Owned Businesses: An Update to the Black Business Parity Dashboard,” Brookings, June 15, 2026 — https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-business-parity-dashboard-new-findings/

4. Aspire Consultancy, UK Black Business Entrepreneur Report 2026, cited in Nadine White, “‘Talent Clearly Exists’: UK Black Business Entrepreneurs Conference CEO Challenges Barriers Facing Black Founders,” Black Current News, July 18, 2026 — https://www.blackcurrentnews.co.uk/p/uk-black-business-entrepreneurs-conference-black-founders-barriers

5. “Business Statistics,” House of Commons Library, UK Parliament — https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06152/

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There’s a paragraph open on my screen right now that argues with a paragraph I wrote yesterday.

Yesterday I was certain the book needed to lead with structure.

Today I want to lead with feeling and let the structure catch up later.

My instinct is to call this messy and move on, but I want to stay with that word for a second, because I don’t think it’s the right one.

Think of it as land and sea.

Land is firm, land is solid, stand on it or sit on it and you’re not going anywhere unless you choose to. No current is going to move you while you’re not looking.

Sea is a different kind of thing entirely, it doesn’t hold still for anyone. Get in a boat or get in the water and the current has an opinion about where you’re going whether you asked for one or not.

Depending on how rough it is that day, it can feel like a threat.

Neither one is better. Some people love the sea the way other people love solid ground under their feet, and both are exactly as they need to be.

If you’ve spent your whole life on land, if the systems and institutions you grew up inside taught you that solid and safe were the same thing, then the sea reads as a problem the moment you’re in it.

It gets called messy, a thing to survive rather than a different kind of place to be.

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I coauthored a book once before, and that process had land under it, an editor, coauthors, a shape already walked.

This one has put me in open water. Every idea I bring to the page collides with three others, and some mornings I can’t tell which current is taking me anywhere.

Here’s what I’m noticing. Even standing waist-deep, the sea won’t hold still under you the way land does, and get in a boat and you’re not steering so much as negotiating.

There’s more risk in that than land, and there’s more possibility in it too, because nothing on solid ground needs to move for you to get somewhere new.

The finished paragraph isn’t really what matters here, being in the water while I write it is.

Sometimes that looks like a mess before it looks like anything else, everything pulled out in front of me at once so I can see what I’m actually working with.

So maybe the messy middle isn’t good or bad. Maybe it’s just what the sea looks like to someone who was raised on land, and the adventure was always going to look like that from where I started.

I still don’t know what tomorrow’s paragraph will say about today’s. I’m starting to think that not knowing is the current doing its job.

What would change if you let yourself be in the water instead of trying to find the shore?

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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Muscle only grows because we damage it, carefully, on purpose, and then let it heal back stronger than it was.

Hold that notion for a second. Growth and damage, sitting in the same sentence, both true.

I was thinking about this at the gym this morning, one earbud in, an audio book on the topic of resilience playing while I worked through my own set.

Then I watched it happen right in front of me, the exact thing the book was describing, playing out a few racks over.

Someone was chasing the number on the plate rather than the shape of the movement, elbows flaring, back rounding under the load, breath held somewhere it shouldn’t be.

I want to be clear, there was no judgment in watching this, I’ve been that person too. Many of us have, at some point, mistaken the weight for the win.

It’s the same pattern I keep seeing in the work. Growth asks something of us that sounds almost contradictory.

The paradox is We have to work against ourselves to expand, to push through comfort, conformity and protecting ourselves while we do it.

Working against yourself looks like adding resistance you haven’t earned yet, more weight, more reps, a version of the exercise that asks more of the same muscle.

Everyone understands this part. This is the part that gets celebrated.

Protecting yourself while you do it looks less visible. Starting lighter than your ego wants. Posture, breath, the understated foundation nobody posts about. Form isn’t the opposite of intensity, it’s what makes intensity survivable.

Skip it, and the resistance you’re adding isn’t building anything. It’s just accumulating risk in a body that can’t yet carry it.

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Two very different people can end up in the same place, for opposite reasons.

One is held back by comparison, by a fair self judgment that says everyone else is further along, stronger, more capable, so why bother starting where you actually are.

That person often never builds the foundation at all, because starting light feels like admitting something.

Someone else is pushed forward by a kind of borrowed confidence, an overestimation of what the current foundation can hold. That person builds on sand and calls it momentum, right up until something gives.

Different starting points. Same missing piece. Neither one is working with their actual foundation, one from fear of it, the other from ignoring it.

Whatever form the work takes for you right now, it seems to ask for something more deliberate than either of those.

Stretch yourself, embrace the resistance, let it be hard, and let the difficulty come from the load, not from a foundation you skipped past to get there faster.

The “damage” that makes you stronger is never accidental. It’s chosen, measured, and survivable on purpose.

What would it look like to add just enough weight that it’s honest, and no more than your form can hold?

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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I’ve had the same conversation more than once this year, in different rooms, with different people, saying different things.

Some come right out and say it.

I feel like I should be further along than this.

Others don’t say it in words. It shows up in the pause before they answer a question about what they’re building, or in the way they measure their year against somebody else’s.

What surprised me is who’s saying it. I expected it from people well into a career, watching the runway shorten.

I’ve heard it just as often from people half that age, already convinced they’ve missed something.

The question I circle back to is behind what, exactly?

Whose clock we’ve been watching and each agreed, without ever saying so out loud, to be measured against.

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The ancient Greeks had three words for time, not one. Chronos was the clock, the thing you could count.

There was also Kairos, the right moment, the sense that something had ripened before you could explain why.

Beneath both sat Aion, the whole arc of a life, too large to hold in minutes.

We kept one of the three and forgot the other two.

Long before anyone built a clock, people had a sundial and a compass. Both read something real.

The sundial reads the sun.

The compass reads the pull of the earth itself.

Neither can be argued with, they just report what’s true.

The clock is the one we made ourselves, and we’ve been overriding it since.

We push it forward an hour in spring, back an hour in autumn, set it to whatever timezone suits the call we’re dialling into.

Pace is an agreement between people, direction is not.

I think what’s underneath the feeling of being behind is a direction problem, dressed up as a speed problem.

When someone is working through a genuinely big decision with me, the fear rarely sounds like uncertainty about the decision.

It sounds like a clock.

I should have done this years ago.

Everyone else is further along than me.

None of that is coming from their compass.

It’s coming from a borrowed pace they never agreed to.

I don’t think the answer is to slow everything down on principle. I’ve made that mistake too, mistaking stillness for alignment.

The answer looks more like what the sundial and the compass already know.

Read what’s actually true for you first, then move from there.

Kairos doesn’t arrive on a schedule, and it’s not checking your age first.

You’re not late, and you’re not early.

You’re reading a clock that was never measuring what mattered in the first place.

What would you build differently if you trusted the compass over the clock, just for one decision.

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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Before You Say It…

I was in a video call watching a founder pitch.

She was good, she was very good. Brilliant at what she did, and clearly prepared.

Her numbers were solid and the product knowledge was there.

One of the mentors in the Zoom call interrupted her mid-sentence to point out that she said “um” a lot. She started saying it more.

Nerves were already running high. English wasn’t her first language, and she knew that when founders seek investment, people are weighing whether they believe in the founder as much as in what they’re building.

That information, delivered that way, made her more self-conscious, not less. It closed something in her rather than opening it.

After the session, I had a private conversation with her. When you’re searching for a word, I told her, it’s okay to pause.

Take a breath, You own the room when you’re pitching. Nobody is timing your silences.

The “ums” reduced without her thinking about them.

(For what it’s worth, I say “um” too. Most people do. The question is always whether naming something helps or hinders.)

That moment captures the whole difference between feedback that’s effective and feedback that’s ineffective.

It is rarely about accuracy. It is about how you bring it, what you are trying to open, and whether you have run it through yourself before you say it.

In my sales roles I have experience of running teams, including international ones.

Giving feedback is one of the most technically simple and humanly complicated things a leader does.

Most people know the theory. The difficulty is that theory tends to leave the room when the conversation gets personal.

Something I have borrowed from the work of Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, steadies this for me.

1. Be impeccable with your word. In the context of feedback, this means speaking about behaviour, not character. When you said that, this is what I heard. Not you are someone who. The person is never the problem. A specific moment, a specific pattern, a specific impact. Those can be named without attacking the person who needs to hear it.

2. His second agreement matters equally on the receiving side. Don’t take anything personally. When feedback is framed around behaviour and impact, the other person finds it easier to receive without defending against it.

There is a step before all of that, and it is the one most people skip.

I call it the self-feedback loop.

Before you bring something to someone else, you run it through yourself first.

Ask yourself what you are actually feeling, and what you want the outcome to be.

Check whether what you’re about to say is for them or for you. Frame it in the language of impact.

When this happened, this is what I felt. Then see whether you can hold that cleanly, without it becoming about the other person’s character.

Sometimes, more often than you might expect, you discover there is nothing to say.

The thing you were holding was yours to work with, the irritation was yours, the reaction was yours.

You needed to shift something in yourself rather than deliver a message to someone else.

That is the self feedback loop working.

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A friend was navigating a friendship that had become draining.

Face to face, they had a wonderful time, easy company and real warmth. Phone calls, though, had started going in a different direction.

One friend had fallen into a pattern that could be thought of as “Negging”, dumping negativity on another.

The calls that arrive loaded with complaints and grievances, cycling through the same territory, leaving the listener heavier than when they answered.

My friend didn’t want to lose the friendship. They couldn’t sustain being the landing place for all of the negativity either.

We walked through the self-feedback loop together. What were they feeling?

What did they actually want to say?

How would they say it in a way that named the impact without making the other person the problem?

When they ran it through, a few things became clear.

One was that they had more agency than they’d realised. They didn’t have to answer every call.

If they were tired, or irritable, or simply not in a place to receive it well, the voicemail existed.

The boundary wasn’t a rejection. It was an honest signal about when they could genuinely be there for their friend.

The other thing that became clear was that if the pattern persisted, they had the language to name it now, calmly, without blame, from genuine care for the friendship rather than accumulated frustration.

Going through the loop gave them options. It gave them the conversation with themselves before they had the conversation with their friend.

Running feedback through yourself first looks like extra work. In practice, it is what makes the honest conversation possible.

That requires the person receiving feedback to feel seen rather than judged, and the person giving it to have done some of the work on themselves first.

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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He has a master’s degree, an MBA, a track record that should make him hireable.

Many of his friends without a university education are on the employment ladder, some already moving up, a couple with property, something building in the background.

His version of that background is tens of thousands of debt and applications in for roles he is overqualified for.

What he keeps hearing is the same thing, that the roles he’s qualified for will be automated, probably within two years, maybe sooner.

His surface questions were practical. How do I position myself?

What kind of case can I make for a career in a landscape that is shifting faster than I can navigate it?

The anxiety I could hear running underneath the whole conversation, was a different one entirely.

What has any of this been for?

I spent nearly three decades inside that system, building a career in technology and consulting, playing by its rules well enough.

Having been made redundant twice ,You come to know the disorientation that happens when the ground starts shifting beneath something you have spent years constructing.

Across the table from him, I could see the anxiety wasn’t really about AI. It was about what the system had always told him he was worth.

We have inherited an image of the productive person that says your value is what is in your mind.

What you can produce, inside a structure, in response to instructions, that you absorb enough, pass the right tests, collect the right credentials, and perform reliably.

Peter Drucker named this in 1959, defining the knowledge worker as someone who applies theoretical and analytical knowledge, acquired through formal training, to develop products and services.

That was the template the Industrial Revolution had been building toward, and what the education system spent the next sixty years perfecting.

Then the engineers built AI, many of them, over decades, drawing on research into how language works, how information is processed, how patterns can be recognised and reproduced at scale.

What they built, whether they intended this reading or not, looks a great deal like the knowledge worker, systems trained on data, evaluated on their outputs, deployed into existing workflows, responding to prompts and producing results.

People feel like they are competing with AI for a reason.

The kind of human being the system optimised for, and the architecture these AI systems run on, are not as different as most of us have assumed. In many respects, the knowledge worker was Version 1 of AI.

That comparison only holds, though, if you accept that a knowledge worker is what you are.

I work with something I call the Five Intelligences. Cognitive is one of them, the one the education system measured and the corporate world rewarded.

The others are emotional, somatic (your body’s knowing), intuitive (the deeper pattern recognition that doesn’t translate into language), and what I’d call spiritual or holistic, your felt sense of being part of something beyond your own individual story.

An LLM has the cognitive one, a remarkable and accelerating version of it, and it doesn’t have the others.

Those intelligences are rooted in something that can’t be replicated through statistical training, something that lives in embodied experience, in genuine relationship, in the weight of having lived through something and having your body hold the memory of it.

When my mentee was laying out his credentials, he was doing exactly what the system trained him to do. Demonstrating cognitive output, making the case through evidence that could be assessed and compared, measuring himself against AI through the only lens the system gave him.

What the system never counted, and what AI genuinely cannot replicate, is the rest of him.

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His body knows things his CV doesn’t say, he has read rooms before a word was spoken.

He’s navigated situations through relationship and through failure that don’t appear in a competency framework, and carries an awareness of being woven into something that extends well beyond any single role or organisation.

These are intelligences in the fullest sense, and they are the ones most compressed by a system that needed you to sit at a desk and produce.

Anxiety about competing with AI only makes sense if you have accepted a version of yourself that was already diminished before the algorithm arrived.

The education system didn’t erase the rest of you, it just spent years asking only for one part of you, and you delivered, because that was what the deal looked like.

What my mentee and I circled back to wasn’t CV strategy. We spent the rest of that conversation on something more fundamental, on what he knows that doesn’t appear in applications, what he has felt and navigated and understood through experience that no training data could reproduce.

Those aren’t rhetorical questions. They are the beginning of a different kind of positioning, one that has nothing to do with outcompeting an algorithm and everything to do with remembering what you actually are.

We made AI in the image of the knowledge worker, trained and credentialled, optimised for a system that had already decided which part of you was worth measuring.

The rest of ourselves, we had stopped counting. Where we come from is far more expansive and sacred than that.

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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[Reference: Peter Drucker, The Landmarks of Tomorrow, 1959]

I had a conversation recently with a friend, I haven’t know him for long but the depth of conversations we have don’t reflect that. At some point in it he said something I’ve heard increasingly recently, that “he’d hit a ceiling”.

He’s not burning out or struggling to manage everything he’s come to a plateau.

He’s a SVP of operations for a not for profit, well-regarded, experienced, someone people reach out to within the industry because of what he knows and how he operates.

Gay Hendricks names this the “Zone of Excellence”, the territory you’ve worked long enough to own, where your credibility is established, the income reflects it (sometimes but not always) and people seek you out.

He’s earned it, and the “ceiling” he described wasn’t a failure ceiling, it was this one.

What he could see, looking further up the ladder, was what getting higher would actually cost him.

More responsibility, more direct reports, more pressure, longer hours, less time with the people he loves, less room for the things that make life feel worth living.

He wasn’t naive about it, he’d watched it happen to others near and afar, he could trace exactly where the ladder leads.

Saying it out loud, I think something came clear to us both. The ceiling isn’t telling him something has gone wrong. It’s telling him the ladder is the wrong structure for where he wants to go.

He framed it as binary options. Stay on the ladder and sacrifice the life he wants, or step off and sacrifice the financial stability his family depends on.

That tension is real and I’m not dismissing it, the question is whether it’s really as locked as it feels?

Maurice Philogene talks about five freedoms, among them time, purpose, and freedom of relationships, alongside financial freedom.

Frameworks like this give language to something most people feel long before they can articulate it, the longing for a life that belongs to you, not dictated by the organisation, the mortgage/bills, or someone else’s version of what success looks like for you.

The Freedoms gesture a way of living outward rather than upward.

What I put to him was simpler than a framework. What does his life look like when he starts to look horizontally instead of vertically?

The people around him, the things that enrich him, the work and experiences he loves and that he really wants to nourish.

How much of that can he bring back in, and how might he feed more of it?

Perhaps he steps off the ladder entirely and builds something within his Zone of Excellence on his own terms, his own clients, his own hours.

It might equally be that he stays and finds ways to carry that horizontal richness with him, treating it as something to build alongside his work rather than what you sacrifice in order to lead.

One or the other, or some version of both or more. The binary begins to open when you stop staring at the ceiling and start looking around.

Most of us were built, by education, by organisations, by family expectations, to think about progress as a track.

You get on, you move forward, the direction is given. For a long time, that’s genuinely productive. You develop real skills, build real credibility, arrive at real expertise.

However the tracks, at some point, often turn to road, pushed there by the toxic environment, that boss (you know the one), lay-offs, org changes, long term illness.

The problem isn’t that the road is worse than the tracks, it’s that you’ve never had to steer before.

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This is the state I’ve started calling “Conscious Unknowing.”

He isn’t incompetent (this is someone with two decades of real experience), and he isn’t lost in the usual sense.

He’s standing at the honest edge of what he currently knows, aware he doesn’t yet know the way through.

That awareness, the knowing that you don’t know, is the doorway.

Unconscious unknowing is being asleep at the edge, Conscious Unknowing is standing there with your eyes open. Feeling the fear, uncertainty and doubts.

On the other side of that edge, when you step through with purpose, intention and alignment, is what Hendricks calls the Zone of Genius.

I understand it as the Five Intelligences in coherence, cognitive, emotional, somatic, intuitive, and spiritual, all operating generatively and purposefully together rather than one dominating at the expense of the others.

When that coherence happens, you’re playing in a different dimension.

There’s a distinction I want to make because I don’t often hear it named. The Zone of Genius is how you operate… it’s like how you play an instrument, creatively relaxed, in flow, with musicality.

What the instrument produces is different, the work that reaches people, that stirs something in them, that feels like it came from somewhere deep and true, that is what I mean by “Genius Level”, the music the instrument makes.

The “music” we create is unique to us and is important because it’s often connected to our why, it’s what we get to share that’s valuable to others, the impact we have in family, community, society, humanity.

People running on tracks have forgotten they can make music, the capacity is still there, the track just never called for it. In fact it often inhibits it.

In the work I do, I’ve come to use the word SOULpreneur, not as a business type or an entrepreneurial label, but as an orientation. For people who irrespective of their job title or role are showing up to “play their music” for the betterment of the whole.

Most people who fit it have been living it already, without knowing there was a name for it and increasingly I’m seeing that it’s becoming more difficult for “being” and living in this way in corporate settings.

The conversation reminded me how many people are standing at that edge right now, experienced, capable, respected, looking at the place where their tracks stop and become something else. Maybe it’s a road, a body of water or a ledge overhanging an abyss waiting for you to find your wings.

Whatever it is, more and more people are calling it a ceiling.

The disorientation of standing there isn’t a sign that something has gone wrong.

For a lot of people, it’s the first sign that something deep within has shifted and something new is required to go where you want to go next.

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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There are moments in most of our lives when a decision can’t wait for the right conditions.

The timing is wrong, the picture is incomplete, the certainty isn’t there, and the window to act won’t stay open while you look for it.

You may have had one of those moments recently.

We’re living in a period when they’re arriving faster than most of us have experienced before.

The conditions we’ve been trained to wait for don’t materialise, and the window closes while we’re still looking for certainty that isn’t coming.

I’ve been in those moments at the most important junctions of my life, going to Thailand to run my first retreat and the circumstances made no case for it, leaving the security of corporate world, getting married, starting this work.

Every decision that mattered most moved in the same order. Something knew before I could explain it. The rationale came after.

For a while I’ve been researching about what’s actually happening in those moments and it’s fascinating.

The enteric nervous system, the neural network running the full length of the gut, contains more than 100 million neurons, more than the human spinal cord.

It can sense its environment and respond to it without waiting for instructions from the brain.

When I read that roughly 90 to 95 percent of the signal traffic between gut and brain runs upward, that blew my mind 🤯.

The gut has been doing the reporting the whole time, and the brain has mostly been listening.

Our ancestors didn’t need that paper to know this. They built their lives around it. What’s changed isn’t the biology. It’s what we’ve decided counts as intelligence.

Somewhere along the way, the credential, the argument, the analytical case didn’t become the priority it became the only read that counted.

The gut signal got reclassified as a feeling you needed to earn the right to trust, something to reason around rather than from.

I catch this in myself still. Even when the logic adds up on paper but something feels off, I feel the pull toward more information, more time, more certainty before I move, and sometimes that’s right (albeit rarely).

I recognise now often I’m just stalling because the gut has already finished its work and I haven’t learned to accept the answer yet.

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For anyone navigating this kind of uncertainty, the vulnerability is real especially when the stakes are high.

For the Solopreneurs building something alone without a team or a room to test a call against, the gap shows up fast.

For the leaders who their team are looking the decisive action when there’s no more time or data.

When the founder has to make a call in the moment that could seemingly make or break the business.

The parent or carer that has to make a medical decision on the behalf of a loved one and none of the options seem correct…

We often need a deeper intelligence and higher wisdom.

Your internal intelligence system is your board of directors. It doesn’t deliver a rationale first. What arrives is a pull, a readiness, a sense of direction before the analysis has even started.

In fast-moving, uncertain terrain, that signal is often the clearest thing available.

The decisions that shaped my life didn’t wait for perfect conditions. They moved before the case was built.

I’ve learned to stop expecting the rationale to go first, and to trust the signal that was already there.

What would it mean to do the same with the decision that’s in front of you right now?

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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I’ve watched the Kill Bill films more than once, probably more than most people would admit.

Near the end of Vol. 2, there’s a scene where Bill delivers a monologue about Superman..IYKYK, and the first time I heard it, I had to pause and rewind that part multiple times.

Bill’s point is this.

Every other superhero is their human self first. Peter Parker wakes up in the morning as Peter Parker. He has to put something on to become Spider-Man.

The costume is the transformation. Superman, by contrast, didn’t become Superman, he was born Superman. The baby in the rocket, the blanket he arrived in, those are the original things.

What Clark Kent wears, the glasses, the suit, the shuffling uncertainty, that’s the costume. Superman puts layers on to seem ordinary. To conceal his power.. while others try to add layers to show their power.

Bill takes the observation further. Clark Kent’s characteristics (weak, perpetually self-doubting) are how Superman sees us. The disguise is also his critique on the whole human race.

That second part is the one I’ve found harder to reconcile because once you see it, you can’t un-see it

Capable, genuinely extraordinary people spend years perfecting their Clark Kent, getting very good at fitting in, learning the vocabulary of ordinariness.

I cringe when I remember I’ve done it myself, I’m not separating myself from this, there were years when blending in felt like a survival skill.

The corporate world gave this a structure. Arrive for induction, match the culture, dress in standard business attire uniform, sand down the edges that make you different.

I’m not making a case against organisations as a whole, some of them have genuinely made room for people to be themselves.

Many haven’t, instead asking people to trade in the S for a plain business suit, a trade that has felt reasonable because everyone around them was making the same one.

You can do this for years, get so good at Clark Kent that you start to believe he’s the real one.

The moment this starts to unravel, in my experience, is when somebody genuinely needs something from you.

When something is at stake that requires you to be exactly who you are, without editing, and the person in front of you is what’s on the line, the layers come off not for us, but for them.

Founders, leaders, myself included, we tend to rise to who we actually are when we’re in service. This is the legacy dimension of how humans are built, we are, at our most alive, what we are for others.

SOULpreneurs (Self-aware, led by Ownership of their choices, working from their Unique ability, toward Legacy) carry this as a starting recognition, that the S was always there.

The ordinary life wasn’t a failure, it was a phase, sometimes a necessary one. Whether you’re still in it when you no longer need to be is what matters.

Someone I worked with recently had been remarkable for years in a way that people around her felt before they could name it.

She’d spent the better part of a decade building her career but editing herself for rooms that didn’t ask her to.

When I reflected that back, she said something I’ve thought about since. She’d confused fitting in with belonging.

Fitting in and belonging aren’t the same thing. Clark Kent fits in. Superman belongs somewhere he’s allowed to be exactly what he is.

There’s an S on the chest of almost everyone I’ve ever worked with. It’s usually been there the whole time.

Whether you have it was never the real question. The question is are you ready to reveal it and be seen for who you are?

Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.

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I was standing waist-deep in the warm sea off a beach in Koh Samui, Thailand.

A line of tropical hills framing the beach, watching a group of people work through an exercise I had set them. They had come because I invited them to join me.

The retreat was the first I had created and led. Standing there in the water I felt something settle, a recognition that this was exactly the life experience I had pictured and felt.

None of that happened by accident. A few years earlier I had decided I would run my own retreat, and then I had gone about the slow, unglamorous work of making that decision true.

The research of the venues, the design work, booking the place, shaping the days, inviting people who trusted me enough to fly halfway around the world on the strength of it.

Something Alex Hormozi wrote recently brought that morning back to me. His point was that living the life you want starts with deciding what it actually is, then declining everything that isn’t it, and that this is simple without being easy.

I am not a religious man, but there is one line from the old religious language that keeps coming back to me.

“We are made in the image of our Creator.”

Hold that with me for a moment.. it says something I find exhilarating. If we come from a Creator, then something of creation lives in us, which makes us makers too and there is little I find more powerful than this.

A person decides to bring something into the world, and then they do, not perfectly, rarely with the outcome they first imagined, but they take the thing that lived only in their head and give it a body in the world. They speak it, then they build it, and one day they are standing inside it.

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It does not always look like building. Sometimes it looks like recognising something and saying yes to it before you can explain how.

The village I live in now was not on any of the lists we had drawn up. I drove through it once and it felt familiar in a way I could not account for, so I kept looking there, even though there was nothing for sale and, on paper, no honest way for me to afford one of the properties that were suitable for me and my family.

Then a new development appeared, I put my name down, and within a couple of years I was living in the place I had set my intention on.

I have stopped trying to explain how that works. What I notice is that the world seems to orientate itself toward a clear intention, as though naming what you want changes what becomes available to you.

The harder part, the one I keep meeting in myself as much as in the people I work with, is that most of us use only a fraction of the intention we have.

We set small, hedged aims that protect us from disappointment, deciding what we want and then negotiating it down to what we believe we are allowed to have.

This is the work I care about most, and part of why I call myself a guide rather than a coach. The labels matter less than the thing underneath them, which is helping a person reconnect with their own capacity to create, then aim it at something larger than they would have dared alone.

Those I most want to walk alongside are the ones building something real and refusing to lose their integrity to do it, the ones who hold their ambition and their respect for other people in the same hand.

Deciding what you want and saying no to the rest is simple. Living as though you are a creator, trusting that a clear intention reaches further than it has any right to, is the harder discipline.

I am still learning to dream at the size I am actually capable of. Most of us are, I suspect.

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*Earl Talbot is a guide for founders and leaders navigating the gap between who they’ve been and who they need to become. He works through Recoded Resilience and the Inner Compass framework for SOULpreneurs under Creative Muscle Ltd.*

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Reference: Alex Hormozi, post on LinkedIn, 2026.