What do we do when we feel like we can't relate to our friends or chosen communities because we've come off social media and don't know what's happening in social culture?

My take — and what I get into in this episode — is this is short-term problem. We are simply experiencing the complexity that comes with being early.

I also get honest about the cost of coming off Instagram as it was my main conversion channel. If you're thinking about your own break, I offer some advice.

Alison xo

watch instead.

I've wanted to do this for so long but the truth is, when it comes to secondhand and vintage finds, I've always been a greedy girl. I keep everything I find for myself but that's no longer an option because I've filled our apartment, my studio and our storage unit.

So this new series is me setting my saved folders free with the hope that I surface some gems for you and you fall in love with the pre-loved life.

Ok, kicking off with what's currently sitting in my Salvos saved folder. This site requires deep trawling so if you see something you like here, don’t sleep on it. I try to thrift real silver, leather, silk, wool, cotton, vintage and designer, so while many of these pieces aren’t crazy cheap, they are the real deal. Heirloom pieces. Stuff you’ll wear year after year.

I want literally everything featured here but you must not let this stop you from buying. One of us should enjoy these treasures. Tony if you are reading this, it isn’t too early to get organised for Christmas.

Kimono ($140), silver bracelet ($150), leather mules ($110), Henne pants ($79).

Von Troksa blazer ($80), Murano glass teardrop pendant ($95), vintage caviar spoons ($49), Toteme puffer jacket ($250).

Card box with dice ($10), Le Journal 1898 French newspaper ($80), vintage silver cuff ($229), Max Mara blazer ($256).

Vintage navy trench ($97), Sandler vintage black leather boots ($35), silver Trombone link necklace ($450), Jane Austen The Complete Novels ($59.99), Staffordshire England Vintage Ceramic Libra Mug ($10), vintage mother of pearl caviar spoon ($12.50).

With Jean dress ($85), silver swirl earrings ($35), Olga Berg mesh bag ($49), vintage jelly moulds ($50), vintage Spiegelau Ponte Vecchio glasses ($35).

New York Yankees long sleeve ($39), The Sak crochet tote ($80), vintage Magrex bracelet ($75), The Art Of Portraits and The Nude ($20), vintage Louvier Paris wallet ($20).

Well that was fun. Hope you found a treasure or two. Would love to know if you buy something!

What site, store or category should I do next?

Alison xo

A community full of like-minded women walking away from performing a life online to living a richer, deeper one in the real world.

Imagine meeting for gallery walks, bookstore browses or to thrift treasures. Imagine gathering to plan your personal seasonal curriculum and bringing your ideas to share with the wider group — films you want to watch, exhibitions you want to see, albums you want to listen to, books you want to read.

Speaking of books, there’s a book club, of course, but instead of just meeting to discuss the book, you also meet to read it together — shoulder-to-shoulder, binaural beats in the background, incense burning and snacks aplenty. Every now and then, you even get to discuss the book with the author.

There’s a physical library within this community. One you can borrow rare, secondhand books from. Books that support your desire to get offline and explore who you are beyond the algorithm and what you do for a living — think hobbies, craft, art, philosophy, ancient wisdom, poetry, creative writing, DIY home projects, herbalism, dream tending… maybe you even have your own books you want to share.

Once a month, you all gather online for a wisdom session. No frameworks, homework or hacks, just a highly vetted network of teachers and guides pouring into beautiful you.

As the community expands and becomes more resourced, you benefit directly. First access to intimate film screenings, writing rooms and hobby classes. In the highest vision, there’s a robust annual program and hosts in every major city around the world.

And for those thinking about going out on their own, an invitation to join a live mentoring session inside serve every other month — a living practice room for regenerative entrepreneurship and service business.

Last but not least, the all-important group chat. A private space to share your field notes from a life lived more offline. There would be a no selling or self-promotion rule, making it one of the only ad-free spaces in your life.

this — all of this — is the get offline community.

I’m writing to ask if you’d bring this community through with me and if so, how much you’d be willing to invest. The two polls below will be live for a week.

Sitting here basking in the sweetest part of co-creation — the potential of what this could be and mean to us.

Alison xo

It’s been three years since I last paralysed the muscles in my face. I was 38 when I decided to stop getting Botox (I’m 41 now) and I started at 28. I got injections anywhere from one to three times a year for 10 years.

I’ve written about this before, but the first time I got Botox was a few months before my wedding and at the time, I was working as a beauty editor. Preventative anti-aging was big and Botox was just beginning to enter the mainstream beauty conversation.

If you follow editors, influencers or creators on social media, you’ll know one of the biggest perks is free stuff in exchange for sharing the product, treatment or experience with your audience.

Back in 2013, this meant trialling treatments and products in exchange for an article or mention on the women’s lifestyle website I was writing for at the time.

I’ll never forget laying down on the treatment bed that very first time. The injector gave me a giant frozen hand — a plastic glove that had been filled with water and frozen — to place on my face and numb the areas the needle was soon to penetrate. There was no consultation about how many units she recommended for me being so close to my wedding, or even what type of botulinum toxin she would be using (Botox is just one of many brands). I simply numbed my face with the frozen hand and off she went on an injecting spree.

I hold a lot of grace for younger me — the one surfing the magical beauty editor wave who didn’t want to seem ungrateful by speaking up.

As you can probably guess, I couldn’t move my face on my wedding day. I was completely frozen. Like many brides, I cried walking down the aisle but you wouldn’t have known it because I couldn’t express any emotion. I find looking at the photos tricky for this reason.

Here’s the part where I tell you even though I didn’t like not being able to express emotion on my face on my wedding day, I did like not being able to express emotion on my face on a regular day. I also liked how high my brows sat, how wide-open my eyes looked and how Botox seemed to give me glass-looking skin.

That was until three years ago when I started to feel trapped inside my own body. Encased. I can’t describe it to you any other way. I was alive on the inside — a rich tapestry of emotion — but lifeless on the outside. The stillness and control I had once loved had started to feel like a prison. My little girl was also a huge factor because I couldn’t make a lot of the expressions that were important to her development and our emotional bond.

It was around this time that I realised I was telling myself and everyone else a lie. I told anyone who would listen that for me, Botox was an act of self care. Yes it was expensive, yes it was medically unnecessary (not true for everyone) but it made me feel confident. It was something I was doing for me.

The truth is that for me, Botox was actually an act of self abandonment. I wasn’t getting it because it made me feel good, I was getting it because I couldn’t accept what I saw when I looked in the mirror.

Every time I lay down on the bed to get injected I wasn’t empowering myself, I was rejecting myself. My main goal was looking perfect in selfies and videos and we have to talk about this because no other generation has had to — or chosen to — look at themselves as much as we do. No other generation has had to receive and perceive themselves in the way that we have. It’s not normal and it’s not healthy to see yourself from every angle. We’re supposed to imagine what we look like, not know the ins and outs of which side to stand on, where to strategically place our arm or how high to lift our chin.

For me, I realised I was complying with a beauty standard that tells women youth is beautiful and aging is ugly. And that if we surrender to the aging process, we are also surrendering our relevance in the world because our relevance is tied to our desirability. Patriarchy has made it super clear that aging women aren’t desirable and therefore aren’t relevant, and so I think I was gripping onto youth as a kind of survival strategy.

surrender.

This is an important word for me and it’s where I find myself today, three years on from my last injecting session.

I now bow down to the natural expressions my face wants to make after 10 years of allowing someone else to decide what parts should move and what parts shouldn’t. Reclaiming movement has meant re-learning that it’s safe for me to be perceived as looking “angry” when my brow is furrowed from being deep in interesting work or a compelling thought.

The lines around my eyes are now evidence of all the times I’ve smiled with joy or winced from pain. Childbirth, losing my mum at the same time I became one — these experiences live on my face now and that feels right to me because these experiences have shaped the woman I am today.

Overall I am surprised I don’t hate my natural face and this is why I wanted to write this essay, for any other woman who might be reconsidering her relationship with aging and injectables.

My biggest fear was that I’d have to learn to love myself again but that couldn’t have been further from the truth. When I look in the mirror I see me, Alison, and I feel radiant and alive. I look older and wiser, more grounded and unique. My face can say things words can’t. I am also experiencing a level of relaxation and overall softness I couldn’t access when my face was frozen in time and place, and people tell me I look more beautiful than I ever have before.

Acceptance is a state of consciousness. I’ve accepted myself fully and where I’m at in my journey in this body — entering my wise woman years.

Alison xo

I recorded this conversation with Vedic meditation teacher and founder of Mahasoma, Laura Poole, in 2021. I’m bringing it back now — five years later — to demonstrate how subtle making contact with the need we are each here to meet actually is.

So many people are wondering what their purpose is. What their contribution could be. This conversation provides guidance.

You also get to hear me make contact with the idea for my service business practice room and program, serve, and Laura cognise what has now gone on to become her shared field of belonging for Vedic meditators and initiators, Radiate.

Alison xo

additional links.

• If you are ready to start bringing your own service business through, I’d love to support you every step of the way inside serve. Join here.

• If you are an advanced Vedic meditator or initiator, explore joining Laura’s new offering, Radiate, here.

• If you’d like to learn Vedic meditation with Laura and I at Studio Offline in Sydney, join the upcoming course here.

The economic system most of us are trying to build a happy life within, capitalism, has defined rich as the acquisition of money, assets and status — homes, shares, cars, gadgets, designer items, titles, followings.

Most people build a life through the lens of this definition. Wealth and success looks like building the big business or getting the big job with the big salary, building the big share portfolio, getting the big house with the big mortgage and driving the big car.

But the truth is, most of what we call rich is leverage in disguise. The house is leveraged against the mortgage. The lifestyle is leveraged against the job they’ve outgrown. The identity is leveraged against what everyone already believes about them.

Most people can’t press undo on any of it without unwinding the whole thing, so they don’t. They keep servicing a life they no longer want or like because the alternative feels too risky and for many, in the short-term, it is.

But A Little, Rich Life — the philosophy my entire body of work bows down to — is unleveraged. It’s owned (mostly) outright. Not much about it depends on us staying exactly where we are.

Prompt: I’ve got what I said I wanted, but do I feel rich? Successful? Satisfied?

I’ve had the distinct honour of mentoring over a thousand women who look very successful on paper and not one of them has told me they feel rich, successful or satisfied.

What’s more common is they feel anxious. They tell me life is exhausting and expensive. They want to press undo but don’t know if they can because they are so leveraged.

The women I’ve mentored that do feel rich, define rich in ways capitalism doesn’t value.

A regulated nervous system. A phone almost always set to do not disturb. Choosing the shape of their day. A modest home with rent or a mortgage that doesn’t keep them awake at night. More than enough money but rarely the most money. Attending the school assembly. Quiet, meaningful work that doesn’t always look impressive on LinkedIn but allows them to use their gifts to meet a real need in the collective field.

And across the board, choosing their definition of rich and what makes for a rich life has been hard. I can also vouch for this.

Turning away from what you were told to be, get and do in search of something more true isn’t all dream catchers and rainbows.

They come, eventually, but before they do it’s mostly judgement from your high performing friend, difficult resignations that lead to toxic notice periods, relationship breakdowns rooted in the narrative you’ve changed, feeling painfully misunderstood, being labeled woo woo and sitting with the shame that arrives when you sell all the stuff you thought would make you feel successful but didn’t.

Once you’ve realised, your life and most of the things in it can quickly feel like a trophy cabinet that belongs to someone else.

navigate your next professional season in community.

If you are transitioning out of employment and into your own service business, I’d love to support you inside serve. It’s a practice room and program for service entrepreneurs. Study the program at your own pace, join live mentoring and deep work sessions, meet like-minded women building in right relationship with the season of life they’re in. Explore or join here.

Prompt: Whose definition of rich does my life currently bow down to?

Capitalism hates to see this question coming. The last thing an economic system funded by our fear of failing to ~meet our potential~ needs is us questioning the real author of our vision boards.

Prompt: Am I living my life or am I enduring it?

You’re telling me we evolved from literal star dust to merely endure or worse, survive our lives? No. Life is meant to be enjoyed. Life is meant to be pleasurable. Life is meant to be lived. It’s time to stop postponing our fulfillment and claim it in the here and the now. I know it sounds cliché but tomorrow isn’t promised.

Prompt: Do I want what I currently have?

One of the bravest things we can do is interrogate what we’ve cultivated and acquired, and ask ourselves how it all feels.

Feels.

This is the thing they don't want us to do — feel. Sure, you’ve got the big job or the successful business, but how does showing up to it feel everyday? Maybe you've got a lot of money in the bank, but do you feel rich? You're wearing the latest designer item, but do you feel like your True Self in it?

Prompt: If you're not winning, climbing or achieving, are you failing or are you free?

Rich is an internal experience. It’s always been a feeling not an asset class but they don’t want us to know this, either, because the entire system fails when we stop trying to get the next thing. Capitalism would collapse without the air we create from our desire for what we don't yet have or haven’t yet done — professionally or personally.

Prompt: What does a wealthy existence look like to me?

If you don’t dance with any of the other prompts, just dance with this one. Answering this question is how you land in your definition of rich.

And then the way you take it from definition to lived reality, is by participating in the co-creation of it and that starts with becoming the energetic, mental and emotional condition for it.

One way that we can do this is by having a regular (ideally daily) experience of the feelings, thoughts, beliefs and events that exist in this richer reality.

The more time the imagination spends here, the more normal and inevitable this reality feels. This has us making different decisions, taking bolder action, implementing more loving boundaries and overall just being an agent of evolution in our lives.

That’s it. That’s what this whole manifestation thing is about. The vital shift from desire to assumption.

Now go there. Write out a typical day in your little, rich life, and then record yourself narrating it. Listen to it as much as you can. Meditate on your own voice speaking it into truth.

a typical day in your little, rich life.

• The story begins with you rising out of bed and ends with your evening routine

• Be descriptive about the moments, events and activities — really take yourself there in the felt details

• Fill in any blanks with logical but aligned details

• Include specific interactions you want to have with your loved ones

• Describe your internal landscape and how this life feels in your body

• Use first person, present tense to create the feeling of immediacy and realness

• Focus on sensory elements that really bring the scenes of your day to life

This is one of the first exercises co-creators complete in serve’s business program and I firmly believe it is behind the life I'm living today.

Everything changed when I allowed myself to claim a higher vision for myself, my life and my work.

Alison xo

A hand-selected group of the highest minds we know or admire, getting offline and thinking out loud together in an era increasingly designed to think for us.

She got it immediately and agreed it’s the exact thing we need right now — an invitation to put the phone away and connect on intellect and ideas, not social media.

Over the last 15 years, Billie and I have had the distinct privilege of attending a lot of PR events. When we first met as beauty editors in 2011, we would attend five or more a week. For a few years there, I saw Billie more than I saw my husband.

The good thing about PR events is they know what they are — experiences designed to raise awareness about a new brand or product. The unspoken agreement if you attend is that you’ll feature the product and share the event on social media. Perfectly understandable given the amount of money that goes into them.

But what this means, ultimately, is these events are engineered for content capture not connection. That’s not to say meaningful connections can’t be made, but it’s harder. You have to fight for conversations that go deeper than what you do for a living.

The Thinking Room is a response to this reality. As writers, creatives, creators, artists, founders, strategists and specialists, what would become possible for us if we gathered in a room designed for deep connection not content creation?

What would come online (conversations, ideas, collaborations) in the act getting offline together and putting our beautiful brains to work for each other?

Well, I’m here reporting back. Billie and I hosted our first Thinking Room on Wednesday, July 15, and it was a screaming success.

taste, curation & creative restraint.

Each seasonal salon will have a different theme. We went back and forth on our theme for Winter 2026 but ultimately kept coming back to one of the most pressing and contentious topics in the age of algorithms and artificial intelligence: Taste, Curation & Creative Restraint.

We asked our guests to vote on their favourite provocation ahead of the evening:

1. Has the algorithm replaced our taste or revealed that most of us never had any?

2. Is restraint a creative discipline or a luxury only the secure can afford?

3. Is curation an act of generosity or an act of control?

4. If everyone has access to everything, does taste still exist or has it become the last form of status?

The winner? Number one.

What's important to note, I think, is a provocation isn’t a discussion prompt. It isn’t asking for consensus or a considered middle ground. A provocation asks you to take a side. To have a position and to be willing to defend it, and in The Thinking Room specifically, to do that in front of people you don’t really know and without any access to Google or your favourite LLM.

Hello brain, welcome back.

re-learning how to connect without context.

After about 30 minutes of mingling and enjoying mid-strength gin martinis kindly gifted by ENOUGH, we moved guests into four small discussion circles.

Deliberately creating friction in an increasingly frictionless world was a key motivator for me. I know there’s a specific kind of discomfort most of us spend our lives trying to avoid, and that is the discomfort of being assigned to a group. Being told where to sit and who to think alongside is trauma we left behind at school and university, and most of us have spent our adult lives engineering the opposite. We construct situations and environments where we are only ever in the company of people we have pre-selected for compatibility.

The Thinking Room gently challenges this and what I noticed as the groups settled into their discussion circles, is we all might need a moment to remember how to do this. A moment to familiarise ourselves with what awkward feels like and also what getting to know someone from scratch feels like. These days we meet people through the lens of the personal brand and the content they’ve provided on social media or even here on Substack.

People know us, what we think and what we believe without ever having met us. We come into most new interactions so informed that it almost eradicates the need for the meet-cute questions that actually create lasting connections.

Cancel culture has also taught us not to hold a firm position before we know whether that position is socially acceptable. We have been conditioned to sense-check our opinion before we fully release it to the world. We use content to feel the temperature of the feed before we commit to it being something we want to be known for, and this makes sense because it turns out the internet is just as permanent as print. People don’t forget.

We have also become so good at performing thought (being seen to be thinking) that the actual generation of it — in real time, in front of real people — requires a level of bravery we just haven’t had to summon in a long time. Depending on your age, maybe even ever.

Whether we want to admit it or not, we have begun to outsource the first draft of our thinking to search engines, LLMs and algorithms that serve us either the most likely answer (this is how LLMs work — essentially a sophisticated auto-complete) or the answer the platform has been paid to surface before we try forming an original opinion based on our own personal experience and worldview.

The rise of identity politics is the clearest evidence we have of groupthink and like anything that stops being exercised regularly, our minds will atrophy. Perhaps they already have? This is the cognitive debt we’re all reading about and it’s ultimately what we hope The Thinking Room will become a salve and a balm for — the increasingly rare art of original thinking.

creating the conditions for authentic connection.

I hate to use the dreaded authentic, but it holds here. The Thinking Room is an offline experience and includes an invitation to guests to put their phones in the Offline bag hanging on the door. I was meant to pass it around and force everyone but I forgot. Wonderfully, a few brave souls did put their devices inside and there was something about seeing the phones in there that made my heart sing.

We’re doing it. It’s happening. I’ve been serving into this body of work about getting offline for eight years now and this event felt like an arrival in many ways. Like getting offline is no longer something we “should do”, it’s now something we want to and can’t wait to do when given the permission.

Permission.

Billie and I knew we’d have to grant permission not to document The Thinking Room in order for our guests to trust there was truly no expectation they’d share on social. The value exchange was their presence and the quality of their thoughts and in return, maybe they’d meet like-minded people they otherwise wouldn’t have met.

We are tribal in that way, I think. Artists hang with artists. Founders with founders. Technologists with technologists. What we’re doing with The Thinking Room is something different. We spent the most time on the guest list and each guest was asked to supply a short bio which I read out on the night.

This seems like a really simple thing. A courtesy, really. But we’re just not doing it anymore. So often we don’t know who we’re in the room with or maybe we do, but only because we’ve seen them on social media. But how do they talk about themselves? What do they want us to know?

Building the discussion groups was the fun part.

Thinking about energy and discipline and range — not just professional range but how people communicate ideas (something Billie and I could understand through receiving their work) and how they might hold disagreement.

Getting that as close to right as possible can only come from humans, not an LLM synthesising bios and matchmaking from there.

What Billie and I know for sure is what emerged on the night was the outcome of our shared networks and our deep experience in curation and facilitation. Guests kept calling it a high frequency room and that has to be the greatest compliment in a time where literally everything feels flattened by the algorithms and AI.

who they were thinking alongside.

Group 1

A chef and stylist, a creator, author and TV commentator; a creative communications agency founder, an editor studying to become a psychologist and a venture builder deep in the emerging nature and climate markets.

Group 2

A creative director, head of partnerships at Substack, a principal ballerina and a conscious fashion founder.

Group 3

Creator partner at Spotify, a musician and producer who also works in solar energy, a communications director and a marketing specialist who also moonlights as a palliative care biographer.

Group 4

An art curator, a digital identity entrepreneur, a contemporary witch (and my co-founder, more soon!) and an intentional fashion designer.

the verdict.

Has the algorithm replaced our taste or revealed that most of us never had any?

Each group had to select a speaker to share their stance on the provocation and knowing how easily discussions can be dominated by the most confident or articulate voices, I anointed my silver wine filter The Talking Sphere. A heavy, quite tactile prop that signalled who had the floor.

I’ve facilitated at least a hundred sessions over the last eight years and I’ve learnt a lot about the importance of playfulness. Life is so serious and we’re never without problems or hardship, but if we can find ways to be silly, to access that inner child again, it does wonders for the energetics of a room or a session. Serious and silly can co-exist.

So, what came through?

Group one took the cleanest position of the night and when challenged to take a side, believed the algorithm hasn’t replaced our taste but has, in fact, revealed that most of us never had any. They spoke about our tendency to blame the algorithm, and reminded us that before the algorithm we had teams of editors defining taste. We seem to feel comfortable with the editor but not the algorithm. Is Meta really the culprit?

Group two landed somewhere more layered. That we’ve always had an inclination toward what we like whether or not it’s deemed tasteful, and the algorithm is really just this generation’s magazine, newspaper or editor. It’s a choose your own adventure. They also brought forward a question sitting underneath the provocation: Who should get to decide what’s beautiful, what’s on-trend and what’s not?

Group three went further still. The algorithm has democratised taste and who is considered a tastemaker. It hasn’t replaced or revealed taste so much as changed our relationship to it, and also that it moves so fast we no longer have time to develop taste in the same way we used to. Some will go an inch wide and a mile deep — rabbit holes of specificity they’d never have found before — but most don’t.

Group four built on this reference. You can be so many clicks down a particular rabbit hole that you feel like you’re curating taste. That what feels like discernment might just be how far down one algorithmic path you’ve travelled. They also raised an interesting point about the soullessness of algorithmic recommendations starting to take their toll. There’s a lot more hollowness in buying something the algorithm serves us. It doesn’t feed anything within us and because it doesn’t nourish us in any way, can we even call it taste?

I learnt to get out of the way.

It’s no secret I like to talk and I like to think out loud. I think in public for a living. What I learnt about my role in The Thinking Room, though, was my own intellectual layer is not required. My role — and Billie’s, too — is to create the conditions for other people to bring theirs forward.

With social media and professional platforms like LinkedIn, we’re so used to needing to demonstrate our intelligence as a throughway to building authority and gaining opportunities. But in The Thinking Room, I realised in real-time that my interpretation wasn’t required.

It was clear the provocation was an opening to more questions and more discussion, and so instead of synthesising and drawing the threads together with my own commentary, I delivered them back to each other. Back into the groups they clearly didn’t want to leave (success!) and back into the conversation they hadn’t yet finished.

That’s when Billie and I looked at each other and knew this was something special. The conversations were still alive in the way they can only be when a group of people is truly thinking together vs. performing thinking.

I turned the music back up and Billie and I started to mingle. Absolute perfection.

This is what we know we’ve created with The Thinking Room — not an event, but the conditions for authentic connection.

The icing on the cake was the physical cards we hand-stamped with the date so they could share their details with each other, and the secondhand art books we sourced and hand-wrapped for each guest. Leave it to two Cancerian mums to make it feel extra special.

We’re already planning our Spring Thinking Room and I want you to know more experiences just like this are coming for Get Offline’s wider community. Salons and gatherings designed around the same belief — that the connection we’re all craving exists offline in smaller, more curated, closed rooms.

Alison xo

In this episode of the podcast I share my earliest observations and reflections of what life feels like without Instagram, what I've gained, and as it relates to my business, what I might lose.

I also talk about why I'm pouring into Substack and the result of seven days of sustained focus on that platform. It's been very revealing to say the least.

Alison xo

watch instead.

additional links.

• Personal essay: If I stay off Instagram, I get 12 years back

I’m just about to turn 41. Let’s say I’m lucky enough to live to 90, that’s 49 more years of life. 17,885 days. If I was to continue spending nearly six hours a day on Instagram that would be over 107,310 hours spent scrolling. Broken down again, that’s 4,471 days or twelve of the 49 years of life I could have left spent consuming other people’s lives.

Here I am trying to help us get offline and live these richer, deeper, more service-led lives, and my screen time is nearly 10 hours a day. What’s been discombobulating for me personally is what I’ve been doing in that time, which is attempting to stay abreast of artificial intelligence news, the latest software launches and algorithm changes to ensure I’m offering the most current information to the service business founders I mentor inside serve, as well as researching content trends, formats and editing styles I can apply to my account to reach more people with my message.

I wish I’d been scrolling thrifting hauls and DIY home renovations but I wasn’t, and it took a powerful Akashic Records reading to wake me up to the fact that what I’m attempting to do is not only not the best use of me, but it’s completely at odds with my belief about where the customer will be in the age of AI. Not on social media platforms but inside closed, values-aligned micro communities.

I woke up last Thursday and realised there is no longer a need for me to be excessively online and I deleted Instagram then and there. I believe in direct, community and network-based marketing for other people’s businesses but I hadn’t yet turned that belief back on my own, or noticed that I was spending nearly ten hours a day doing the exact opposite of tending to my own micro community. I quickly realised this was the permission I didn’t know I needed and once I had it, I didn’t hesitate in announcing I was taking an indefinite break from Instagram.

now, the fun part.

Let’s explore what I could do with the 12 years I will get back if I stay off Instagram and reduce my screen time in general.

I could become fluent in three new languages.

At roughly five years per language, twelve years is long enough to become fluent in nearly three new languages. That’s three entirely new ways of thinking, experiencing, expressing and interacting with the world. What’s bringing a smile to my face is somewhere within that first five-year stretch there is a version of me standing in a small Parisian cafe, ordering in French that no longer feels awkward and rehearsed. Instagram is never going to give me that moment of satisfaction and belonging.

I could read 877 books.

I am a slow reader, so it takes me about 10 hours to read a book. If I was to dedicate just two of the nearly six hours I was spending on Instagram to reading each day, I would be able to read 877 more books by the time I turn 90. If you’re a fast reader, yours will look more like 1,000 books.

You guys, we could read the complete works of Shakespeare, the major Greek and Roman classics, most of the world’s religious and mystic texts and still have hundreds of books left over. Reading this many books is the equivalent of doing roughly six full literature degrees back-to-back.

I could become an accomplished maker, artist or musician.

Twelve years is more than enough time to master things made, completed or learned only by hand. The kinds of skills that can only be earned through repetition and the thing we’ve been conditioned to avoid — failure. Because I’ve been so excessively online for the last 15 years I wouldn’t know, but I can only imagine the clumsy first years of trying to take a lump of clay and turn it into something beautiful or functional. The amount of times you have to sit at the wheel before it feels like an extension of your limbs.

The same has to be true at the piano, or with a violin tucked under the chin, or a guitar under the arm. Musicians who reach real mastery are the product of thousands of ordinary, unremarkable hours without an audience.

I’d like to think it’s been the same for me in my time as a career and business mentor. I’ve logged 15,000 hours of 1-1 mentoring over seven years. I’ve hosted hundreds of live sessions. Answered nearly 1,000 questions in voice memos, each 10-40 minutes long. All of those hours of practise ladder up to a kind of mastery that makes it feel like I always have the answer because, well, I do.

Instagram, TikTok and even Substack can’t give us this. These platforms can’t give us what can only come from the sustained, embodied attention these apps were built to interrupt.

I could complete a masters & most of a PhD.

One of my besties is doing his masters at the moment and while I know it’s hard work, goodness me does it sound dreamy. Being on campus. Going to lectures. Sitting with the reading material over long stretches of time, no algorithm deciding what he encounters next, just a syllabus and curiosity leading the way. And I’m not going to lie, seeing the title Dr. Alison Rice does something to me and I suspect one day I will follow that something. It’s an opening. An internal aliveness. I see her. I know her. I’ve always known her.

I could write & publish several books.

I’d honestly be happy with just one. It’s actually the main thing I’ll be doing with the time I don’t need to be allocating to revenue generating activity during my days at the studio. All of this getting offline stuff sounds lovely in theory but the reality is I still need to earn money.

I’ve been in discussion about a book with a publisher in the past so this isn’t a pipe dream. It’s real, or at least it could be if I just started writing. Us writers are always waiting for permission. To be chosen or approached. To be tapped on the shoulder and handed a three-book deal. I’m done with that and instead what I’ll be doing is using the knowledge I have about the publishing industry and applying it to myself.

I’m going to be bringing early pages through here on Substack, and building an expressions of interest list I can eventually show to publishers.

the list doesn’t stop there.

Once I started writing down everything twelve years could hold, I couldn’t stop because I kept remembering more about the lives we’re all putting on hold when we scroll. Here’s some highlights:

• Produce a body of work large enough to fill a lifetime retrospective

• Restore a house then live in it long enough to need to restore it again

• Train for and complete dozens of marathons (I hate running so this will never be me but I thought relatable)

• Apprentice under a master, then work independently for a period of time before having someone apprentice under you

• Build an entirely new business from idea to a legacy player

• Visit every country on Earth with years still left over

• Walk the entire circumference of the Earth roughly 1.5 times over (lol)

Most of this stuff can’t be compressed into a three-minute Reel and I do wonder if that’s one of the reasons we aren’t pursuing anything this… big? Although admittedly, “walk with me from one end of Earth to the other” feels like an Instagram series I’d watch.

But truly, this is what these apps are stopping us from experiencing. In just a few days off Instagram I am realising they don’t compete with our “down time” or this magical idle time we seem to have created to scroll. They rob us of the only time most of us have to do even a tiny portion of any of this — early mornings, during the commute, evenings and weekends.

from performing a life to living one.

The saddest part of the last few days has been the realisation that I have, in fact, been performing my life not fully living it. This has surprised me because I really did think I was “in” my life and all of its various moments. The evidence I haven’t is I’ve started questioning the relevancy of everything. Take my cool loft studio in Sydney’s Surry Hills. Did I get this space for me, or for the Instagram plot? My thrifted outfits. What’s the point in putting one together if no one (read: strangers on the internet) is going to see it? Makeup. I’m no longer taking selfies, so perhaps there’s no need for that, either?

Even my hobbies haven’t been safe from this interrogation. I picked up oil pastels because I wanted colour and texture back in my hands after years of a life lived mostly through a screen. But somewhere along the way I started buying the “right” pastels — the ones I’d seen the cool art girls on Instagram using — and angling my canvas toward the light not because it helped me see better but because it photographed better. I didn’t notice this happening and that’s the part that unsettles me most. How long have I been performing? What is real in all of this?

But alongside the sadness has also been relief. Deep, deep relief felt in my bones. I’ll be doing something like listening to Rosalía while I play around with my oil pastels and feel total, utter relief that I don’t have to turn the moment into a Reel. But then, like a sickness, my next thought is what a shame, this would be such a great Reel.

When you make a living online, everything can be content and before you know it, your entire existence is a set. A stage to perform on each day. This happened to me, and it’s currently happening to so many of us. We have engineered lives that will perform well on social media, but are they truly ours, or do they belong to the audience we tailored them and ourselves for?

I think this is what my screen time maths has actually revealed to me. Sure I can replace scrolling with other, more life-giving activities, but now I also need to practise living just for me again. This is the deeper work after leaving a platform as addictive as Instagram — noticing all the ways the platform is still living inside you long after you stopped scrolling.

Alison xo

We're consuming more than ever and tending almost none of it.

In this episode of the podcast I introduce you to the concept of a Digital Garden.

It’s a personal, non-linear, evolving collection of the things that genuinely matter to you. A place for your thinking to live, grow and develop into something that is entirely your own.

I explore why our inner worlds have become so fragmented, what we're losing when ideas never get to connect and why building something slow and self-authored is one of the most rebellious things we can do in the age of the algorithm.

If the Seasonal Curriculum is our planting plan, the Digital Garden is where things actually take root.

In an upcoming Substack entry, I’ll be offering a guide to building your own.

Alison xo

watch instead.

additional links.

• Seasonal Curriculum episode on Spotify here and Apple here

What once felt like clarity had begun to feel like a cage, and then I had my second Akashic Records reading and nothing will ever be the same again.

The reading can only be described as a directive from the part of myself I’ve been refusing to embody fully — the Divine Mother herself, Shakti.

What got revealed to me in this reading is I've been maintaining a role that is no longer relevant to the progression of my individual spirit or yours. I’ve been showing up not as an expression of my True Self and what’s alive for me right now, but as who I thought I needed to continue to be because I was helping people and it makes money — a career and business mentor.

I first identified I was in maintenance mode about 18 months ago when I started resisting my own reality. Rather than responding to life and what it was trying to offer me, I was responding to a carefully planned out calendar that had content pillars, lead times and marketing objectives.

The containment I've been feeling isn’t about being inauthentic in some way, it’s about trying to exist and create from a preset when my personal power lives in dynamic response.

are you experiencing the death of a role or identity, too?

If you are, this essay is for you. It’s for us. The ones standing at the edge, yearning for what’s next while simultaneously gripping onto what was.

The last time I experienced this dissonance between what I am and who my current reality required me to be, I was in so much pain I had to leap. Staying the same hurt more than changing and so I left my job and started the podcast. I figured someone would call this 10x award-winning leader with another big, shiny job and in the meantime, I’d bring through something that felt true. I saw it as a tiny window to do what I actually wanted to do not what I should do based on what I’d done before.

No one ever called. A recruiter here and there, sure. But no one called me directly wanting me specifically. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t still surprised by this.

What the podcast went on to become was a closed container to explore who we are outside of what we do for a living. Who we are without the big jobs, the titles, the social media followings and the highlight reel. What was the quality of our lives, offline? Every episode ended with the same question — who are you when you’re sitting in your True Self?

They say you teach what you most need to learn and so here I am, eight years later, learning it — and teaching it — again: True Self.

This time around there’s no positioning statement or new title I want to announce to you. Alison Rice the “conscious career and business mentor” has dissolved but there’s nothing replacing it. No shiny tagline. No content pillars.

The strategy is to be me — a meditator, a seer, a gatherer, a partner, a mother, a sister and a friend who has made contact with her True Self and is living her definition of a rich existence.

Seer: one that sees.

This Substack and the podcast are now becoming what I’ve always wanted them to be but have been too scared to let them be — outlets for spontaneous bursts of creativity in the direction of the truth and each other vs. marketing channels.

My beautiful service business practice room, serve, is open and you can join anytime here, and my Office Hours are now whatever you need them to be here.

This evolution of my role in the world and how I use the sacred time I get with you on platforms like this might mean I have to make money in other ways, but I’m not focused on that right now. I am inherently safe. My basic needs are met. It’s going to be ok.

Maybe all of this will inspire you to get more true in your own life and work. Maybe it won’t. But at least I’ll know in myself that I responded to the call to evolve. To transcend the title and step into something more unbounded.

It’s blowing me away that I cognised this in 2018, forgot, and am now remembering it again.

“light up the sky so all can see.”

In my reading, I was directed to give it (the truth) ferociously, consistently and without concern for how it performs. I was instructed to start truly using the gifts I’ve been given and to start truly communicating instead of coddling or crafting.

I was likened to a small but powerful thunderstorm that can split a tree in half with a single bolt of lightening. I was told it’s time to start striking. To wield my power with exacting precision and light up the sky so all can see.

I sobbed for most of the reading. She told me I am her and she is me and one day we will be together again but not for some time.

This contact, when we’re ready for it and open to it, can be life-altering. As my sweet friend and teacher Laura affirmed when I called her that night, you are anew. Born again but the eyes can see much more clearly now.

These landings into what feels like a new stratosphere of existing and a claiming of a less restrictive role or identity used to feel quite destabilising and scary but having learnt to “be” with the expansion, the overall feeling right now is gratitude for this graduation.

My sister actually offered me another landing this morning when I shared the full reading with her. She said you’ve always identified as a builder but what you got to realise yourself as in the reading is the creator. Shakti in motion.

in the Vedic worldview, three forces govern all of existence.

1. Creation

2. Maintenance

3. Destruction

Think of these forces as the collective breath of the universe itself. They’re often described as opposites or opposing energies, but that’s not accurate. They’re more like one continuous cycle. Brahma creates, Vishnu maintains (useful, but to a point), Shiva destroys then Brahma creates again.

Every living thing moves through this cycle and no living thing is exempt. The seasons, the cells in our bodies, our careers, our businesses, our relationships… this isn’t some sweet spiritual metaphor, it’s the actual mechanics of reality and once you understand it, your life will never be the same.

Well, that’s been true for me at least.

Here’s that truth I’ve now committed myself to sharing with you again and again — we are each one expression of the one whole thing. Consciousness broke away from itself to develop a more sophisticated understanding of itself. This means we, and everything else it creates, are vehicles for its expansion.

I am sorry to tell you but we are mere KPIs for this fantastical creator of all things. It’s currently having 8.3 billion experiences of itself through humans alone, and then there’s the animal kingdom and every plant, flower or tree it also created.

Furniture, too. A chair is not “conscious” in the same way we are, but it’s still Consciousness expressing itself.

So when we — this localised version of Consciousness stumbling around in the human suit — evolve and grow, the one whole thing evolves and grows. That is precisely what Consciousness wants. Growth. Newness. It hopes that we will surprise and delight it and when we do, it showers us with support.

Trouble is, most of us are too scared to do anything remotely new, surprising or different because we’ve been conditioned to believe that’s risky and scary and we might fail. So we stay the same. We maintain what is no longer relevant.

This is why capitalism and the conformity it has created is so ludicrous. It is in direct opposition to what Consciousness is desiring for itself through us and that’s why it’s breaking. Destruction has entered the chat.

I know it’s really easy to forget that you are a unique channel through which something vast and creative is trying to have an experience that has never existed before and will never exist again, but in order to fulfill this intent you have to be an agent of progressive change in your own life.

Back to the collective breath of the universe — creation, maintenance, destruction. The directive, if there had to be one, is to continuously inhabit creation. Proactive, intentional action in the direction of where you are currently not.

What happens if we ignore this? Prepare to get dragged, because destruction will appear to move you back into creation.

When you labour, scheme, control and contort to keep everything the same even though you’re feeling an undeniable pull to evolve (maintenance mode), you are holding the entire universe back.

Why do these words kind of hurt?

The thing is, and where it gets softer, is it’s not our fault. We are creatures of maintenance and there is some wisdom in it. Continuity, loyalty and care are not bad things. Maintenance is relevant, but to a point. When maintenance becomes irrelevant, this force enters its shadow which is stagnation. And I think the particular cruelty of our current age is the system most of us are trying to build a happy life within keeps us maintaining long past the point of relevance.

All of us staying the same — trying to control outcomes and achieve particular things — is the collective condition capitalism needs to thrive. It needs millions and millions of good, little students playing by the rules.

We maintain jobs that no longer align with who we have become. We maintain friendships built on who we used to be. We maintain relationships — romantic, professional, familial — that we have privately known for years are complete. Letting any of this dissolve feels terrifying.

Maintenance is seductive because it manufactures stability. It feels responsible and often looks like loyalty. But there is an invisible exhaustion that comes from sustaining something that has already completed itself and you’ll know it as soon as it descends on the self. It’s a flatness. A low-grade loss or lack of life force. A sense of going through motions that no longer add up to meaning.

This dullness is a signal. It’s data to be used in decisions. In many ways it feels like the precursor to the creation phase. A warning. A knock at the door. Hey, it’s time to move.

What most of us do when we start to feel extinguished, is one of two things:

1. We double down on what no longer feels relevant — a vow renewal in a marriage that ended emotionally, energetically, sexually and spiritually years ago. Saying yes to the promotion at the company that’s already taken the last of what we had to give. Maintaining a title or positioning that makes sense to everyone else but makes us feel like we’re dying.

2. We do nothing at all. We take enough action to keep the cogs of life turning but not enough to create friction or change.

And again, we have to witness our innocence here. Change is genuinely frightening most of the time. The unknown is a gaping hole of possibility yes, but it’s also a kind of fragility. We want so desperately to know what comes next but the way this divine play goes is releasing what is familiar before the new or next thing has revealed itself.

Security lies in letting go. I know, make it make sense.

The truth is, if you don’t move through the cycle voluntarily the cycle will move through you. Shiva — the force of dissolution, destruction and transformation — doesn’t wait for our readiness. It comes when creation has been suppressed too long. Something collapses that we weren’t prepared to release and now we must rebuild from rubble instead of from choice.

None of this is about fate. This is, again, the mechanics of the universe.

choose change before change chooses you.

What Vedic philosophy offers us is the understanding that you can choose to be an agent of your own evolution. That you don’t have to wait for destruction to end what has already ended. You can choose creation before Nature forces it.

This does not mean blowing up your life. It means becoming honest with yourself about what has completed, like I am doing here in this entry. It means tolerating the discomfort of the in-between — the liminal space between what was and what is now emerging. It means trusting that the unknown you are afraid of is not emptiness but the next cycle of creation waiting to begin.

The change that is calling you is not random, it’s specific to you just like mine is to me. It’s the next unique expression of Consciousness that can only arrive through this current version of you, living this particular life, at this exact moment in time.

Nature wants that next expression and it has been waiting for you — and me — to agree. The Divine Mother herself told me this and now I’m telling you.

The question is whether you’ll choose to evolve or whether you’ll wait to be dragged. I am choosing evolution and look forward to being my True Self here.

Alison xo

A Little, Rich Life is such a sweet philosophy, but what does cultivating one actually look like in practice? What decisions and sacrifices are required? That's what this episode is about.

I'm sharing personal stories and real financial decisions to show what enoughness looks like as a lived practice not just a beautiful idea.

I talk about why there's no framework, rejection as a throughway to what's true for us, handling judgement and projections from our loved ones and why building a manageable, sustainable life is not poverty consciousness but one of the most radical acts of self-authorship there is.

If you're wondering what it looks like to choose depth over size and living life over enduring it, this episode is for you.

Alison xo

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For the first time in years, I’m not running ads to support the launch. Not a single dollar is going to Instagram or Facebook. I have made a decision to divest — financially, strategically and energetically — from Meta. A company that has made it abundantly clear addiction is the goal.

This entry was meant to walk you through serve (one of the final times I’ll be talking about it here, at least for a while) but what’s feeling more true as I sit down to write to you is to speak honestly about values-in-action. The last time I made a decision of this magnitude (no longer working with practitioners linked to a spiritual organisation whose leadership had been accused of serious misconduct toward female students), it cost me $50,000.

Bit edgy to share the number but I just feel like it’s all sunshine and rainbows talking about building a service business that is a demonstration of our value system but actually doing it lives on another stratosphere of conviction.

I realised recently that this is one of the most potent things I offer co-creators inside serve — conviction. The conviction and the courage to build a restorative service business or personal brand. To be a founder offering the salve, the balm, to customers and clients who have never felt so disorientated, manipulated, anxious, stressed or depressed.

This is what we need now. This is all we need now. The invitation — as cliché as it may sound — is to be the change you want to see and well before it’s on-trend.

In terms of what I know I can achieve with a paid acquisition strategy in play, my highest grossing launch to date is $180,000. This was the outcome of 12 weeks of sustained effort. Priming, engaging interest and then inviting. The invitation period required daily marketing made up of multiple Instagram Posts and Stories, Reels — so many Reels — and countdowns. I invested about $8,000 a month in additional support across three months, and about the same in ad spend. It was a significant machine and for a long time, I was willing to power it because I believed in it.

This belief changed when the algorithm turned all the way to showing us content based on our “interests” vs. content from people who we’ve chosen to follow. To get in front of the people who follow me on Instagram — arguably the truest signal of interest — I now have to pay and I’m not willing. I’m also no longer willing to feed the algorithm with seemingly endless amounts of content in the hope I remain visible to you. I’m not willing to spend months selling on social media when I could be using that time to serve.

As I stepped through in this podcast episode, I believe the future of marketing for regenerative, restorative service businesses, is human-centered, relational, direct and network-based. Content is a supporting strategy not the strategy anymore. This is the serve lesson I’m currently writing and it’s the model I’m moving to.

This time around, I have collapsed the launch into two weeks. No paid acquisition. No crazy countdown urgency. No algorithm working on my behalf in exchange for my money and your data.

What I believe in and am relying on instead, is your inner-knowing, self-trust and self-determination. I am relying on your capacity to self-select without the ads in your feed, the reminders, the trending sounds or polarising content hooks.

I have over seven hundred people on the serve expressions of interest list. One hundred and eleven of those have already been inside. These potential co-creators are what we call warm, pre-qualified leads in the marketing world, and this is the primary strategy I teach in the program because unless we’re willing to pay to get in front of the people who follow us, email is still the most sovereign, most direct way to reach the people who need what we have to give.

Build a list that belongs to you not to a platform, an algorithm or a company that monetises your most aligned customer’s fear, existentialism, self-doubt, boredom, hopelessness or depression.

I am also relying on the eight years I’ve spent earning your trust. Eight years of serving you with sincerity, integrity and deep care for the professional season you’re stepping into and the vision you hold for what’s next.

I’m halfway into this two-week launch & I currently have 18 enrolments.

And this isn’t even guaranteed revenue because everyone is currently inside enjoying a free, two-week orientation period — an offer that will be open until Sunday, June 7. This is called a conversion tactic, and I brought it in to try and lessen the impact of not investing in ads.

I also wanted to decrease any fear around the investment-to-value ratio. I believe in what I’ve built so deeply, that welcoming you in to see for yourself felt — and still feels — like the most supportive thing I can offer women who want to learn with and from me.

what is serve?

serve is a living practice room and business incubator for women who are ready to start a service business in alignment with their values and the season of life they’re in. Not (just) a course you consume and definitely not a mastermind where the loudest voice wins. A practice room where you show up, build in real-time and develop a foundation that will set you up to achieve your version of success.

Explore or join here.

Now listen, even though 50 percent of my enrolments typically come in the last 48 hours, I definitely thought emailing over seven hundred people with an offer to join serve for free — the old try before you buy — would bring more co-creators in at the beginning of the launch. But this is the thing about entrepreneurship, it’s an enduring experiment. You cognise strategies that feel (at least in my method) aligned to the world of service you’re building and the values you’re building it through, and you wait and see. And rather than viewing something you tried as a failure, you view it as a learning and then you use that learning to inform the next bit of action you take or decision you make.

Strategy is dynamic, not static. It’s alive.

So I’m a week out and I’m currently sitting with that number of 18, and another number, which is the two months’ worth of operating capital I have sitting in the business. serve is my main revenue stream and so you could say there’s a lot riding on this launch, but it runs a little deeper than that for me.

Nature fights very hard not to disguise itself. There’s flow and there’s friction. I actually love and live by the wisdom that if you ever want to know how aligned you are to Nature’s intent for you, all you need to do is inspect the friction. I don’t believe in “unblocking” things or moving into a series of “fixes”. I simply take my awareness off what is friction-full or blocked, and I go where there’s flow.

Here’s that dynamism again and it’s what I teach founders inside serve. How increase their capacity to move into the seat of the witness, inspect the friction and assess the weight at either end of the polarity they might be experiencing. How much ease? How much friction? Where is it weighted and given that, what might you let go of or discontinue pursuing?

So much of running our own business is allowing the discomfort while also staying deeply connected to the highest vision we hold for it and the people we hope it’ll serve. This is actually part of how we remain the condition of the outcome we are desiring. Strategy, energy, mindset. It’s all three, working in harmony together. It’s not making eighteen out of 700 wrong. It’s trusting that continuing to show up from a place of clarity and conviction to offer what you have to give, communicate the need it meets and the transformation they can expect, is really the only thing in your control.

What I'm playing with in this launch — and surprisingly is does feel playful — is how deeply seated in my values can I be without blowing my business up? No one else can test this but me.

It’s important that I’m honest about this because this is part of entrepreneurship — periods of expansion, moments of contraction, chapters of change. Change is the only thing that’s ever happening and if you’re aware of that, being the agent behind the change is the most powerful thing you can do.

service business = spiritual curriculum.

None of this — not the ads, not the collapsed launch timeline, not the eighteen enrolments — is what any of this is actually about. It’s about what I am expanding into and who I am now becoming in the conviction and the right action.

To live our values rather than perform them is an initiation into a new dimension of Being. For me to stop funding the infrastructure of the attention economy and accept that the consequence of that choice will likely be real and material, is what my spirit is ready for.

Starting or thoughtfully scaling a spiritually intelligent service business has this charming way of inviting us to “be it”. Not just talk about it or teach it; but build, create and sell as an expression of it. The invitation is to become a living embodiment of the belief system of the business.

What many founders don’t know before they start but I ready them for, is that service business — or going out on your own in some capacity — is spiritual curriculum.

We all enter these human suits with a set of desires for what we’d like to learn, understand or experience this time around and entrepreneurship — specifically service entrepreneurship — presents us with some of the richest material available for our growth. I’ve evolved more in the last eight years than I did the 20 before. It’s like this superhighway to everything we came here to experience.

The sense of risk I’m sitting with each day, the texture I’m navigating around what this may or may not mean for my business, this is it. This is the point. This is what’s here for me. This is the material my individual spirit needs to progress its storyline. And I chose it, fully, because I know that as bad as it tastes right now, this is my medicine.

But it’s not all self-serving and this is what you learn in the program. I teach regenerative entrepreneurship which isn’t some woo woo label, niche or founder aesthetic. It’s the sum of hundreds of small choices we make at forks in the road where the easier path is more accepted and more available. More known — like return on ad spend. The harder path, the one that, say, requires you to trust a more relational approach, is the one I believe leads to professional peace and a conscience that is as clear as it can be in this capitalistic world.

Not doing ads and writing about it here isn’t a pick me. I genuinely believe that the mass divestment from extractive platforms is not that far away. I believe it’s already beginning, one regenerative entrepreneur at a time. And I also believe that those of us who are willing to go first, to absorb the awkwardness and the exposure and the uncertain numbers, are doing something that matters far beyond our own bottom line. We are proving — or at least trying to — that there’s another way. We are creating a data point that someone else will reference when they are standing at the same fork, wondering if they can afford to choose differently.

The swell of individual participation is how culture changes. It has always been this way.

on remaining the condition for the outcome.

I want to close on what it means to remain the condition for the outcome we believe is relevant for us and the evolution of the whole (sorry, in Nature’s eyes it has to be both). This is a practice I teach inside serve and it’s one I am in deep relationship with right now — and you can expect this from me, by the way. I am always looking for opportunities to show you that no founder or business owner is exempt from having to use the tools and techniques.

Probably one of the most helpful areas was how transparent Alison was with her own business. This in itself was beautifully valuable and was one of the most potent learnings. The forms and spreadsheets were a great bonus, too. There was a momentum that has really pulled me forward in the last few months. I wouldn’t have kept going without it. — past serve co-creator

Remaining the condition for the outcome is what comes after you have done the strategic work — the offer is created, the list is built and the invitations are sent out — and you’re now in the liminal space between building and serving.

This part is purely energetic and it’s the discipline of staying in the frequency of trust rather than collapsing into scarcity. It’s refusing to let fear become the emotional climate you’re launching or selling from. This isn’t magical thinking or spiritual bypassing. It’s an understanding that when you’re serving others, your inner state is part of your offer. The quality of your belief in what you’ve built is something people will feel from you, so radiating that self-belief while you’re inviting them to receive from you is paramount.

This is precisely why serve exists. A community of co-creators who genuinely understand what you’re building and why, and who can hold the vision for you when you are temporarily unable to hold it yourself.

If you’re a service founder or want to be, I really hope to see you inside.

Alison xo

Join serve here

Dearest you.

There's a particular kind of tiredness that comes from building something in a room that doesn't believe in what you're building or how you want to build it. I know this because I've been there.

This episode is about a different kind of room.

It's an invitation to join me inside serve — a living practice room for women building purpose-driven, regenerative service businesses. It's not (just) a program you complete. It's a held space for becoming the founder you already are alongside other women practicing the same thing.

In this episode I map the architecture of the room:

• Foundational business program

• AI mentor trained on the program and eight years of my work

• Live mentoring, co-working and deep work sessions

• In-person meet-ups

• Forming service collectives

While everyone is welcome inside this room, it has been built with two very particular women in mind.

The first is standing at a threshold, circling a service business she can feel but hasn't yet found the courage to begin. 

The second is already inside her own service business, feeling the ground shift beneath her feet with AI. She knows she doesn't want to abandon what she's built but she needs guidance on how to evolve her business to meet the moment we find ourselves in. 

If either of those women is you, the door to enter serve is here. Take your time and if it lands in your body, I'll see you inside.

Alison xo

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Back then, I didn’t have the language or the evidence to communicate why. I just knew the open social feed couldn’t hold the specificity of my mission or the space I required to serve.

While my peers were building up — growing big followings, going broad — I was building down. Burrowing down is probably more accurate, into a niche and deep community of women saying goodbye to Girlboss.

This month, New Public published a report that gives words and research to the instinct I acted on back then. It’s called After the Feed: Trust, Connection and the Next Era of Social Technology and it points toward not only where the work I’ve been doing fits, but also what’s coming next for all of us.

If you’ve felt the shift but haven’t had the words for it — whether you're building something, considering it, or just trying to figure out where your attention belongs in 2026 — this is for you.

the thing many don’t want to believe.

The report’s central claim is the one I’ve observed many builders, founders, marketers and brands are still refusing to absorb: the era of the algorithmic social feed as the primary place where humans connect and exchange information is over.

The feed itself isn’t going to disappear — people will still scroll and parasocial entertainment will still live there (although my bet is we’ll scroll a lot less as the phone gets replaced by voice-led wearables), but the feed is no longer where your online social life or your information diet will live.

That role is moving to agentic interfaces. Your chat with Claude, the morning briefing your personal AI agent gives you, the content agent that summarises the world for you in the format you prefer. An audience of one, curated by an intelligence that knows you intimately.

And while attention drains toward those interfaces, the big social platforms are simultaneously fracturing. There is already AI-generated harassment at scale. AI-generated “slop” as we now love to call it is already drowning out human voices. Bots that in blind tests have been judged to be human already make up an estimated 51 percent of all internet traffic (dead internet is no longer a theory).

The platforms we were told to build our businesses on are getting weirder, less trustworthy and less social faster than most people are willing to admit. The playbook of “build a personal brand, amass a large following and monetise it” is the playbook of an era that is ending in real-time because the trust it used to signal has been hollowed out by synthetic engagement.

the cosy web: where we’re already going instead.

When open spaces become hostile, we retreat. We leave when it becomes unsafe and many years ago writer Venkatesh Rao coined the term for where we’re going instead — the cosy web. It’s a build on Yancey Strickler’s 2019 idea of the Dark Forest theory of the web.

The cosy web is closed, safe, micro-communities that gather around shared interests, beliefs or ideals.

I am almost positive you can feel this in your own life. The conversations that actually matter to you are happening in WhatsApp Groups, on Discord, private Slack channels, here on Substack in the comments section or subscriber chat. All with their own funny names, language and unspoken but well-respected rules.

And as New Public’s report reveals, this migration from open to closed is happening at every level — from local parenting groups to the elite group chats where political and business decisions are being made. People are choosing trust over reach and if you’re building something, this is the tentpole to build on.

Trust is the new currency. Attention isn’t enough anymore because attention can be manufactured for the price of an API call. What can’t be manufactured is what New Public is calling thick reputation — the kind of standing you build slowly, in a specific community, through showing up over time. It’s no longer about having 100,000 followers, it’s about how long you’ve been showing up somewhere, contributing thoughtfully.

This is a different economy and the brands, communities and creators who understand it first are going to look — just as I have — like they’re making the wrong decision in the short-term.

using purposeful pauses to think critically.

I remember heading into maternity leave in early 2021 feeling very sure I was going to stop monetising the podcast and instead, turn my gaze toward a community-funded model. Very few clients were interested in truly integrated partnerships, favouring the CPM model instead which still the most common way to monetise a podcast today. What it means is for an ad to run on my podcast — either read by me or someone else — I would get a maximum of $68 (this was considered premium) per 1,000 listens. At the time I was getting about 60,000 listens per month which would mean I’d bring in about $4,000 per month in ad revenue.

This model starts to make sense if you’re one of the big boppers getting +300,000 listens per month (It’s A Lot, Life Uncut) but the reality for most is nowhere near this. Light years away, in fact. The vast majority of smaller, independent Australian podcasts get less than 150 downloads per episode within their first month of release. No, that isn’t a typo.

It was this intel that made me realise even though Offline, The Podcast sat in the top one percent in Australia, it wasn’t big enough to be a viable business on its own. I also had a desire to go deeper into spirituality which meant sacrificing mainstream appeal and in turn, the size of my listenership.

At that time I was spending $300-$500 per episode on production (much, much cheaper now) and I was publishing weekly. This meant I was investing about $1,500 a month in production. It was also more or less a full-time job as I spent a lot of time researching guests, building the episode narrative, adding narration, thoughtful intros, sound treatment and then social promotion.

The revenue reality was clear, but so was the intense pull I was feeling to closed, hyper-focused spaces. I knew in my body that the kind of work I was put here to do required four walls. Safe, stable containers that could hold the specifics of a mentee’s story, lived experience, fears and breakthroughs. Neither social media or the podcast could meet them where I knew I had the personal capacity and experience to.

For nearly five years now I have watched what happens when you build small but deep. In the service space it looks like referring paying clients to each other. It looks like collaborating on offers. It looks like noticing when someone has gone quiet. It looks like telling each other when we’re pricing too low.

All of this can’t happen at scale which is why scale isn’t a metric that belongs in the new era of social connection we are now shifting to.

Small is perfect. Small is nourishing. Small is valuable.

the time is now to build your own version of strava or even serve.

What New Public’s report has gifted me is other businesses I can use as examples of the new way instead of always referring to my own. It uses a brilliant example that makes the perhaps abstract idea of micro-communities feel really tangible to most people. It asks you to imagine using AI tools to build something like the running app Strava, only just for the runners in your local area. Not a platform for millions, but a small, specific space for the people you actually run with. Tailored design. A shared language. An unforgettable tone. Stable energetics. A human steward — you — at the centre. Price it in line with the value and transformation it offers and you have yourself a very sustainable business.

I am grateful to not need to imagine this because I built it in 2022 with Off— and again in 2024 with serve. These two micro-communities along with my Group Japa Journey offering have generated over $1 million in revenue. This is what’s possible as a solo service provider bringing like-minded people together in closed community.

This is the model we’re now moving towards and the one you get to witness up-close inside serve, if it aligns.

I built the room I needed & now you can, too.

New Public’s report describes a near future where small, purpose-built spaces, tailored to specific communities, run by humans with AI in supporting roles, owned by their members, become not just viable but central. The infrastructure for this is already here. AI coding tools have collapsed the cost of building software. Small, member-supported economics are working.

The running club is just one version, serve is another. What will yours be and for who?

If you choose to join me inside, I can’t wait to share the process of building the app that now acts as our four walls. I’ll be sharing the platform I used, the configuration prompt that started it all, how long it took, how I’ve set up the sovereign AI mentor that will support you to bring your business through and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. It’s all material for us to learn from.

As soon as the technology came online I dove straight in and I’m going to offer you the courage and confidence to do the same. The next era of brand, business and community is going to be built by the people who decided not to wait. The tech is here and the time is now. We’re all building the plane as we’re flying it.

after the open feed is the closed room.

When I made the call to move towards closed community in January 2022 I had no proof, just a feeling that what I had to give couldn’t be built or held on a feed. Nearly five years on, New Public has put language and research around the instinct and the numbers in my own business are the receipts.

What I want to give you is what I had to give myself — permission to ignore the playbook of the era that was ending, and to start building the room I knew needed to exist and could only exist through me.

Yours is required, too.

Alison xo

Join or explore serve here.

I know it feels like it’s everywhere right now — the new book about success being promoted by every major media outlet in the world. The female founders on the podcast circuit. The women who built the brand, took the investment, made the exit and are now telling us exactly what it cost and why it was worth it.

I’m not here to tell you any of them are wrong.

What many of them are doing really well is offering the terms and conditions their version of success has demanded with complete transparency. That’s a genuine gift to the women who want what they have and if that’s you, they are precisely who you should be reading, following and listening to.

What I’m here to do is name the gap and reinforce the alternative, because that is what has never been given the same publishing deals, cultural visibility and mainstream legitimacy.

A definition of success and a category of entrepreneurship that don’t require the sacrifices these founders so helpfully call out. The business model that doesn’t demand scale at all costs or growth as the only evidence that it’s working. A professional reality that doesn’t treat your nervous system, your relationships, your seasons and cycles as acceptable collateral damage on the road to “there”.

The alternative exists. It has always existed:

a smaller, richer, deeper, more service-led life.

Yours will look different to mine but for me:

• A slow start to the day: this is rich.

• Ample time to move my body: this is rich.

• Comfortably affording nourishing food and local produce: this is rich.

• Having a safe and loving home to return to each day: this is rich.

• Replacing social media scrolls with art gallery strolls: this is rich.

• One modest home to call my own: this is rich.

• Being present and available for myself, my partner, my daughter, my friends and my family: this is rich.

This alternative definition of success is an invitation to cultivate a life that brings you back into right relationship with your ambition. It’s a reclaiming of the why behind why you work and who or what else gets to succeed when you do.

It’s a life that’s small in size but deep in satisfaction. A life that is consciously contained. A life that can be lived into and enjoyed vs. planned and endured. A life that is void of comparison and abundant in self-determination.

This alternative definition of success doesn’t require you to reject your ambition, either. Instead, it presents you with an invitation to harness it and point it in the direction of collective wellbeing, safety and support. It’s a value-for-all mindset.

“Rich” also gets reimagined.

How your wealth expresses itself feels like a salve not an indication of your status in the world. Money still matters but exchange is a currency you also trade in.

It’s not about having the most money, it’s about having enough money. A relevant amount of economic wealth. How much is enough? In this alternative definition of success, you get to decide.

You get to define your version of plenty. And in the seasons you move into financial overflow instead of holding, you choose to recirculate your excess into the spaces and places that need it more than you. Because you have enough.

this isn’t some magical ideal. it’s available to you right now but you have to choose it.

The path to this alternative definition of success — should you choose it — is obviously very different to the path to Girlboss 2.0 being re-promoted to us right now.

The big thing to know is that it rejects traditional growth milestones, for-scale timelines and vanity metrics in favour of a completely different set of success signals.

You will define yours but here’s what it looks like for me:

Waking up on a Monday morning feeling creative and excited. Not 100 percent of the time but most of the time. There is rarely dread in my body and I honestly didn’t think this could be possible professionally but it is.

I turn to my body not my bank balance when I need to make a decision. As a Generator with Sacral Authority I am always looking for that visceral “yes” or “no” response. If it’s a yes, I then run it through my values and the regenerative entrepreneurship principles I teach. Not an external motivator in sight.

I find it hard to cultivate a desire for more. Hard to type this because even I am rolling my eyes but very sincerely, I am so landed in my definition of enough that I have to really brainstorm what “more” could look like. What ends up on the list always feels like a hangover from a past version of me that was stuck on capitalism’s wheel of acquisition.

I am in right relationship with money. Because I am living my definition of a rich existence, I plan and earn in alignment with that definition. This isn’t poverty consciousness (thoroughly explored that possibility) or an inability to hold or steward more money. I just don’t need more than what is needed at the time.

I could go on but it’s starting to sound holier than thou and that’s not my intent. I’m just trying to demonstrate what success signals can look like when you subscribe to this alternative definition of success — smaller, deeper, richer, more service-led.

When it comes to business — in my case a service business — the signals are also the polar opposite of what we’re getting fed from highly visible entrepreneurs on social media.

I don’t measure the business’ success against arbitrary numbers like $50k months. These earning benchmarks touted by online business coaches don’t factor in the restorative nature of a business that has been built to honour the season of life I’m in and my capacity to serve.

In this alternative definition of success you’ll also see a business that operates at a pace you can comfortably sustain. It has a patient revenue model that scales thoughtfully and responsibly over time. It measures its success not in exits and investment rounds but in depth of service, quality of relationships and the level of transformation the people it serves experience.

None of this is anti-ambition, anti-profit or spiritual bypassing dressed up as a business model. This is something much older and more true — an ancient way of building and serving that capitalism buried but thankfully did not destroy, and that this particular moment in time is calling urgently back into form.

I really believe we can feel inspired by aspects of the Girlboss path while simultaneously honouring the pull into something softer and more service-led. Our “watch out” is when the inspiration imprints itself and starts to govern our action. The experts we follow, the books we read, the definitions of success we allow into our psyche — these are not neutral inputs. They can quickly become the operating system running underneath every decision we make.

What I have learnt is that if you are going to build in the direction of this alternative — regenerative and service-led — then at some point you have to choose it completely. You have to turn towards it fully or you’ll continue to feel like you’re failing or that success isn’t coming fast enough.

choose differently.

If you find yourself resisting the beat of the Girlboss recruitment drum, consider joining me inside my living practice room for regenerative entrepreneurship and service-led work, serve. Join here.

Alison xo

This episode begins as satire and if the opening feels uncomfortable, that's the point.

All of it is real. Quotes and close paraphrasings from women and founders being held up right now as the aspiration.

We have a problem.

Eight years into this work, I find myself more alarmed than ever. Girlboss 2.0 feels to be emerging and mainstream media is serving her up as the role model we should be learning from and aspiring toward. And so many of us — consciously or not — are still subscribing.

This episode is a call to action. It's an invitation to excavate the seed of ambition the system planted in us and to replant something more honest, more nourishing and more suited to bodies that cycle and lives that take place in seasons.

It's an invitation to define your version of enough — your version of A Little, Rich Life — and build from there.

No one is coming to save us. The external conditions will not change. We can't do this in isolation and that's what serve is for — my living practice room for regenerative entrepreneurship and service business.

Alison xo

• Express interest in serve here

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Hopelessness.

Different women with different circumstances and levels of privilege all feeling hollow and suspended in this constant state of despair. I know the feeling intimately because I’ve lived it.

So many women are experiencing an internal collapse right now and if they’re not, they feel like they’re about to. The question I got the most (in more thoughtful words): what’s the point anymore?

If this resonates, I want you to know that you’re not going crazy. How you are feeling right now is in many ways the only reasonable way to feel. War, genocide, wages not increasing with the cost of living, interest rate rises, most people unable to buy a home after years of saving and trying, rental increases, AI making the future feel scarily unknown.

We have reached a collective breaking point and hopelessness is what we feel when we’re still trying to achieve the system’s definition of success without adequate support from the system itself.

Not to sound like a broken record because I know I’ve been on this beat for eight years now, but the Girl Boss era was capitalism wearing a women’s empowerment cape and it lured us in through very influential, aspirational mascots. Sophia Amoruso, Sheryl Sandberg, Audrey Gelman… women who were genuinely compelling and ambitious but also convinced, I think, that what they were building was new. We all did.

But it wasn’t.

The message underneath all of it — the hustle quotes, the Forbes lists, the big social following, getting investment, having the label “female-founded” business — was that liberation meant winning on the system’s terms. That freedom was something you earned through revenue and reach and rooms that used to say no to women finally saying yes. And that the ceiling, once shattered, would fall equally on all of us.

What we were never invited to ask was whether the ceiling was worth shattering in the first place.

That era — one I participated in heavily — gave us ambition without any interrogation of the seed. No inspection at the root. It handed us the ladder and called it feminism without once questioning the building the ladder was leaning against.

And so we climbed. We climbed toward individual achievement, toward personal brands, toward the particular kind of visibility that the algorithm rewards and capital recognises and when we arrived — exhausted and out of alignment with our natural seasons and cycles — we couldn’t make sense of why we didn’t feel this magic thing they told us we would: Successful.

The hopelessness so many of you raised in those Instagram questions is not a personal failing. It is the consequence of spending years building toward something that was never designed to make you feel whole. A definition of success so thoroughly shaped by extractive values that achieving it leaves most women feeling emptier than before.

But here is the most important reframe available to us right now:

The reason you don’t feel successful is not because you haven’t achieved enough. It’s because peace and fulfillment — the two things we are all ultimately chasing — don’t live with self-serving definitions of success.

They live in service. They live in the giving of our individual energy, our unique gifts and our learned skills toward the specific need of the time we are each here to meet. And not as martyrdom or self-erasure, but as the most ancient and trustworthy form of meaning-making available to us — collective care. Women resourcing each other and then placing our attention on the new system, structures and services this broken world actually needs.

This is the other way and it isn’t a reaction to the Girl Boss era but a return to something far older and true. A way of working and earning and contributing that capitalism has buried.

If you have recognised you are in a fight you can’t win, my invitation to you is to withdraw yourself from the battle and begin building for the other side. The side that is fighting for humanity, for meaning, for unity and collective care vs. million dollar years, another property and social media fame.

This sounds really dramatic but no one is coming to save us.

A movement is required now.

I’ve been at this for eight years and that’s eight years too long to be advocating for work we don’t have to survive. What we need now is healed people healing more people.

Healed of life as an acquisition strategy. Healed of work as a competition ground for more money, more status, more followers, more microphones, more investment, more houses, more clothes. Healed of the belief that success always looks like the biggest or the most.

From a collective standpoint, our work is too self-focused. We’re still building around what we want to create, what we want to be known for, what we want to earn. I’m not criticising this impulse — it’s a conditioned state and we are innocent — but only to a point. Because the peace and fulfillment we are looking for does not live in the me. It lives in the us, and in serving into the needs of the time.

When we drop the focus from the Small Self — the who, the I, the me — and begin taking action from the Big Self, we find what we’ve been reaching for and not as a reward at the end of this long, arduous road, but as the natural consequence of serving.

The truth is, your work was never designed to be about you.

The system, and more directly capitalism, planted that seed. But Nature, the Universe, Source, God, Consciousness — whatever word holds meaning for you — broke away from itself to create you for higher order doing and thinking.

I want you to exhale. Take a breath. Let the pressure lift. Unburden yourself of the weight of capitalism’s ideals of success and point your awareness toward Nature’s original intent for beautiful, essential, unique, required you.

The Universe wants to experience a very specific quality of itself through you but you have to let it. I keep learning this and at the very seed of its intent for you is service.

We come into these human suits forgetting what we are — one expression of the one whole thing — so that we can experience the utter bliss of remembering. And when we do remember, life and how we experience it becomes the outcome of what we choose to do with what we’ve realised.

Now that I’ve realised I am the Universe localised, what would the Universe have me do? Who would it have me be? What world would it have me co-create? How would it have me use these gifts it gave me and the skills I’ve learned along the way? Where would it have me place my specific energy?

We need to stop waiting for the external conditions to change.

The world today — including AI — is a direct reflection of the average state of consciousness and the principles, desires and motivators that average state of consciousness bows down to. Greed, power, control, notoriety... Everything we are experiencing today is these motivators actualised in the 3D. Entire generations of people wanting to be famous, rich and known no matter the cost to themselves, their health, their relationships, their integrity or the collective field.

But we are running on an old operating system that will not survive the new era now emerging. The internal code we each need to rewrite is that success is something we “achieve” and that successful is something we “become” when we achieve it. It’s not true and many of us now have personal evidence of this.

Success is a feeling that emerges from you when you are living as an expression of what you really are and serving into the need of the time you are here to meet in any given season of your life.

I really believe right now is the final collapse of profession as identity and the age of AI will eventually be known as the age of reinvention. What will start out hard and bad will eventually swing toward good, and we will look back and understand that we needed this moment of destruction because how we were going — how we were living — was self-destructive and at complete odds with Nature’s intent for all of us. What is happening is meant to be happening and we know this because it’s happening. It’s relevant.

What AI is turning us back toward is Nature’s original intent for humanity. The things most at risk in an AI-powered world are the things that were never really ours to begin with like titles, tasks and rigid roles. These were capitalism’s way of containing and restraining us.

What can’t be automated, generated or replicated is our individual energy, our unique gifts, our relational intelligence and the specific needs Nature created us to meet in the collective through our individuality.

That is our edge now. That is what we have to work with and that is why we’ll work at all.

When you’re sitting in your True Self, who are you?

It’s the question I used to ask at the end of every honest conversation I had on the podcast and it’s still my North Star when you enter a closed learning space with me. If I do my job well you will begin to answer it from another dimension of being. Of knowing.

The who is the individual. The human suit. The role, the personality, the story, the resume. The curated self we present to the world and the private self we doubt in the dark.

The what is something much larger. The what is the Universe constantly exporting and expressing itself locally in the relative world — one unique expression of the one whole thing. That’s what you are. And why does this matter? Because your existence is not accidental. You are not random. Nature literally broke away from itself to create you, to inhabit you, because it has a very specific intent it wants to co-create through you.

That is it. This is the whole thing.

When women arrive in the Get Offline world, they usually do so believing they have been forgotten somehow. That they aren’t special enough, talented enough, or needed. And so I ask:

Why would the Universe create you if it had no need or purpose for you?

Your role — with my help — is to make contact with Nature’s intent for you. To make contact with the need you are here to meet and to channel your energy, gifts, skills, time and awareness in that direction.

You are not lacking purpose. You are lacking an understanding of your essential nature and the ways you are required in the collective.

For a long time I taught this sweet thing I call True Self Success as formula:

Individual Energy + Unique Gifts + Learned Skills + The Need of the Time = True Self Success.

I expressed it visually as overlapping circles — a Venn diagram with True Self Success at the centre.

The formula was useful but it always felt like it was missing something quite pivotal. It also implied that all four elements carry equal weight, and that you can arrive at them in any order. That it’s simply a matter of getting the mix right.

What I understand eight years on is that True Self Success is not a formula. It is an emergence. It moves from the inside out like rings on still water.

Individual Energy is the foundation — what you are before you’ve done anything with it. Your raw nature. The essential frequency of you.

Unique Gifts live one ring out. They are what you are, expressed. The natural capacities that arise when your individual energy is allowed to move freely.

Learned Skills come next — what you’ve acquired through living, study, experience and practice. They refine the gifts and give them a form the world can receive.

And then, only when those three are activated and aligned, do you have the genuine capacity to meet The Need of the Time. That outermost ring.

True Self Success is what emerges when your innermost nature meets the world’s outermost need.

The feeling of it — that deep internal peace, that sense of being in the right place doing the right thing — is what happens when all four rings are in alignment. When your centre is genuinely connected to the outermost ring rather than performing connection or bypassing the inner layers entirely.

This is what we get to feel when we have done the work of moving from the inside out and this is what we practice inside serve.

serve is a living practice room for regenerative entrepreneurship and human-centered service business. It’s a place to belong and to navigate this new era of life and work together. It’s an invitation to move out of isolation and performing growth for an algorithm and into conscious community. A room to starting building from the inside out.

The dissonance you’re feeling — the hopelessness, the lostness, the sense that something is deeply misaligned — all of this gets resolved in the act of turning toward something larger than yourself and beginning to serve it. This I can promise you.

If you’ve felt even a flicker of recognition reading this, consider joining me inside serve. Bring your questions. Bring your uncertainty. That’s exactly what this room is for.

Alison xo

Join serve here.

Dearest you.

This is the permission slip so many have been waiting for and an explanation of why it's finally arrived.

If the thing standing between you and starting (or sustaining) a service business has been the belief that you have to become a content creator, a semi-influencer or a founder building in public, this episode is for you.

The model is moving on. Content marketing as the primary strategy for service businesses is giving way to something that has always felt more true in the world of purpose-driven business — relationship-based, community-led and human-centered.

I trace what's driving the shift (the saturation of AI-generated content on social platforms, the quiet death of the follower economy, the coming transition away from the phone itself) and what I believe is next and will be preparing us for in serve — consulting collectives, long-form authority building and service businesses designed around depth of relationship rather than volume of reach.

The conditions you've been waiting for are finally here.

Alison xo

• Express interest in serve here

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In the seven years I’ve spent helping women navigate what they’ve traditionally done for work and what they now want to do, the story I’ve tended to most is the story of risk. How to take a professional identity that’s been decades in the making and ask it to stand on its own without the architecture of an employer around it.

The story is always the same and it was for me, too. The job is safe, the salary arriving on the first or the fifteenth equals stability, the title tells her and the world where she sits and what she’s worth, the team carries the parts that she shouldn’t have to anymore or can’t, the org chart orients her within a structure and tells her where to next. These are all the things we exchange our freedom for whether we’re aware of it or not. It’s a trade. Security in return for the perceived safety of “the known”.

Leaving all of this — that’s been the courageous act. That required what I call a high mind and at least a glimmer of self-belief that what you had to offer could exist beyond the four walls of your employer and that other people would learn about it, want it and pay for it. Leaping out has been branded as audacious because for a long time, it was. Staying was the sensible choice and leaving was the risk.

This story was true until now.

Risk never disappears, it just shifts

Risk will never disappear from our professional lives but it will keep shifting. What is worth knowing and me saying, though, is what we are living through now with artificial intelligence is the most significant professional shift most of us will experience in our lifetimes.

Risk, whether real or perceived, has always been part of the curriculum. It’s required for evolution. It’s the thing that creates the conditions for growth when we finally decide (or when Nature decides for us) to bite the evolutionary carrot. I tend to bite quite a lot and I’ve found that the more I bite, the less terrifying biting feels. But that doesn’t mean the risk has gone anywhere, it simply means I’ve developed a greater capacity to tolerate it.

So where has risk shifted to in the professional sphere?

The permanent role. Staying is now just as risky as leaving.

The ground beneath our feet

Regardless of how transparent your organisation is or isn’t being about how AI is impacting the business, the ground is being excavated beneath our feet. The roles, organisational structures and business models that were once the safe harbour are being redesigned with the intent of either capitalising on this technological revolution or surviving it.

AI is not coming for work in some distant future. It is here. It is already restructuring roles, collapsing entire teams and functions, and causing leadership teams to ask which parts of their workforce even need to be human.

With each wave of innovation (weekly now), a new org chart gets birthed. The roles that felt permanent and irreplaceable are on the table for reconsideration. The titles that felt like entire identities and legacies are being reimagined in real time and not because we aren’t excellent, but because the function no longer needs to exist in the way it once did.

The argument for permanent employment was always an argument about stability. We traded a level of freedom and self-determination for the security of the known. The structure felt like it held us. But what happens when that structure can no longer hold the fullness of the moment? What happens when the stability that was the whole point of the trade turns out to be contingent on the company’s AI adoption plan, the leadership team’s ability to execute it and whether your particular function survives the next quarter’s efficiency review?

We don’t have to like this and we don’t have to agree with it, but I think we do have to accept it if we’re choosing to keep playing the game that powers this system. The question I believe we’re each being invited to ask is not whether this is happening (it is) or when (right now), but where we want to be standing, next to who, believing in what, when the ground really starts to shift.

I’m not trying to panic anyone. This is loving preparation.

From producer of value to composer of value

Here’s the idea I keep returning to — the one I believe is at the heart of how we navigate this particular moment from a place of empowerment and choice:

The professional era that is ending is the era of production. We were originally hired to plan, produce and execute. We had defined outputs within defined functions or departments using defined skill sets and increasingly, defined programs. The role told us what was required of us and we delivered on those requirements. The clarity was a comfort.

But production — reliable, repeatable output — is what AI does very well and also faster and cheaper (to the business' bottom line but unfortunately not the environment) with less drama and no requests for more money after the work is done.

Composing — the thing AI can’t do — is something entirely different.

Composing is the act of bringing together disparate elements like lived experience, perception, relational intelligence, taste, timing, intuition, instinct, pattern recognition earned over years of showing up and creating something from them that didn’t exist before and couldn’t exist without you.

A piece of music is composed. Winning strategy is composed. The right question asked at the right time to the right person is a composition. You’re composing when you hold a client through a difficult transition or re-read a room before anyone else in it has noticed something has shifted. When you carry the kind of institutional knowledge that lives in your body not on a document you are a walking composer.

Then there’s your taste, your perspective, your informed opinion, your ability to see around a corner before it reveals itself, the particular quality of your thinking, the specific energetics of your relational intelligence, the decade or two of professional context you carry and bring to every piece of work you touch… none of that can be automated. None of it is available in any LLM, at any price, on any platform. And all of it becomes more valuable, not less, in a world where the production of content, creative, analysis, strategy and communication is available everywhere and for cheap.

The shift I’m inviting you into is not about a new job title or a dramatic career move. It is a fundamental reorientation in how you understand and articulate the value you offer.

Not what can I produce, but what can only I compose?

This is not a small question but it is the most important professional question of our time and it’s one that women in permanent roles have rarely been asked to answer because the role has always answered it for them.

The questions that actually matter now

In last week’s episode of the podcast (watch or listen), I offered up the questions that entrepreneurs have always had to answer for themselves that are now questions every professional needs to sit with. And not because everyone will become self-employed (though many will), but because the era of the role as identity is ending and something more sovereign is being asked to step forward in its place.

• What aspects of your work must remain deeply human?

• What are you actually solving for, beneath the surface of the job description?

• What is the real need you meet — the thing people are actually reaching toward when they come to you?

• What do people trust you for, know you for, come to expect from you not from your title but from knowing you specifically?

• What do only you know?

• What can only you can see based on your unique gifts, your professional experience, your depth, your relational intelligence, your knowledge of the client, your feel for how this kind of work has been done before and where it’s now going?

• What is the kind of transformation or result that you, specifically, help create and for who?

These questions have a quality of excavation to them. They can feel uncomfortable at first — particularly for women who have been rewarded for fitting into the shape of what was asked rather than for declaring the shape of what they bring — but really sitting with them with honesty and without rushing to a tidy answer is the work to do in this moment. And when you have genuine answers, what you’ll likely discover is that you are far more portable than you realised.

Portability, in the age of AI, is going to matter more than almost anything else.

The future of work is already taking shape

The prediction I want to play a role in preparing you for is that the workforce of the near future will be more fluid, more contract-based and more project-oriented than most of us have worked within.

And not exclusively — permanent roles will exist — but the composition and the expectation around what employment looks like is shifting in ways that are already visible if you know where to look. Alongside permanent human employees, organisations will be running AI agents as a matter of course. The people who thrive in this environment will be the ones who have done the work of understanding the exact value they compose and why it matters.

The organisations that are ahead of this shift are already building workforces that look far more fluid and project-based and this will only increase. And the interesting and I think very encouraging thing, is that this creates real opportunity for the woman who has done the inner and outer work of knowing what she brings.

Meeting this moment well means dissolving the employed-versus-self-employed binary entirely. Not as a philosophical position but as a practical one. It means becoming what I think of as a sovereign unit of value — someone who understands the particular shape and substance of what she brings, has language for it and can carry it both with and within businesses as those businesses change. Not a dependent unit waiting to be assigned a set of tasks but sovereign one arriving with full presence, accountability and ownership of what she brings.

Sovereign rather than dependent. Bringing exactly what the business can’t replicate or replace, for exactly as long as the business needs it, from a position of genuine agency. Pitching projects, contracting back to organisations that used to employ you, building a reputation as someone whose value travels well because she knows it so intimately and owns unashamedly.

This is not a fantasy. The organisations that are ahead of this shift are already building exactly these kinds of relationships with exactly these kinds of people. This will only increase.

Belonging has never been more essential

We are going to be looking for signs of life. We are going to be looking for each other.

In a world where AI can generate the meeting notes, write the first draft, produce the data analysis and simulate a reasonable version of many kinds of professional output, what becomes the irreducible centre of doing business is the human who is showing up with taste, perspective, skin in the game and genuine care for the work and the people it’s for. Relating has felt like this nice-to-have in the digital era we are exiting but I now see it as the main character. It’s the thing.

This is why I believe belonging to a regenerative, entrepreneurial community has never been more important and I don’t mean LinkedIn. I mean a real community that operates through a shared belief system and has the capacity to hold you, challenge you, help you think and get hired. The kind of community where the conversation isn’t just about branding strategies or business development, but also about what kind of professional life you actually want to build and how to build it with integrity, ethics, intelligence and enough spaciousness for your actual life to breathe alongside it.

The move from production to composition is not one you need to make alone. You can make it in proximity to other women moving through the same transition, whose thinking will influence yours in ways that help you see more clearly and whose courage is close enough to be contagious.

serve: a living practice room

None of what I’m describing requires this dramatic moment of resignation or throwing out the business you have and starting a new one. It also doesn’t require knowing where the finish line is before you begin (literally impossible when you’re serving into the needs of the time because the need is always changing!). You don’t need to have it fully figured out to start moving toward it but I do believe you need somewhere to think. Somewhere to inhabit where other women are already in motion with building something distinctly their own. Somewhere with the structure, the strategy, the steps and the mentorship to meet this transition with intention rather than panic.

That is what serve now is. What began as a twelve-week service business program has evolved into a living practice room for regenerative entrepreneurship and human-centered service business — the exact things this moment is asking of us.

It’s a space where strategy and depth are not in competition and where the work of understanding the need of the time and the value you uniquely compose becomes the foundation everything else is built on — your positioning, your offers, your pricing, your content and the way you market yourself.

If you are employed and beginning to sense that the professional ground is shifting, I want you to see serve as a room you belong in. My intent is not to rush you out of employment before you’re ready but to help you slowly build what’s next from within the arms of a loving community, led by a steady steward — me.

Join serve here.

Alison xo