I still remember the sinking feeling when I first saw the gap, and how I ran the numbers two more times because I wanted my calculations to be wrong.

The General Manager responsible for the business was capable and experienced, and she trusted the team she had inherited when she stepped into the role. From what I could see, she had no obvious reason not to believe what they were telling her, except that the picture they had given her wasn’t accurate and, in some areas, they weren’t as capable as she had believed them to be.

When I told her and a call with the CEO was subsequently scheduled, she said, “You know I’m going to get fired over this.” I reassured her while praying she was wrong.

By the time the real position became visible, she was the person ultimately held accountable for it and she lost her job.

I’ve thought about that situation many times over the years, particularly as I’ve become more interested in the decisions we make without necessarily recognising them as decisions, because I don’t think she consciously decided not to look closely enough.

I don’t imagine she sat at her desk one morning and thought, “I’m going to accept these numbers without properly understanding what sits underneath them.”

It was probably far more subtle than that.

Perhaps the agreement was, “I trust my people,” or, “I don’t want to be the kind of leader who comes in and immediately questions everyone.” Perhaps it was simply that the people around her knew the business better than she did at that point, so accepting what they told her felt entirely reasonable.

Or perhaps none of those were the exact words.

That’s what interests me about the agreements we make with ourselves. They don’t sound like formal declarations. More often, they show up through what we repeatedly choose to question, tolerate, avoid, assume or take on faith, and because they can look so much like our values, our leadership style or simply “the way I am”, we don’t necessarily realise there is a choice sitting underneath them.

Trust, after all, is a good thing, as is empowerment, and most capable leaders are actively trying not to become the person who micromanages every decision their team makes.

But I think there is an important distinction between trusting someone and outsourcing your responsibility to understand what they are telling you.

That distinction is obvious in hindsight.

It is considerably less obvious in the moment, particularly when the thing influencing your decision feels virtuous.

It is easy to recognise the cost of a poor decision when someone knowingly ignores the numbers, avoids a difficult conversation or decides not to act on information they already have. It is much harder to see the decisions that don’t feel like decisions at all because they are wrapped up in something we consider part of our character.

“I trust my people.”

“I give people the benefit of the doubt.”

“I don’t want to be controlling.”

“I want my team to feel empowered.”

Each of those can be entirely true and entirely reasonable, but I wonder what happens when the identity we have attached to being that kind of leader subtly starts deciding what we will and won’t look at.

At what point does trust become an unwillingness to verify?

At what point does empowerment become distance?

At what point does not wanting to micromanage become not wanting to know?

I can ask those questions fairly comfortably when I’m looking back at someone else’s experience.

They become much less comfortable when I turn the same questions on myself.

Where have I trusted because checking felt uncomfortable? Where have I accepted an explanation because questioning it would have required a harder conversation? Where have I described something as trust, patience or generosity when there was also a part of me that simply didn’t want to disturb what I hoped was true?

I can certainly find examples.

That is where this becomes interesting for me because, if my core philosophy is that You are Subject No.1, then I can’t use someone else’s behaviour as evidence for an idea without being willing to look for my own version of it too.

The more I explore Inner Negotiation, the less I think it’s always a conscious internal battle between two obvious choices.

Sometimes it is much more subtle than that.

Sometimes it is an agreement about who we believe we are, or who we believe we should be, which then determines the range of choices we are willing to make.

Perhaps we want to be a trusting leader, a supportive boss, a loyal partner, an easy person to work with, someone who gives people the benefit of the doubt or someone who doesn’t create unnecessary conflict.

None of those identities are inherently problematic.

The issue arises when they become so intertwined with how we see ourselves that we stop recognising the decisions that are being made as a result of them.

If I believe that being a good leader means trusting my people, questioning someone’s numbers can start to feel like a betrayal of that identity.

If I believe being supportive means giving someone another chance, holding them accountable might feel harsh.

If I believe being reasonable means not making a fuss, speaking up can feel disproportionately difficult.

The external decision might look commercial, operational or relational, but there is often another negotiation taking place underneath it.

Who will I have to be if I question this?

What might it mean about me if I say no?

What happens to the way I see myself if I behave differently this time?

Those questions aren’t always conscious, of course, which is exactly why I think they matter.

We tend to focus on the visible decision in front of us, yet often the parameters of that decision were set much earlier by an agreement we made with ourselves about who we are allowed to be.

Eventually, that agreement becomes visible in the external world.

It shows up in the forecast we didn’t interrogate, the person we kept in a role for too long, the conversation we postponed, the standard we quietly lowered or the result we can’t quite understand because we keep looking at the outcome rather than the agreement sitting underneath it.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons some problems seem to repeat themselves.

We keep trying to solve what is happening externally without examining the internal agreement that keeps recreating the conditions for it.

Which makes me wonder whether one of the more useful questions we can ask ourselves as leaders isn’t simply, “What am I missing?”

Perhaps it is this:

What am I currently treating as a value, a personality trait or simply the way things are, that is actually an agreement I’ve made with myself?

Because once you can see the agreement, you can decide whether you still want to keep it.

Keep going and keep growing.

Love Glin x

I also had a breakthrough in seeing how my ideas, research and writing could become the foundation of the business I’m building.

This month’s One Page Report reflects on the shift from knowing what feels true to actually living in a way that matches it.

Each month, I sit down and write a One Page Report - a way to capture where I am, what I’m learning, and how I’m evolving. It’s not a polished update or a highlight reel. It’s an honest reflection of the journey I’m on: experimenting with what alignment really feels like, challenging old patterns, and choosing to live my life in a way that feels true to me.

As a paid subscriber, you’ll get a real and unfiltered look behind the scenes - what’s working, what’s uncomfortable, and what I’m noticing as I continue stepping into who I’m becoming. I’ll share my thoughts on living authentically, identity, transformation and the inner negotiation, along with the moments that quietly change everything.

From time to time, I’ll also offer paid subscribers opportunities to go deeper. In July, as a thank you to my founding paid subscribers, I gifted two complimentary Mirror Sessions - the same kind of focussed thinking space I ordinarily reserve for private coaching clients, where we can surface the Inner Negotiation underneath what feels stuck and create greater clarity around what you know, what you want and what you’re ready to choose.

Given the cost of working with me privately, I wanted this to feel like a genuinely valuable thank you for those who choose to support my work early.

If you’re already a paid subscriber and haven’t yet claimed them, you’ll find the details in this month’s One Page Report.

If you’re newer here, paid subscribers will continue to receive occasional opportunities to go deeper with me beyond the writing itself.

This is for you if you’re curious about what it really takes to build something meaningful. If my journey resonates with you, I’d love to have you along for the ride.

Subscribe to receive my monthly One Page Reports and become part of the journey.

Let’s keep going and keep growing.

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Before I ask anything of anyone else, I must be willing to go first.

It’s both exhilarating and confronting in equal measure!

When I’m asking you to get honest with yourself about what you want, it means I have to first be honest with myself.

When I’m asking you to isolate the signal and ignore the noise around you regarding the business or life you’re building, I’ve got to demonstrate that I’m doing the same.

When I’m asking you to let go of the things that don’t serve you, I have to show you that I’m letting go too.

Being Subject No.1 is challenging and scary.

Years ago, I remember being inspired by Seth Godin’s words around the choice we have to either show up in life as an amateur or a professional.

I remember at the time thinking that I absolutely wanted to show up as a professional, that I wasn’t interested in playing the game of life at an amateur level.

For the most part, I can see that I honour this choice, but at the same time I’ve also noticed that when fear or doubt gets in the way, my actions can reveal me to be an amateur.

If I’m choosing to play the game of life professionally, I must fully commit to playing full out, yet when I’m feeling scared I can choose casual participation over full commitment.

Not perfection. Not certainty. Not endless effort. Just a willingness to stay in conscious relationship with what I say I want.

To me, being professional means choosing devotion, especially devotion to faith in something bigger than yourself, yet fear seems to consistently choose distraction, which can become an amateur’s default.

Over the last few months, since embarking on a journey to become a mum via an embryo donor, I’ve had to take a serious look at the life and business I’m building.

If I want to financially sustain myself and a future child through my own business, AND be a present mum, I need to design the way I work and the business I build more consciously.

I can’t play an amateur game or accept a default strategy when the stakes for the life I want are so high.

I’ve noticed over recent months that the further I progress in my personal journey, the louder the fear and doubt gets in my mind.

I notice that when this happens, my usual superpower of inquiry doesn’t appropriately focus on questioning what needs to happen externally to create the reality I want. Instead, it gets directed internally, questioning myself, my sanity and my vision.

The dreams and ambition for the future I want feel too big, too scary, too much.

I notice fear asking why I’m choosing to make my life harder and suggesting I should set my sights a little lower, dream a little smaller and join the others who came to the same conclusion, accepted their limits and settled for a life less than the one they wanted.

While that isn’t my desired choice, fear can make it feel like the most appropriate one.

The thing is, I don’t think you can discover your true limits by playing an amateur game, even if playing a professional one feels incredibly daunting.

I notice the tension I feel in my body because deep down it knows I want both a simple life and a big life. It knows I want to feel chilled while also expanding myself.

It’s what makes the inner negotiation so loud.

I want to play full out in the game of life and leave nothing on the table, AND I also want ease and grace in all that I do.

Through observing this inner negotiation between two things I genuinely desire, I’m beginning to see that the conflict isn’t actually between the desires themselves. It’s between the agreements I’ve unconsciously attached to them.

That a simple life is an amateur life.

That I can’t be chilled and play professionally.

That ambition has to feel intense.

That scale has to require sacrifice.

What if the work isn’t choosing between the two, but renegotiating the agreements that told me I had to?

What if I agree that I can commit to playing professionally and still be chilled through non-attachment to the outcome?

What if I agree that I can have a big life and a simple life, that I can make an impact at scale and have time to be present with the people who matter most?

What if I agree that I can design my business and work around the life I want with my future child, AND that I can be a present mum while financially sustaining us both?

This week, instead of letting fear continue to dictate the terms of my agreements, I decided to let faith renegotiate the contract.

One of the new terms I agreed to was to keep sharing the truth of the journey I’m navigating. There’s a saying that “the truth will set you free”, and I think I finally came to understand why this week.

I realised that if, as I navigate this new journey ahead, I try to protect a false image of having everything figured out, then I would actually be playing an amateur’s game. To me, the professional thing is to tell the truth about what the work requires, including the parts that are hard, confronting and uncertain.

Being Subject No.1 isn’t a philosophy that asks you to pretend you are something you’re not. It’s not about being perfect and having all your shit together 100 per cent of the time, it’s about studying yourself so you know how to give yourself the best chance of creating the life and business you actually want to live, not the version that others have handed to you and told you to accept.

I’ve ended this week recommitting to going all in on my vision and my ambition, both professionally and personally.

I’m doing it scared, and you have front-row seats to see how I navigate the inner negotiations I’ll encounter along the way.

I promise to keep sharing the good, the bad and the ugly.

Because being Subject No.1 isn’t about having yourself figured out. It’s about being willing to keep telling yourself the truth, renegotiating what no longer serves you and choosing again.

Love Glin x

I admitted that out loud recently, on a call with a go-to-market strategist.

I told the truth, that some days I catch myself watching people build things quickly and confidently online, and something in me flinches.

Not envy exactly.

More the sense that I’ve lost track of what I’ve actually built.

With over seventeen years in commercial finance, my own business since 2018, an 18mth stretch back inside, during Covid, not prison, a global negotiation consulting firm.

Somewhere across all of that I stopped being able to say plainly what it adds up to.

It wouldn’t have mattered so much but I’m in the process of re-orienting my business as I embark on a donor embryo IVF journey.

The business that I need to sustain and provide for me as a solo mum has very different requirements than the one I’ve been focussed on building until now.

That’s exactly why I’ve started watching what everyone else is building so closely, and why the question of my own capability and credibility has gotten so loud right now.

It isn’t that I’m comparing myself to them.

It’s that my business has to hold more than it ever has before with less of my time, and I don’t yet know for certain that it can.

You don’t need a season that looks like mine for this to land. It might be a health scare, a relationship ending, a parent who needs more of you than they used to, anything that changes what your work has to carry.

Once that kind of uncertainty about the next chapter is sitting there unanswered, your body runs its own threat assessment on it.

While my fear may be a reasonable response to a genuine unknown, what’s less reasonable is what’s sitting underneath it.

I’ve actually been taking that time to get clarity on future business focus for months now, and I am getting closer. But here’s what’s come up in the space. I keep wanting to build the new thing fully, developed and polished, before I ever let the market near it.

It’s the same pattern in a different disguise, needing what I offer to already look credible before anyone’s allowed to see it, rather than letting the market see it rough and tell me what it actually needs.

None of that’s about capability. I know how to do the work, I’ve never doubted that when I’m in the room. What I doubt is whether I can be seen half-formed at all, without a title or an institution standing behind me to make that safe.

Here’s what I’ve worked out since noticing my own resistance to letting myself be fully seen.

For a large proportion of my career, something else was doing the job of proving I was credible, without either of us noticing.

A title did it.

A payslip did it.

Organisational hierarchy did it.

So did the status of working for large multinationals.

I never had to build the credibility case myself, because the structure I worked inside built it for me automatically.

I’m not the only one finding this out. AI is taking apart a lot of the structures that used to do this proving automatically, whole roles, whole teams, sometimes whole companies.

A lot of capable people are about to find out, without choosing the timing, whether they can stand behind their own name once the external structure has gone.

When I left corporate the first time, I told myself that I could finally give myself the gift of me, and that I wanted to help others give themselves the same gift.

But what I did, unconsciously, was continue to seek scaffolding outside of myself. To play the credibility chasing game without realising it.

I invested in more certifications and qualifications.

I took on board directorships.

I started choosing to work with the most senior executives and C-suite leaders, the association alone proving the altitude I was working at.

Now I’m about to embark on a new journey.

The IVF journey ahead hasn’t lessened my ambition but it’s asked me to confront what I really need.

And in confronting what I really need I got present to how much I need to let go.

Letting go of what, exactly.

Proving my credibility.

The board seats. I’ve already let go of those.

Collecting more certifications. Another one was never going to help.

The PhD I keep circling back to. I still might do it one day, but if I’m honest with myself, right now my driver isn’t really about the research. It’s another badge, another institution to lean on for the same reason.

What I have to watch for is less obvious.

It isn’t that I need to stop working with senior executives and C-suite leaders, some of my best work happens there. It’s that I can’t let my attachment to being seen as credible decide what I build next.

I need to create, and let the market tell me what’s needed, rather than narrowing my options because something feels safer for how it looks.

The real question this season is asking isn’t how I keep proving I belong at that altitude. It’s what can sustain the future I’m building, as a mother, for a child who isn’t here yet, in a life that looks very different to the one I’m living now.

You don’t need an IVF journey for this question to be yours either. Whatever’s changed what your life has to hold, ask yourself what you’re still doing to prove you belong at the level you already reached, and whether you’d keep doing it if nobody ever saw it.

The people AI is doing this to right now face the same trap, spending everything they have left rebuilding the same credibility in the same shape, instead of asking what needs to be built now.

So here’s what I’d say, to myself and to you. Stop trying to prove you’re credible, and start focussing on building a life and work that’s true.

Rebuilding the old proof in the same shape won’t answer what this season is asking. The work now is asking what needs to be built instead, and letting the answer be different if it needs to be.

What would you let yourself build, if proving you still belonged at your old altitude wasn’t the point any more?

Give yourself the gift of you.

Love Glin x

Proud? Grateful? Disappointed?

All of the above?

On Friday I celebrated being a finalist at the Sunshine Coast Business Women’s Network Awards Gala.

I didn’t expect to make it as a finalist. But it felt like a cool surprise when I did, especially as I was a finalist in not one, but two categories.

I didn’t win in either category.

I thought I’d feel fine because I hadn’t expected to win.

So my feelings of disappointment caught me by surprise.

How is it that when you’re genuinely not expecting to win, you can still feel so disappointed when you don’t?

Because despite giving off “I’m chill about it all” vibes, I genuinely cared.

And if I’m being completely honest, the part of me that had allowed herself to hope was the part that felt the disappointment the most.

She’s the part of me that cheers for my big-dreaming, ambitious, possibility-focused self.

She’s also the part of me that wanted reassurance that her self-perception wasn’t distorted.

Only she didn’t get it.

That’s when I noticed the feeling in my stomach wasn’t just disappointment.

It was fear.

Fear that my self-perception was wrong.

That the part of me that imagined being able to create an extraordinary life was wrong, and that the reality of who I was being was far less impressive.

I didn’t understand the fear at first because I truly believed, after so much inner work, that I wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone else.

But what’s hit me this weekend is that there is still a part of me trying to prove something to myself.

Prove that the aspirations I have are more than just big dreams.

Prove that my capability isn’t somewhere in the middle of the bell curve.

Prove that the part of me that believes I’m meant to live an extraordinary life and play big isn’t wrong.

The evening after the awards night, I noticed the tension building inside me.

I knew the discomfort came from having to confront the possibility that this feeling I have, that I’m meant for much more, maybe isn’t actually true.

That maybe the dreams I have will remain just that.

Dreams.

As I sat with friends this weekend in front of a log fire in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast, I had to name what I was most afraid of.

That I might one day discover I was actually less than who I thought I was.

That I couldn’t trust my own self-perception.

That the sense I have of what I’m capable of bringing to the world might be wrong.

It was brutal trying to name that fear and let it be witnessed.

But I needed to say it out loud because, in some way, I hoped that speaking it openly would loosen its grip.

It hasn’t yet.

And I’m choosing to sit with it.

Because underneath the fear, I’ve started to notice an assumption I hadn’t seen before.

That I need evidence that I am exceptional in order to give myself permission to pursue an exceptional life.

Awards.

Results.

Income.

Readership.

Invitations.

Recognition.

All the things I could point to and say, “See. I knew I wasn’t imagining it.”

Perhaps that is the inner negotiation I am really in.

Not whether I am capable of creating the life I imagine.

But whether I can trust myself enough to keep pursuing it while the evidence is still inconclusive.

That feels much harder.

Because I know how to chase evidence.

I know how to achieve something and use it to briefly reassure myself that I’m on the right path.

What I don’t yet know is whether I can separate my willingness to pursue an extraordinary life from my need for life to prove that I was right to want it.

There is something incredibly freeing in that possibility.

And incredibly confronting.

What if I never get definitive proof?

Would I suddenly want a smaller life?

I don’t think I would.

I would still want to write.

I would still want to create.

I would still want to contribute something meaningful.

I would still want deep love, beautiful friendships, ridiculous laughter, adventures, abundance and experiences that make me feel completely alive.

I would still want to see what I am capable of.

Perhaps the desire itself is enough.

Perhaps I don’t need to turn every outcome into evidence of who I am.

There’s a subtle but important difference between believing you are destined for something and deciding you are willing to give yourself fully to creating it.

The first asks life to eventually prove you right.

The second asks something of you.

And maybe that is where I’m being invited to grow.

To stop asking my future achievements to settle the question of whether my current self-perception is accurate.

To stop treating every outcome as evidence for the prosecution or the defence in a case about who I am.

To allow not winning to simply mean I didn’t win.

To allow making the final to simply mean I made the final.

To be proud that I got further than I expected.

Disappointed that I didn’t get as far as I wanted.

Grateful that I cared enough for losing to sting.

And curious about what the sting revealed.

I don’t have a neat conclusion for you this week.

The fear hasn’t disappeared while I’ve been writing this.

There is still a part of me that wants my life to prove that the vision I have carried for myself was right all along.

But now I can see the negotiation more clearly.

Maybe the negotiation isn’t whether I’m extraordinary.

Maybe it’s whether I can keep choosing the life I want without needing every outcome to prove that I was right to want it.

I don’t know the answer yet.

But I think that’s the question I need to stay with.

I’ve become increasingly interested in that gap, the space between the knowing and the doing. Not because I think people are irrational, or weak, or short on discipline. It’s closer to the opposite.

Some of the most capable people I’ve worked with can tell me exactly what they should stop, what they should start, what they should continue. They know what they need to do. But then they spend months faffing with something else entirely, while the things they knew they needed to address still remain.

I’ve done it too. More than once, and not always about small things.

This philosophy, that you are Subject No. 1, didn’t start as something I taught anyone. It started as an experiment I ran on myself, trying to get out of my own way. That experiment became the work I share with others, because I never wanted to hand anyone a theory I hadn’t tested on my own life first.

There’s a simpler reason underneath that too. I want to live an extraordinary life, not an average one. I also know the life you actually want doesn’t come to you if you aren’t willing to do what it takes to get it, and closing the gap between knowing and doing is part of that.

Not everyone’s willing to do it. But if you want what you say you want, this is the work.

So what happens in between knowing what you need to do and actually doing it?

The sentence that comes before the but

You’ve probably been given the same answer I have. If a behaviour isn’t producing the result you want, perhaps you need more information. A better strategy. Tighter accountability. More discipline. Another framework. A cleaner plan.

Whole industries are built on that idea. Hand someone the missing piece, and the doing is supposed to follow.

Sometimes that’s exactly right. There are plenty of moments where you genuinely don’t know what to do, and the missing piece really is information, or structure, or someone showing you how.

But sometimes you already know the thing that matters most. I’ve started listening for what comes right before the word “but,” because that’s usually where the knowing is hiding.

“I know I need to have the conversation, but...” “I know this isn’t working anymore, but...” “I know what I want, but...” “I know I don’t want to keep doing this, but...”

Whatever sits before the “but” is usually true. It’s the part you’re not confused about at all. Whatever comes after it is where the real work is happening, even though nobody’s naming it.

The negotiation nobody names

I’ve spent most of my career around negotiation between people. Two sides, each wanting something, each with something else they need to protect at the same time.

Nobody gets everything they came in for. Trades get made, concessions get offered, positions shift a little, and eventually, out loud or not, both sides land on an agreement they can live with.

What I’ve come to see, watching this play out for years, is that we do exactly the same thing inside ourselves. We just don’t recognise it as negotiation, because it happens fast, and it happens alone, and there’s no one sitting across the table to make the process visible.

So instead we give it other names. Procrastination. Overthinking. People pleasing. A lack of confidence. Avoidance. Every one of those words describes a symptom. None of them names what’s actually going on underneath.

What’s actually going on, I think, is that two real interests are in competition, and something in us is trying to work out the terms. I want to tell someone the truth, but I also want to keep the relationship I have with them. I want to do the work I actually care about, but I also want to feel secure about money.

Neither side of either pair is wrong. Both interests are reasonable, on their own terms, which is exactly why the negotiation is so hard to see. It isn’t a fight between a good motive and a bad one. It’s two good motives, and only room for one of them to lead.

For the people I work with, the thing being protected is rarely the interest they’d admit to first. Sometimes it’s a story about not needing help, about being the one people come to rather than the one who’s stuck. Sometimes it’s simpler than that, a need for certainty, a fear of what not having enough would mean.

Left unexamined, the negotiation still happens. It just happens without you conscious in the room, and the terms it settles on become your leadership, your business, and how much of yourself you actually bring to either one.

I see it constantly in the leaders I work with, even though none of them would call it that. The CEO who knows the underperforming executive needs to go, but keeps finding one more reason to give them a quarter. The founder who knows the deal terms aren’t right, but signs anyway because walking away feels riskier than the bad terms do.

It shows up just as often outside the boardroom. The friend who knows a friendship has become one-sided, but keeps showing up the same way because ending it would mean admitting how long it’s already been over. The son or daughter who knows they need a boundary with an ageing parent, but keeps saying yes because saying no feels too much like abandonment.

In every case, the knowing was never the problem. Something else, something worth protecting, was outbidding it.

The agreement I made without knowing it

I’ll use my own version of this, because it’s the cleanest one I have permission to tell in full.

For a long time I’ve known I wanted to build a body of work. Not content, not a following, an actual body of work.

I wanted to write, to study human behaviour, to understand how and why we get in our own way and how to get out of it. I wanted to build things from first-principles thinking that would still hold up in five years rather than share things that disappear the day they’re posted.

I knew that. I could have told anyone that with total clarity, on any given day.

Then when my business income got uncertain, the way it does when you’re building something new, my financial security started to matter more than anything else. That wasn’t unreasonable.

“I know I want to write and create a thought leadership practice, but writing isn’t paying my bills.”

It was a true statement.

But underneath that statement was a question I wasn’t asking out loud. “Do I want to grow my business and revenue doing what I’ve been doing, and working the way I’ve been working?”

I never sat down and consciously considered the answer to that question. I don’t think many do, most of the time.

So an agreement formed, the way agreements do when nobody’s watching for them. It went something like this. “I just need to make this work.”

That agreement didn’t make me lazy. It made me productive in exactly the wrong direction.

I built new products and services. Reworked my positioning, more than once. Went looking at other business models to see what I might be missing. Tried on one strategy after another to solve the revenue gap. Every single one of those things was reasonable, defensible, even smart, taken on its own. I could have justified any of them to a room full of people.

Except they kept pulling time and energy away from the actual body of work I said that I wanted to build. Week after week, the writing waited. The thought leadership practice stayed on pause while I solved a revenue gap that felt like an immediate income crisis, even though it wasn’t.

I wanted to feel safe and in control.

Even though, financially, I had enough funds to keep my business solvent and therefore my bills paid, I kept choosing activities that were focussed on revenue growth, activities that gave me a sense of certainty, instead of embracing the uncertainty that the long-term work I knew I wanted, and the work my heart needed to do, required.

I did this more times than I’d like to admit. As a result, I may have created the income to keep me going, but I wasn’t creating the life, the business and the future I wanted.

The irony was that I may have created a sense of safety, but my choices, and retreating into the same loop whenever income became uncertain, eventually cost me my aliveness.

What the agreement gave me, and what it’s costing

That’s the thing, when you’re smart and capable of doing a lot, it’s easy to keep going pedalling faster and faster rather than stop and take stock of what’s going on.

Here’s the part I think gets missed. That agreement, “I just need to make this work,” gave me things too, things I wouldn’t want to hand back even if I could.

It made me resourceful. It taught me to try something, watch what happens, and adjust instead of freezing. It built a kind of resilience that only comes from solving real problems under real pressure, over and over, without anyone rescuing me from it.

What I needed to see was the full cost, not just the gain.

What has this agreement given me?

Resourcefulness.

What is it costing me now?

My aliveness.

Do I still agree?

No. The cost is too big. I need to follow a path that’s more aligned with the future I want.

That last one is the question that actually does the work because it opens the door for a renegotiation and because most of us have never once gone back and asked it.

We’re living inside agreements we made under pressure, sometimes years ago, formed in a moment we’ve long since forgotten, and we’ve never returned to check whether we’d still sign them today, knowing what we know now.

Knowing doesn’t make it easy

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into something simpler than it actually is. The point isn’t “always do whatever feels true, whatever the cost.” That would be a nice thing to say, but it isn’t credible, and if I’m honest, it isn’t even accurate.

I think of the executive who knows the board’s timeline is wrong, but chooses to hold her tongue this quarter because she needs the board’s confidence for the fight that actually matters next quarter, and this isn’t the one worth spending it on. Or the person who knows a business partnership has run its course, but stays in it because unwinding the equity and the friendship at the same time feels riskier than staying stuck.

Neither of those is self-betrayal. Either might be the most conscious negotiation they have all year, provided they know that’s what they’re doing, and provided they go back and check the terms once the pressure lifts.

You can know something with total clarity and still face real consequences for acting on it. Other people have their own agency, and they get a say in what happens next. Businesses have financial realities that don’t soften because you’ve become more aligned.

Relationships carry needs that were never only yours to begin with. Power exists in every room you walk into, and pretending it doesn’t is its own act of self-deception. Sometimes compromise is the conscious, correct choice, made with your eyes open, not a failure of nerve.

So the goal was never to override every protective interest in favour of whichever one feels more exposed or more true. The goal is to see clearly enough to know exactly what you’re agreeing to, and then to choose the terms on purpose, rather than by default, the way most of us have been doing it without realising.

Where I’d start

If there’s something you’ve been circling for a while, whether it looks like the executive holding her tongue, the friend who’s stopped calling, or my own years of choosing safety over the writing, here’s where I’d actually start.

What do I already know?

What’s the “but”?

What am I trying to protect?

Do I still agree with the agreement I’ve been living inside, once I actually weigh what it’s given me against what it’s cost me?

None of those have a tidy answer, and I’d be suspicious of anyone who hands you one quickly. Sit with them before you reach for anything else, before another framework, another plan, another dose of discipline. Those all have their place. They’re just not the place to start, and if you’re the kind of person reading this, they’ve probably already had their turn.

I’ve spent years learning to read what happens across a negotiating table, two people, real stakes, a deal that needs both sides to actually agree. But the negotiation with the most leverage over how your business, your leadership and your life turn out isn’t the one across the table. It’s the one you have with yourself before you ever sit down.

That’s the one most of us make alone, without ever noticing we’ve made it. It might be the most powerful negotiation you’ll ever have.

I’m researching this idea in my work with senior leaders right now, particularly the moments when someone knows exactly what needs to happen and still finds themselves negotiating against acting on it. If you recognise that experience, in yourself or in the leaders you work with, I’d be genuinely interested to hear what was actually at stake.

Keep going and keep growing.

Love, Glin x

P.S. I’m writing my next book, and this gap is becoming increasingly central to my work.

I’m exploring whether what looks externally like a business, leadership or decision problem is sometimes actually an unresolved Inner Negotiation, competing agreements about what we want, what we’re willing to risk, who we’re prepared to be, or what we’re not yet willing to let go of.

As part of that exploration, I’m looking for 10 CEOs, founders, business owners or C-suite executives from established businesses who have something consequential in their business or leadership they know needs to move, but for whatever reason, hasn’t.

I’m inviting each person into a complimentary 45-minute conversation. You bring the live situation. I’ll bring my negotiation lens.

My intention is that you leave seeing something about the situation that you couldn’t see before. In return, I get to learn more about where Inner Negotiation creates meaningful value, and where it doesn’t.

No preparation required. Just a willingness to be honest about something that matters.

If you recognise yourself in this, I’ve opened 10 conversations. You can book one using the link below.

Glin Calendar

To tell you something meaningful. To give you something valuable to read. To only take up space in your day if I have something useful to contribute.

It can feel like a lot of pressure to perform. It’s a way of being that has lingered from environmental and societal conditioning.

It’s also a way of being that I no longer choose to subscribe to. Pressure might be a source of motivation for many, but for me, it mostly feels unhelpful.

I’d rather operate from a deep love for my craft and my work, and share from that energy. Something infused with love feels like it carries a different energy from something created out of a need to prove its value, or mine.

I’m grateful that I notice those thoughts. I’m grateful that I’m consciously choosing how I respond to them.

The truth is, I don’t always have something to say when I sit down. I deliberately don’t plan these Sunday Glin & Tonic blogs because this is my curious experiment. I love seeing what arises each week.

I take time to notice whether anything I’ve experienced during the week has stayed with me, whether I’ve observed something meaningful and whether I feel pulled to write and share about it.

That’s what feels most true to me about my writing.

I write about what’s bubbling up inside me each week and share it so you can witness my journey of growth. I give you a peek into my world, my messy mind and my evolving perspectives, in the hope that something I experience might help you.

I meander as I write. I let my thoughts take form in a way I could never have planned. Like much of how our lives unfold, there is beauty in the process.

Writing feels like my art form. It’s not always pretty and it’s not always appreciated by everyone, but the more I write, the more I understand why I show up week after week.

It connects me back to myself. It’s a way of raising my level of consciousness and discovering patterns I might never have noticed if I only lived my life looking forward.

Weekly reflection is what accelerates my growth. It’s what keeps me connected to the future I want to create.

It’s my mirror. It shows me where I am on my journey.

Last week, I shared that I felt I’d finally shifted from a season of self-recovery to a season of self-expression. It’s fascinating to see what has come up for me as a result.

On Monday, my week started with me spiralling into overwhelm. I didn’t understand why at the time, but now, as I look back, I can see that I’d inadvertently made the completion of one stage of a process mean that I should execute the next stage significantly faster.

Perhaps I will, but the overwhelm came from feeling as though I was behind schedule, according to a timeline I didn’t even realise I’d created for myself.

It’s like reaching one huge milestone and then immediately chastising yourself for not already being at the next one.

I’d fallen into self-judgement again. It’s an old pattern for a high-achievement-oriented mind.

It had been a little while since I’d felt like that, but it was a great reminder that my work is to practise patience and trust the rhythm of my own life.

Have you felt like that recently? Do you have dreams so big that you find yourself frustrated because you’re not further ahead?

As I look more deeply into my own journey, I can see the constant wrestle I have with myself.

There is a part of me that wants to unplug and live a slow, simple and wholesome life by the beach or in the country. Then there’s another part of me that wants to be interviewed by Oprah and appear on the front page of Forbes!

You have a version of this too, right?

The desire for a big life and a simple, chilled life too. A life where you don’t lose sight of what’s important, but don’t quash your ambition either.

I don’t want to choose one or the other. I want both.

Having done all this inner work over the years, I know the shape of that life will look very different from the life corporate Glin would have created ten years ago.

I’m not choosing hustle. I’m choosing alignment.

I’m not choosing pressure. I’m choosing love for my work and my life as my driving force.

I’m not choosing a conventional life. I’m choosing an extraordinary one.

Perhaps that’s why there is always tension.

Extraordinary requires a different way of being from what is ordinary.

It requires a commitment to psychological flexibility, so you can release the patterns that can’t take you towards the life you want to create.

But recognising what needs to change is only part of the work. Eventually, you have to live in a way that reflects who you say you’re becoming.

That’s where I find myself now, in the Integrity stage of my own framework.

Identity x Integrity = Impact.

I feel like this is an even harder stage than getting clear on who you are and what you want. This is the stage that asks you to embody it.

To show up. To be willing to experiment and fail in the pursuit of something bigger. To let each experience shape you without allowing it to define your intrinsic value.

Integrity is where your inner work meets the outer world. It’s where the invisible changes within you become visible through the choices you make.

It asks you to raise your floor, to lift the minimum standard you’re willing to accept for yourself, and to stop operating in ways that keep you small.

It’s also the stage that is easiest to give up on because integrity asks so much of us.

It asks our word to mean something. It asks us to align what we say with what we do.

It challenges us not to hide behind comfort or what feels safe.

Integrity is exposing.

I think that’s why I felt so overwhelmed and “meh” on Monday. This next level of growth is turning me inside out.

It’s saying, “Come on, Glin. Are you ready to actually go for something bigger?”

Exposure is terrifying for most of us.

Choosing to go after what you want without any guarantee of the outcome asks a lot of you.

But it’s also what makes you feel alive!

It’s like standing on a ledge, about to take your first bungee jump. You have to decide whether you’re willing to leap because, once you step off, there’s no changing your mind.

I think I’ve spent long enough standing on the ledge.

The uncertainty hasn’t disappeared, but my willingness to trust myself has grown stronger than my need for guarantees.

Perhaps that’s what integrity really asks of us. Not to feel completely ready or fearless, but to stop abandoning what we say we want the moment pursuing it asks us to be brave.

There will probably always be a part of me that wants the safety of a quiet, simple life and another part that wants to create something extraordinary.

Maybe the answer isn’t choosing between them.

Maybe it’s learning to build an extraordinary life in a way that still feels peaceful, spacious and true.

To move without rushing.

To stretch without abandoning myself.

To leap from love, not pressure.

And perhaps this is what was waiting for me when I sat down this morning believing I had nothing to say.

A reminder that writing doesn’t ask me to arrive with the answers. It simply asks me to listen closely enough to discover what’s already there.

So, I’m choosing to jump.

What about you?

Where are you standing on the ledge of your own life, waiting for certainty before you let yourself leap?

Keep going and keep growing.

Love Glin x

P.S. If you’re standing on the ledge of your next chapter and want somewhere to explore what’s holding you back, The Expansion Room is for you.

It’s a safe space to turn your inner growth into meaningful action, without relying on pressure or abandoning yourself in the process.

If you’re ready to expand in a way that feels true to you, I’d love to welcome you inside.

Enter The Expansion Room

Every idea goes up. Every initiative gets its own box, its own owner, its own next step. The energy is real, the people are engaged, the thinking is good.

By the end of the day the list is longer than it was at the start, and everyone leaves feeling that something happened.

Then a few weeks later you look, and the dial hasn’t moved.

What strikes me about those days isn’t what gets added. It’s that nothing ever comes off.

The whole day is built around putting more on the list. Not once does anyone ask what the business should stop doing, or which of these things was never going to matter.

Deleting isn’t on the agenda.

Adding is the agenda.

The knowing was never the problem

The same leaders in that room can almost always tell me the two or three things that would actually change their business.

I ask, and the answer comes back without much thought, because they already know.

They’ve known for a while.

So the knowing isn’t the problem.

That’s the part that surprised me when I first started noticing it. These aren’t leaders who lack clarity about what matters. They can name it faster than I can write it down.

The gap isn’t between them and the answer. It’s between the answer and where they spend themselves, and that gap is stable.

It doesn’t close on its own, even when the leader is capable, ambitious, and entirely sincere about wanting the result.

A pattern with a name

There’s a pattern underneath this, and once you’ve seen it you start seeing it everywhere.

In most systems a small number of things carry most of the result.

It has a name, Price’s Law.

In 1963 a physicist called Derek Price found that in most fields the square root of the people produce about half the work. It holds in more places than you’d expect.

• On a team of a hundred, around ten people carry half the output.

• Of everything on the strategy wall, a handful sets most of the direction.

• Across a full week, a few hours move more than all the rest put together.

Of the forty things that went up on that wall, maybe six will carry the year.

The rest isn’t wasted. It keeps the thing running, but it isn’t what produces the outcome.

Most leaders sense this long before they’ll say it out loud. It’s why the wall can feel hollow even while it’s filling up.

So why doesn’t the leader move their week, and their strategy day, toward the few things they’ve already named.

Not because they don’t understand the pattern. They understand their own business far better than I do.

What I bring isn’t a better grasp of it. It’s the mirror they can’t hold up to themselves, and it points somewhere they don’t often look on their own.

The middle they skip

There’s a way of seeing this as a sequence.

In anything new you start by exploring. You try things, you take shots, you gather results, because you can’t know in advance which of them will land.

Once enough results are in, you identify. You read them for the signal and find the few that carried the rest.

Then you exploit. You put your weight behind those few and let the others go.

The businesses I work with are large, and most of them are long past the exploring stage. They’ve been running for decades.

Every shot has been taken. The results are all in, sitting in the numbers, in the reports, in what everyone already half-knows.

If anything they have too much data, not too little.

What they skip is the middle. They don’t stop to read which of it mattered.

So they keep taking new shots, filling new walls, running the next strategy day, when the signal from everything they’ve already done is right there unread.

They act as if they’re still in the early game, gathering, when the work they actually need is identification, and without it there’s nothing to double down on, because they never named what was worth doubling down on.

Not reading the signal isn’t an oversight. It’s the same agreement, moved one step earlier.

If you never identify which six of the forty carried the year, you never have to cut the other thirty-four. Looking would force the choice.

So the not-looking protects the leader from the choosing, the same way the full wall does.

The agreement underneath

To concentrate on the few, you have to let the rest go.

You have to choose a small number of bets and put your weight behind them, which means being the person who chose.

If you stay across everything, you never have to.

You can keep every initiative alive, stay close to every part of the business, and answer for all of it, and it feels like diligence. It feels like the responsible thing.

Being everywhere reads as commitment, to the board, to the team, and to yourself as well.

The agreement stays unsaid because each piece of it sounds so reasonable.

“It’s too early to cut this one.” “Let’s keep it on the list for now.” “I want to stay close to that one myself.” “If I let this go and it falls over, that’s on me.”

Every line sounds like care and good judgement. Put together, across a whole wall, they are how the choosing never happens.

Underneath the reasonable lines there’s an agreement. If I keep everything alive, I can’t be caught out.

As long as I never concentrate, I never have to find out whether the few things I’d have chosen were the right ones, and I’m never the one who let something fall.

Go one layer down and it isn’t really about being caught out. It’s about worth.

If I concentrate and I’m wrong, I don’t just lose a bet. I lose the story that I’m the one who has all of this handled.

Breadth keeps that story intact.

It’s easier to stay across everything and stretched thin than to choose a few things and find out what I’m actually made of.

What it costs

Here’s what that agreement costs, and it’s the part that’s hard to sit with.

The breadth the leader is protecting was mostly maintenance to begin with. The safety comes from staying spread across work that was never going to produce the result.

So the thing that feels most responsible turns out to be the thing keeping the result out of reach.

The leader hasn’t traded the outcome for nothing. They’ve traded it for the feeling of not having chosen.

It doesn’t stop with the leader.

A team watches where their leader puts their attention and takes it as the instruction.

If everything stays alive at the top, everything stays alive below. The organisation learns to spread itself the same way and calls it being thorough.

The pattern the leader is living becomes the pattern the whole business runs on.

The reframe is smaller than it sounds. Concentrating on the few isn’t a retreat from the job. It is the job.

The discomfort that comes with the cull, the exposure of having chosen, is the actual cost of the step change the leader keeps saying they want.

There’s no version where they get the bigger result and keep the safety of being across everything.

Fewer, bigger, better is just Price’s Law enacted on purpose, and the hard part of it was never the strategy. It was the willingness to choose and to live with having chosen.

So the question I’d leave you with isn’t which things to cut. You already know which things matter, the same way the leaders I meet already know.

The question underneath it is a different one.

Which things are you keeping alive so you don’t have to choose? What would you have to find out about yourself if you finally did?

Give yourself the gift of you.

Love Glin x

A note before you go.

This is the kind of question I sit with leaders on inside the Expansion Room, a live space where we do this work in real time rather than on the page. I started it as a three-month experiment, six sessions to see what it became. Three are left. After that I'm deciding whether it returns, and in what form.

I think it's a space worth protecting, so if it's been on your mind, this is the moment to come in.

Enter - The Expansion Room

It’s hard to explain because, on the outside, everything looks the same. On the inside, I’m not the same person.

I can feel I’ve finally shifted from years of being in the self-discovery, or perhaps more aptly, the self-recovery phase of life. The phase you can find yourself in during a season when life humbles you and you’re left questioning who you are and what the point of your life is.

For me, my journey of self-recovery started when my marriage ended. When the life I thought I was going to be living was no longer available to me. When the dreams I had were no longer available in the form I’d been imagining.

It’s only now, after years of deep excavation work, trying on different costumes, experimentation and lots of trial and error, that I finally feel like I know who I am and what I’m here for.

It’s taken me twelve years, if I’m really acknowledging the truth.

I didn’t realise how deeply I’d absorbed the conditioning from the world around me, or how strong my protective strategies, the ones designed to keep me safe from harm, had become.

It’s only in the last couple of months that I’ve felt the pull to move into the next phase of my life.

While there will always be an element of self-recovery ongoing, I’m feeling the pull towards self-expression. After all, what’s the point of spending all that time getting to know who you are if you’re going to shy away from being and sharing who you are with others?

I know, from the outside looking in, you’ve had a front-row seat to this journey of mine. Through this weekly blog, you’ve witnessed how much I’ve wrestled with myself, how deeply I’ve reflected and how much I’ve considered what’s true.

You’ve played a huge part in my transformation.

Having you read my words and then mirror back to me what you see and take away from what I’ve published has been powerful. Your reflection on my journey has helped me learn what’s being received.

Sometimes, where I think I am and where you see me are different. Other times, our perspectives are wholly aligned.

And often, I know you see yourself in my reflection.

That’s what’s been most fascinating for me.

In finally surrendering to being all of me, I’m seeing how much we, as humans, are grappling with the same things.

Sometimes you feel someone really sees you and other times you feel completely misunderstood. As humans, we’re mirrors for each other. Not every mirror is clean, and sometimes that distorts what we see when we look into it.

Too often, we focus heavily on the mirror, trying to clean it so we can see ourselves more clearly. We try to change other people’s perceptions, responses or behaviour, hoping the reflection looking back at us will change.

But the most powerful way to change the reflection is to change the person looking into it. When you change, what the mirror reflects back to you changes too.

Perhaps that’s another way of explaining what I mean when I say You are Subject No.1.

Start with the person looking into the mirror.

To be at this threshold now, shifting into more consistent self-expression, feels exciting.

You’ve seen some of that through my Wednesday Witness posts, where I share more of the patterns and observations I see in how the inner negotiation with ourselves plays out in our work, our relationships and our leadership.

It’s also helped me see more clearly the framework I’ve been developing through my own lived experience.

My Mirror Method™ is:

Identity × Integrity = Impact

Identity = Who I believe and say I am. The story I’m living from.

Integrity = The degree to which my choices honour what I know. How truthfully I live in alignment with who I believe and say I am.

Impact = The life that becomes possible when my identity and integrity are pulling in the same direction. What I create when I stop splitting myself in two.

Over recent months, you’ve seen me choose my identity as a writer, and that choice has unlocked so much energy in me.

Writing allows me to be a thought leader, a speaker, a consultant, a coach. It’s the identity I don’t feel constrained by in any way.

It’s what I do.

I write.

Whether it’s good or bad writing is for you to judge, but for me, getting my thoughts onto the page and seeing the recurring themes and patterns is what makes me feel alive. Using my life as the canvas makes writing less daunting because it’s grounded in lived experience and the truth as I see it.

Now I can see that I’m doubling down on the integrity.

I’ve already made huge steps in aligning my focus and time with the work I feel most called to do, but I know I’ve still been playing small.

So, over the coming months, you’ll see me practising being bold.

Now that I know who I am at my core, the question becomes how much evidence I’m willing to create through self-expression.

That means more writing, more thought leadership, more speaking, more sharing of my ideas and more exploration of my thesis that the most powerful negotiation is the one you have with yourself.

Because I know the impact I seek to make won’t happen unless I stop withholding the volume of my thinking from the world long enough for the signal of who I am to become undeniable.

I’m so freakin’ excited to have graduated from this layer of identity work.

I’m sure there will be many future layers of identity work ahead, but now I have the Mirror Method^TM and the tools to help me navigate those shifts, I feel far less concerned by them.

Holding the integrity at the level required is my work now.

You still have front-row seats, and you’ll no doubt see the moments when I drop below the floor. The moments when I start hiding my true self again or reach for one of the protective strategies that has kept me playing at a level I know is below what I’m capable of.

But over time, I hope you’ll also see the muscle building.

You’ll see me more consistently showing up as I am, continuing to unravel the protective strategies I’ve created over the years and creating more evidence that I can trust myself to live as the person I now know myself to be.

Perhaps that’s why I have so much more energy.

I’m no longer depleting it by living in a way that keeps me small, or lying to myself about who I am and what I’m capable of.

There’s a fire in my belly now.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve stopped extinguishing my own light and I’m finally willing to give myself the gift of me.

And it makes me wonder where you are in your own journey.

Maybe you’re still in a season of self-recovery, trying to separate who you really are from who you learned you needed to be.

Maybe you’re beginning to recognise yourself again.

Or maybe, like me, you’re standing at the threshold between knowing who you are and being willing to fully express it.

There’s no hierarchy to any of these places. No stage you should have reached by now. Growth doesn’t work like that.

But perhaps there is value in knowing where you are.

Because I wonder if there comes a point when continuing to search for yourself can become another way of postponing the risk of expressing yourself.

At some point, the inner negotiation changes.

The question is no longer only:

Who am I?

It becomes:

Now that I know, what am I willing to do about it?

So perhaps that’s the question I’ll leave you with this week.

What threshold are you standing at now, and what might become possible if you stopped waiting to become more ready and began creating evidence of the person you already know yourself to be?

Keep going and keep growing,

Love Glin x

P.S. The Expansion Room went deep on Friday.

I witnessed two C-suite leaders speak with a level of vulnerability and honesty about things they had never said out loud in a room with others before.

I won’t share the specifics because what’s said in the room stays in the room, but I was struck by how much we can carry privately while maintaining the external appearance that everything is fine.

The Expansion Room is for C-suite leaders and business owners who don’t necessarily need another person telling them what to do. It’s a space to be witnessed, to name the inner negotiation you might otherwise be having alone and to see what becomes possible when you bring it into the light.

There are three sessions remaining in this live experiment. If you’d like to experience the room for yourself, you’re very welcome to join us.

The Expansion Room

Mostly you did.

But the reality is you don’t want to be this way.

You crave space, you crave time to think, you crave bigger and better outcomes, just not the way you’ve been aiming for them.

You’re not standing still, and you’re not failing at anything. You and your team are in constant motion, doing the work and delivering the numbers. What I notice is the kind of moving it is. It’s a lot of activity that adds up to growth, and the growth feels like progress, but it’s the same business getting a bit bigger and a bit faster.

A good deal of what fills the business probably shouldn’t be there at all. The priorities you keep saying yes to, the good ideas that survive every review because each one makes sense on its own, the whole portfolio no one is willing to prune.

Underneath the motion, the real traction is slow, but the motion is convincing enough that it’s hard to stop long enough to see it.

Your world says it wants something exceptional. Everyone talks about the step change. But if you look at what gets rewarded year after year, it’s a better version of this year and nothing more.

A real step change would mean doing fewer things and doing them bigger and better, and that means letting go of what works but will never be exceptional.

That’s the one thing large businesses won’t do.

The tail of products that should have been culled years ago stays on the shelf. New variations get added to give customers more choice, so the spend spreads thinner across more lines and the marketing fragments to match. More gets layered onto more, and almost no one stops to ask whether half of it should exist at all.

When the question gets raised at all, it’s from inside today’s frame, not from a future frame big enough to change the answer.

So the business gets optimised again when what it needs is to be reoriented. The only time anyone intervenes is when performance drops and costs get slashed, and that isn’t a better way of thinking or leading. It’s the same thinking in a leaner year, and the cycle repeats.

Underneath it is a belief you’ve probably never stopped to question. That the way to a bigger result is always more.

More effort and more carried on your own shoulders.

It’s the model your whole career climb was built on, and for years it delivered, so it’s never occurred to you to doubt it. But more just makes you run faster. The result you want was never going to come from doing more of this. It was going to come from choosing differently.

Instead, a standard for the business settles in that nobody chose on purpose. The results are good enough. They beat the competitors who think less clearly, and the board is satisfied.

Good enough turns out to be a comfortable place to stop, because the alternative asks you to be the one person putting things down while everyone around you keeps picking more things up.

If it were just us, this is the part I’d say to you directly.

Somewhere along the way, you accepted a good-enough version of the exceptional thing you set out to build, and you’ve been moving fast enough not to feel it.

From where I sit, the hard thing to name is that this is what mediocrity looks like now.

It isn’t failure or decline. It’s good enough and running fast, results that clear the bar while everyone stays busy.

That’s exactly why it’s so hard to see from the inside. When your numbers are fine and your calendar is full, nothing tells you the business has settled for a fraction of what it could be.

The truth you don’t say out loud is that you’re tired.

Staying in motion is the deal you’ve made to keep from feeling it, even if you’ve never put it in those words.

Stay busy enough, and you get to believe the big result is still coming. Stay busy enough, and you never have to sit with the tiredness, or with how far good enough is from what you set out to build.

You’re kicking goals, so from the outside it looks like it’s working. But that deal costs you more than you’ve let yourself count.

It’s costing you the space and the thinking you keep craving, and the speed you’re trusting to carry you to the result is the very thing holding it out of reach.

What almost no one believes, until they’ve done it, is that the two things you’ve been holding apart are the same thing.

The space you crave and the bigger outcome you want are reached the same way, by choosing less and choosing it well. You don’t have to run yourself into the ground to get there.

Running yourself into the ground is the thing in the way.

None of that happens by trying harder, because trying harder is the trap. It happens by putting things down and redirecting the whole business while everyone else keeps adding.

That’s a lonely move, and it’s close to impossible to make from inside the motion, which is why it hardly ever gets made without someone standing outside it.

So here’s what I’d leave you with, and I’d rather you sat with it than reached for an answer.

Is the business you’re running the exceptional one you set out to build, or a good-enough version of it that everyone agreed to call success?

If something in you already knows, you’re not being asked to tear it down.

You’re being asked to choose.

That’s the conversation worth having, and it’s the one almost no one around you will start.

Give yourself the gift of you.

Love Glin x

Each month, I sit down and write a One Page Report - a way to capture where I am, what I’m learning, and how I’m evolving. It’s not a polished update or a highlight reel. It’s an honest reflection of the journey I’m on: experimenting with what alignment really feels like, challenging old patterns, and choosing to live my life in a way that feels true to me.

As a paid subscriber, you’ll get a real and unfiltered look behind the scenes - what’s working, what’s uncomfortable, and what I’m noticing as I continue stepping into who I’m becoming. I’ll share my thoughts on living authentically, identity, transformation and the inner negotiation, along with the moments that quietly change everything.

From time to time, I’ll also offer paid subscribers opportunities to go deeper. Last month, as a thank you to my founding paid subscribers, I gifted two complimentary Mirror Sessions. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you’ll find the details in this month’s One Page Report.

This is for you if you’re curious about what it really takes to build something meaningful. If my journey resonates with you, I’d love to have you along for the ride.

Subscribe to receive my monthly One Page Reports and become part of the journey.

Let’s keep going and keep growing.

Read more

This week I submitted the book proposal for my fourth book to Hay House as part of a writers’ competition. It was a commitment I made to myself in January. Hay House doesn’t accept unsolicited proposals from authors without literary agents, so this competition is the only pathway currently available to me as an unknown author.

I have no idea whether my proposal will stand out amongst the many others they’ll receive, or whether they’ll see merit in what I have to say. The outcome is completely outside of my control. What I do know is that I followed through on something I said I would do.

When I looked at the statistics from the competition, I discovered that fewer than ten per cent of the people who had the opportunity to submit a proposal actually will. More than ninety per cent won’t.

That statistic has stayed with me all week because I don’t think the ninety per cent are people without something worthwhile to say. I don’t think they lack intelligence, creativity or even the desire to write a book. They invested in a four-day writers’ bootcamp because they cared enough about the dream to spend both their time and money on it.

Somewhere between deciding they wanted to write a book and submitting a proposal, the inner negotiation became stronger than the commitment they had made to themselves.

I understand that negotiation because I have it too.

There are days when the voice inside me tells me to go for it because I’ve got this. Then there are days when that very same voice wonders who I think I am, reminds me how many brilliant writers already exist, and quietly suggests I’d save myself a lot of disappointment if I stopped trying.

I call her my inner joker because you never quite know which version of her is going to show up.

If the game is survival, she’s exceptional. She notices every possible risk, every reason to stay where it’s familiar and every way I might avoid disappointment.

If the game is expansion, however, she’s far less helpful. Growth asks something different of us. It asks us to move before certainty arrives, to back ourselves before we have proof, and to keep honouring the commitments we’ve made long after the excitement of making them has faded.

I imagine your inner negotiation probably sounds different to mine, but I suspect it serves a similar purpose. It wants to protect you from disappointment, rejection and failure because they feel uncomfortable. The problem is that it also tries to protect you from possibility.

Sometimes that negotiation is reinforced by the people around us. We share a dream that feels exciting to us and they respond with genuine concern because they don’t want to see us get hurt. They encourage us to be realistic, to temper our expectations or to choose the safer path because, from where they are standing, it seems more sensible.

I understand why people do that. We naturally want to spare the people we care about from disappointment.

But I don’t think we are here to organise our lives around avoiding disappointment.

The people we love will one day break our hearts in ways big and small, and yet we still choose to love. We start businesses that may not succeed, create work that may never be recognised, apply for opportunities we may never receive and pursue dreams that might never unfold in the way we imagined because there is something deeply human about wanting to experience the fullest expression of our lives.

The desire isn’t only about achieving the outcome. It’s about becoming the person willing to give themselves the chance.

Whether Hay House chooses my proposal or not no longer feels like the most important part of this story.

Submitting it required me to become someone different from the person who committed to writing it back in January. Along the way I developed a complete book outline, wrote summaries for twelve chapters, drafted two full chapters and gained a level of clarity about my message that I simply didn’t have six months ago.

Most importantly, I accumulated evidence that I can trust myself.

Every time I sat down to write when it would have been easier not to, every time I worked through the uncertainty instead of waiting for confidence to magically arrive, and every time I honoured the commitment I’d made to myself, I strengthened the relationship I have with the one person I’ll spend every day of my life with.

I think we often believe confidence comes first and action follows.

My experience has been the opposite.

Confidence grows from trust, and trust is built every time we honour our own word.

Whatever happens with Hay House, I already know this proposal has changed me.

Not because it might become a book, but because it reminded me that the person I am becoming is shaped far more by the agreements I honour than by the outcomes I receive.

Keep going and keep growing.

Love Glin x

P.S. The next live Expansion Room session is on Friday 7 August at 8am AEST.

One of the participants said something after our last session that has stayed with me.

She described The Expansion Room as “thoughtful, vulnerable, purposeful” and reflected that it wasn’t a place to simply keep talking about the same problems, but a place where your own thinking begins to move.

That is exactly what I hoped this room would become.

If you’ve been reading these Sunday essays and quietly recognising yourself in them, then you’ve already begun the work.

The Expansion Room isn’t about being coached or fixed. It’s a space where thoughtful people bring their inner negotiation into the light, and through being witnessed by others, often discover their own answers.

There are only four live sessions remaining in this founding series.

If you’ve been reading along thinking, these are my people, perhaps I’ll see you there.

Join the Expansion Room

It’s not that they’re afraid of you or that they’re weak. It’s that you run out of equals. The people around you mostly work for you now, and you’re their boss. Being fully honest with your boss is hard, even when the boss is a good one, because that’s the person who decides how your career goes.

So honest feedback gets rarer the higher you climb, and it gets rarer at exactly the point you need it most.

The few people I trust with the truth about my business don’t work for me. That matters because they can say the hard thing without it costing them anything. What they tell me is the real version, not the polite one. But I’ve learned that even with them, I have to make it easy to be honest with me, or I’ll still get the softened version.

So there’s something I say to them before they start.

I tell them I might bristle. That I might go quiet and need to go away and think. That I won’t always agree. But I need them to tell me the truth anyway, because each of them sees something I can’t, and that’s the whole point of asking.

I say it in advance because I know myself. I know how much I might want to defend the thing I’ve already decided. Saying it out loud first is how I stop that instinct from taking over the conversation.

Most leaders never say it.

So it takes over everything.

I see this happen to people who would never believe it about themselves. I don’t mean the leaders who only want to be agreed with, the ones who surround themselves with ‘yes’ people. Those are easy to spot, and if you’re reading this, you already know that isn’t you.

I mean the leader who genuinely asks. The one who says, ‘Tell me what you really think,’ and means it.

Then someone does, and you can see they don’t really want to hear it.

Someone raises a real concern, and instead of dealing with it, the leader turns it back on them. They ask whether the person has really thought it through or whether they’re just being cautious. The concern never gets answered. The person who raised it comes away feeling as though they were the problem for raising it, and everyone else in the room notices.

What they offered gets knocked back, either outright or by being heard and set aside without any real consideration. Either way, the room reads it the same way. The team watches one person’s contribution go nowhere, and they get the message.

There’s no point putting anything forward here because it isn’t going anywhere.

So they stop.

There’s a worse version of this, and you’re never in the room to see it.

The honest conversation happens after the meeting, not during it. In the corridor. In the messages you’re not part of. Two people who both noticed the same problem and both said nothing while you were sitting there.

When your team does its real thinking in the moments you’re not around, that tells you how safe it feels to be honest with you. You thought the quiet in the meeting meant everyone agreed.

It didn’t.

The cost of all this is the decisions nobody questioned. The strategy no one tested. The hire everyone had a bad feeling about and no one mentioned. The number that three people thought was wrong and kept to themselves.

In the moment, it feels like agreement, but it isn’t. It’s a room where people have decided honesty isn’t worth the risk, so they’ve stopped offering it.

I don’t think this always comes from ego. Underneath it, most leaders are carrying an old agreement with themselves, one they made a long time ago and never went back to examine.

For some, the agreement is that they have to be the smartest person in the room. If that’s the deal you’ve made, someone else being right takes something from you instead of helping you.

For some, it’s that they have to keep proving they deserve the job. Then receiving a challenge from your team stops being about the work and starts feeling like a test of whether you should be there at all.

For some, it’s that they should have known the answer already. So a better idea from someone more junior feels like being caught out.

For some, and this may be the hardest one to admit, there’s a worry that the good people underneath them are after their job. Carry that worry, and you start keeping your best people at arm’s length and making them a little smaller than they are, when they’re the ones who could have helped you most.

Most leaders wouldn’t know any of these agreements were running beneath the surface if you said them out loud. That’s part of why they hold on.

The agreement decides how you’ll react before you’ve had a conscious thought about it, so it never feels like avoiding the truth. It feels like instinct.

That concern was probably just caution.

That person probably had their own reasons for raising it.

The reason always feels true, which is why you believe it.

You know the other kind of leader when you’re in a room with them.

They hear the concern all the way through before they respond to it. They leave the silence long enough for the quiet person to decide to speak. They keep it about the work, not about themselves. When they get something wrong, they say so quickly, and everyone watching learns that being wrong here doesn’t cost you.

You’ve been in those rooms. People lean in instead of choosing their words carefully. The thinking gets better because more of the truth actually makes it onto the table.

What separates that leader from the first one isn’t brains, and it isn’t talent. Both of them are capable. Both of them are trying.

The difference is whether they can hear feedback without it setting something off in them.

The thing I keep coming back to is that your people already know how you take bad news. They’ve watched how you react when someone tells you something you didn’t want to hear, and they’ve adjusted to it.

So when you ask them to be honest with you now, they’re not just hearing the question. They’re remembering what happened last time.

They still trust you, or at least they want to. They’re just being careful because they’ve learned how much honesty has been safe here before.

That’s why asking better questions doesn’t fix it. You can run a warmer, kinder meeting and still get the same careful answers because the problem was never the meeting.

It’s what they already expect from you.

The real work sits further back. It’s in that old agreement you carry in with you, the one that decides whether someone else being right is a good thing or a threat before you’ve had a chance to think about it.

If that changes, they’ll feel it, usually sooner than you’d expect.

This is where it gets costly, and you won’t see it coming.

When people stop being honest with you, they don’t tell you they’ve stopped. They just go quiet. They keep their concerns to themselves, and you carry on thinking things are fine.

Then one of your good people leaves, and the reason they give sounds like something else. You never heard what they really thought, so the resignation seems to come from nowhere. You end up losing the people you most wanted to keep, and you don’t find out why until they’re gone.

The honesty you wanted was always there. The people around you had it. They just decided, over time, that it wasn’t safe to give it to you.

None of them needs to become more honest for that to change.

You’re the one who has to make it safe again.

Every person around you sees something the others can’t. That’s what makes their honesty worth having. Whether they keep giving it to you depends on whether you make it safe for them to.

That’s the work we do in the Expansion Room, a fortnightly session where a small group of leaders looks honestly at the agreements driving their decisions before they’ve even named them.

If the rooms you lead have been feeling smoother than they should, that’s probably the conversation worth having.

The door’s open whenever you are.

Enter The Expansion Room

I’ve spent a lot of time in airports over the years, and while the experience varies from one airport to another, there is something about them that makes me appreciate the life I get to live and the parts of the world I’ve been able to enjoy.

I’ve spent the past few days with my Kiwi friends, whom I’ve had the privilege of knowing for more than 18 years. They are dear friends from my life in the UK, long before I moved to Australia.

Friends I worked with. Friends who came to my wedding and then helped me mend my broken heart when it ended.

These friends knew me in my twenties and thirties, and now they know me in my forties. They knew corporate achiever Glin, and they’ve watched me transition from that career into coaching and consulting.

A large part of my second book, Unstoppable Woman, was written in their back garden while I enjoyed the beautiful view overlooking Tasman Bay.

There is something incredibly special about spending time with friends who have witnessed and been part of so many different seasons of your life.

There is an ease with which you pick things up, often as if you were together only yesterday, even when years have passed between face-to-face catch-ups.

There is the banter, the directness and the calling each other out on our BS in a way that is only possible after years of trust and presence have been cultivated within a relationship.

It is a friendship that deepens in love and connection because you have shared the highs and lows of life together.

It can never be a surface-level connection when you have shared the moments that humbled you.

I feel immensely grateful to have good people in my corner. Friends who are very much like family to me.

I’ve been told that I’m a collector of good people, and as I reflect on that statement, I know it’s true.

For me, the consistent quality among the people I keep close is their willingness to be seen.

They don’t pretend everything is fine when it isn’t. They don’t perform success. They openly share their challenges as well as their highlight reel. They prefer an uncomfortable truth to false harmony.

They don’t gatekeep information that could help you get ahead. They openly share what they’ve learnt through their own experiences so that others might avoid falling into the same traps they once found themselves in.

They also ask what you see.

They are humble enough to recognise that the people around them may see something they can’t. They know they won’t always see themselves clearly, so they ask for a mirror because they genuinely value your perspective.

I love my friends.

They help me see myself clearly too. They remind me who I am whenever I feel lost. They cheer me on and always hold space for me to be fully myself.

I hope you have friends who are a meaningful part of your life. I know my life is infinitely richer because of mine.

As I sit here, I’m wondering what I’m really trying to share through this blog post.

I’m not trying to teach you anything. As I write this sentence, I don’t feel as though I have any great words of wisdom or nuggets of guidance to offer this week, other than to invite you to pause and take stock of the friends in your life.

Who has witnessed your different seasons?

Who remembers the versions of you that existed before the person you are today?

Who helps you recognise how far you’ve travelled?

Even though I have control over my own calendar, I still find it far too easy to fall into the trap of not making time for travel and adventure in the way I once did.

It’s easy to stay close to home, settle into familiar rituals and routines, and forget there is a whole world out there waiting to be explored.

Whenever I get out of my own way and book a trip, I’m reminded of how much I love being somewhere different. Experiencing a new place shifts my thinking. I’m always changed by it, sometimes in small ways and at other times much more significantly.

This weekend, as we enjoyed many hours of conversation and shopping, I found myself in awe as I reflected on just how much our lives have changed from the ones we were living 18 years ago.

It reminded me that so much of the life we eventually experience can’t be predicted, no matter how hard we try to create certainty from one day to the next.

It also reminded me that although I sometimes focus on how far away I still am from the goals I want to reach, I’ve already covered an extraordinary amount of distance.

The gain is often far greater than the gap, but we forget to acknowledge it.

Much of our growth is invisible. It happens on the inside, much like the growth of a seed beneath the ground as it develops its roots, long before any green shoots appear above the soil.

We judge ourselves and our lives so critically, but each of us is here to experiment and experience life fully. We can’t do that if we don’t allow ourselves time to play, connect and enjoy the adventure.

Perhaps that is what this trip has reminded me.

The people we love don’t simply accompany us through life. They hold the memories of who we have been, reflect the person we are becoming and help us see the distance we’ve already travelled.

So, perhaps this week, call the friend you’ve been meaning to call. Book the catch-up, take the trip or make space for something beyond your usual routine.

Life is moving, even when it feels as though you’re standing still.

And sometimes it takes an old friend, a new view or a few quiet hours in an airport lounge to help you see just how far you’ve come.

Keep going and keep growing.

Love Glin x

P.S.

This week’s conversations in The Expansion Room continued to remind me how powerful it is when we take the time to truly witness each other. The experiment is already proving that just by putting our inner negotiations under observation that how the energy under those negotiations can shift very quickly.

If you’re curious to learn more, and join us in a fortnight’s time, there’s still four more sessions for you to participate in. The details for each of the sessions and the calendar links to join can be found in The Expansion Room members area.

Enter The Expansion Room Here

She’s clearly capable. Even so, trusting her own judgement was exactly what she was working through. I’ve seen it in leader after leader over the years. It finds the most able among us, not the least, and it tends to arrive when something in our circumstances has changed.

So much of what we feel as our own confidence has been propped up for years by everything around us, and we mistake it for something entirely our own. When we’ve held a role for a while, that role does a great deal of work for us. People trust our judgement. Things move because we set them moving. In countless small ways each day, the world lets us know we’re good at what we do, and that steady reflection becomes ground we stand on without ever thinking about it.

Then our circumstances change. We step out of a role, or step back from it for a season, or move into a room where none of what we’ve done before quite counts yet. The reflection that held us steady begins to fade, and we find, sometimes for the first time, how much of our steadiness had been coming from outside us all along.

I know this from my own life. When I stepped out of my corporate career and into my own business, there were slow months where I wondered whether anyone could see the value in my thinking, or the contribution I could make. I hadn’t become any less capable. I’d simply lost the daily, unspoken reassurance I had been leaning on without knowing it was there.

What I notice, in myself and in the leaders I work with, is that when we’re less sure of ourselves, other people’s certainty starts to carry far more weight than it should. Someone disagrees with us and sounds completely sure they’re right. Most days we’d treat that as their opinion and keep our own counsel. When our footing is already shaky, we believe them instead of ourselves.

Most of the time they mean nothing by it. They’re simply the kind of person who speaks with certainty, and we’re the ones who take it as proof that we’ve got it wrong.

That’s the moment worth noticing, because most of us make it without realising. In the space of a sentence we’ve decided that they see us more clearly than we see ourselves. Once we’ve decided that, it changes how we speak and act for the rest of the meeting, and often well beyond it.

Sometimes no one even disagrees with us. It’s the person who talks over us until we stop putting our view forward, or the one who finishes our point for us before we’ve made it, so that in time we stop offering it at all. Nobody in these moments has actually judged what we’re capable of. Someone speaks with more force or certainty than they need to, and we take it as the truth about us, when all it shows is how sure they happen to be of themselves.

Most of us try to fix this by arguing harder. We think we have to win the exchange, make the stronger case, prove the point, as though a better argument would hand our confidence back to us. It won’t, because what we handed over was never really about the argument. We handed someone else the authority to decide who we are and what we’re capable of, and winning the point doesn’t give that back. We get it back by noticing we handed it over in the first place, and choosing not to do it again.

Because underneath it all this is an agreement, and every agreement can be revisited. Someone has offered us their read on who we are. We’re the ones who decide whether to accept it. That decision has always been ours, even in the seasons when we’ve lost our footing, and it may be the most important negotiation we have all day, because we’re the only ones sitting on our side of the table.

The person whose certainty made us doubt ourselves has most likely forgotten the moment entirely. They said their piece and carried on with their day. We’re the ones still holding it, which means the settling is ours to do, and we do it not by going back to change their mind but by coming back to our own.

So the question I want to leave you with is not whether they were right. It goes a little deeper than that. When your own ground last grew uncertain, whose account of yourself did you begin to believe?

If any of this resonates, I’d love for you to bring it to the Expansion Room, a live space where we put our inner negotiations under observation and watch the agreements we make with ourselves before we notice them.

The next session is this Friday, 8am AEST. There are five sessions remaining, held fortnightly. There is no financial cost to join the experiment, but it may cost you your comfort and the terms that no longer serve you.

The Expansion Room - Enter Here

Give yourself the gift of you.

Love, Glin x

Not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because there is so much swirling around my mind. Choosing one core insight or observation from this week feels a bit like what a parent might feel having to pick the child they love most.

Impossible!

Okay, perhaps, actually very likely, it’s not quite that dramatic.

My writing practice every Sunday morning starts with me relaxing into my seat and reminding myself I have nothing to prove and that no performance is required.

We live in a world where the opportunity to compare yourself to others is practically rammed down your throat. So, when my Type A achiever self starts comparing my writing journey to more established writers who have larger readerships, I have to consciously remind myself that if I’m not using comparison to point me towards where my joy is found, then it’s one of the fastest ways to lose contact with myself.

And when I lose contact with myself, I also deny myself and the world the unique contribution that only I can make.

I’m not big noting here.

You have a unique contribution to make too, so give yourself, and us, the gift of you.

Join me in The Expansion Room

We all do it though, don’t we?

We look at other people and then automatically start asking ourselves unresourceful questions.

My particular collection of unresourceful questions includes:

• What’s wrong with me?

• What am I missing?

• Why can’t I seem to figure this out?

• What if this is it?

• What if I’m just not good enough?

Your questions will likely be different to mine, but I’ve no doubt they’re equally unresourceful and, frankly, like my questions do with me, leave you feeling like poo.

None of us needs to feel like poo, do we?

Yet we seem to do a remarkably good job, on a fairly regular basis, of allowing those thoughts to take hold of us until, before we know it, we’ve lost contact with ourselves.

Which is fascinating when you stop and think about who we really are.

An infinite intelligence experiencing life, and the opportunity for a fully expressed existence, through a human meat suit.

Yep.

That’s us.

We’re all infinite intelligence in these meat suits trying to have a good time at this party called LIFE, and yet most of us stop ourselves.

We don’t allow ourselves to dance like nobody’s watching, sing like nobody can hear, write like nobody will read it and Be like nobody is doing.

I’m smiling as I write this because I can see today that I’ve dropped into play.

I’m writing from a place where I still have contact with myself.

I know this because I’m not in self-judgement. I’m in exploration, play and wonder.

When I write like this I have no idea what I’m going to say, or where the words will lead me on this page, but I know it feels like music to me.

I follow the melody to where it’s leading, trusting in the notes and the space between them.

In my case, the words, the thoughts, the stories, the feelings and what unfolds become this article that I’m sharing with you today.

Words are your wand.

They create the magic of your life.

And sometimes it’s the smallest words that quietly shape the way we experience ourselves and our relationship with others.

Which brings me to two words I found myself pondering this week.

Audience.

Follower.

As I felt into the energy of those words, especially when it comes to my writing, I realised I don’t connect with either of them.

I’ve consciously spent the last few years moving away from being in performance mode and towards being in service.

“Audience” feels as though people are sitting in their seats watching me.

It feels as though we’re separate from one another.

That somehow I have to perform for you.

And that’s not what I’m building with my writing.

When I’m in contact with myself, I’m not asking, “Who am I writing for?”

I’m asking, “Who am I in service to?”

It’s a much more resourceful question.

It takes me from performing for people to serving people.

It’s grounding.

My work isn’t about me being seen.

It’s about helping others see themselves.

Everything changes when I remember that.

When I write from that place, something shifts.

I stop trying to write something impressive, and instead I find myself writing something true.

I meander a little longer. I share the parts of my journey that would never make the highlight reel.

The parts I’d probably hide if I were performing.

But I’m not in a performance. I’m in my life.

A life I’m trying to consciously witness before it passes me by.

A life that has meaning, even when it’s not impressive or always desirable.

So, when I give myself permission not to write for an audience, my writing becomes more truthful, more nuanced and more real.

Because when I’m in service, I stay in contact with myself.

I write for the person who’s willing to become the observer of their own life.

For the person who wants to see themselves clearly and stop negotiating away who they are.

I write because writing, for me, is how I make sense of life.

It’s like a mirror.

It helps me observe my own thoughts, my meaning-making and my limits.

My hope is that through my writing you observe yourself.

That in witnessing me and my journey, it gives you greater clarity about your own life.

Ultimately, I hope my writing helps you create the life and work you most want because you see yourself more clearly.

Maybe that’s all any of us are really trying to do.

Stay in contact with ourselves long enough to express the unique contribution we’re here to make.

We’re all infinite intelligence experiencing the party of life through our human meat suits.

I’m grateful to be journeying with you.

Keep going and keep growing.

Love,

Glin x

P.S. The next live session of The Expansion Room is on Friday 24th July at 8am AEST. If you’d like to join a space with other like minded people exploring their inner negotiation you would be most welcome.

It’s an experiment to see what changes when you put your inner negotiations under observation.

Enter The Expansion Room

The CEO above her is a first-time CEO who spent years as a Sales GM himself, at a bigger company, and he was excellent at it. He knows the pipeline better than anyone in the building. He can smell a soft forecast from three slides away, so when his new Sales Director brings him a plan, he questions it, re-writes it, tightens it, until there’s not much of the original left in it. He isn’t doing this because he doubts her competence. He’s doing it because it’s the one part of the business where he still knows exactly what good looks like.

His leadership team sees this clearly. They talk about it with each other, in the corridor, after the meeting, in the way rooms find to say the thing they won’t say to someone’s face. From where he’s sitting, none of it registers as a problem. It feels like diligence, like high standards, like the very thing that makes him a good leader.

That gap, between what a room knows and what a leader hears, is its own cost, separate from the one he’s already creating with his Sales Director. Everyone around him has quietly agreed this isn’t theirs to raise, maybe because he’s new to the seat and they don’t want to knock his confidence, maybe because the last person who challenged him got rewritten too. Either way, the silence protects him from a truth that would actually help him. And it teaches his leadership team the same lesson his Sales Director is learning, which is that bringing him something real just means it comes back changed anyway.

But the seat he’s in now doesn’t need a brilliant Sales Director. It needed one, and he hired one. The job in front of him now is something else entirely. It’s building a leadership team that can run without his hands on every lever. It’s deciding what the company becomes in three years, not what the pipeline looks like this quarter. It’s the part of running a company that doesn’t give you the same fast, visible feedback that closing a deal does.

The control isn’t about a lack of trust in her. It’s a lack of familiarity with his own new role, where the wins are slower, less certain, and much harder to point at.

Every hour he spends re-doing work someone else was hired and paid to do is an hour he isn’t spending on the thing only he can do, and that’s the direct cost. Her growing exit risk is the visible one, the one you can put a number on if you try. The quieter cost is a leadership team that has learned to manage him instead of levelling with him. And underneath both of those sits the real cost, the version of the company that never gets built because the CEO is still, most days, running sales.

I think about this in terms of the floor, which is the standard you hold yourself to, the level below which you refuse to operate. Raising it usually means giving something up rather than taking something on. Here, it means he has to let go of being the best salesperson in the room in order to become the CEO the company needs, because those two things cannot both be true at once. Every hour spent proving he’s still great at the old job is an hour not spent building the muscle the new one requires.

I don’t think this is really about the Sales Director at all. I think it’s about whether the CEO is willing to be less certain, less visibly excellent, in a role he hasn’t fully grown into yet. Most people would rather stay brilliant somewhere else than sit in that discomfort long enough to get good at the job they’re actually being paid to do now.

Staying in your old floor doesn’t just cost the people around you, though that cost is real and it’s already showing up. It costs you too. It keeps you exactly where you already know how to succeed, which means it keeps you exactly where you already are.

Where in your leadership are you still doing the job you used to have? And who around you has already noticed, and decided it isn’t safe to tell you.

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Give yourself the gift of you.

Love, Glin x

I had the last two of my wisdom teeth removed on Friday under general anaesthetic and my jawline is still very swollen.

It got me curious (it doesn’t take much!) about why wisdom teeth were called wisdom teeth and what it symbolises when we have them extracted.

Firstly, I learned that wisdom teeth were named based on the timing of when they appear, not what they do. They are the third and final set of molars and because they typically emerge late in our teenage years, their arrival became associated with the age at which a person had gained maturity, judgement or “wisdom”.

Secondly, I learned that we still develop the same number of teeth even though our jaws are much smaller than our ancestors, likely due to changes in our diet and development over centuries.

Which means most of us have more teeth than our mouths have space for, and so it’s our wisdom teeth that get removed.

From a symbolic perspective, when wisdom teeth arrive they represent a transition into adulthood. Removing them can therefore symbolise:

• Letting go of what no longer serves your growth.

• Making space for the next stage of life.

• Recognising that wisdom isn’t something you inherit biologically but something you cultivate through experience.

As I reflected on the symbolism it felt true and timely that I’d had my last two wisdom teeth removed.

I am making space for the next stage of my life.

I’ve been doing a lot of letting go of what no longer serves my growth and the wisdom I have now has most certainly been cultivated through my own lived experience.

It’s also come from recognising something I couldn’t see for most of my life.

The life we live is the outcome of the agreements we make with ourselves.

Agreements about who we believe we are.

What we believe we’re capable of.

What’s possible for us.

What we believe the future holds.

Most of us never consciously choose those agreements. We inherit them, absorb them and negotiate them quietly with ourselves over time. Then we spend years living inside them as though the terms are non-negotiable.

A few weeks ago I consciously embraced owning my identity as a writer and started orienting my life and work around my writing.

Everything seems to have shifted.

I started to breathe more easily.

I feel like I’ve breathed life in for the first time in years.

I’m present with today rather than constantly fixated on the future.

I’ve started making choices based on what brings me joy rather than what fear tells me I should do. For me that’s looked like buying beautiful things for my home simply because they make me smile, booking a weekend in Christchurch to celebrate a dear friend’s birthday, and enjoying the ordinary moments of my day instead of constantly feeling like life begins once I reach the next milestone.

Perhaps the biggest shift is that I’ve consciously chosen faith over fear. Not as a motivational or inspirational quote but as a way of living.

I’ve stopped waiting for certainty before allowing myself to fully live.

Because, truth be told, I’m tired of my own BS. I’m tired of living in a prison of my own making.

For years I believed my job was to worry about the future. To stay ahead. To control what I could. To make sensible decisions. Somewhere along the way, compounded by being self-employed, I’d become so focused on protecting tomorrow that I’d stopped fully living today.

Since making that shift towards fully owning my identity as a writer, I feel free to create, to build, to play and to be more fully expressed.

It feels like I’ve finally found clothes that fit me perfectly.

The ones that were made for me.

The ones I can completely relax in because I’m no longer trying to squeeze myself into something that was never designed for me.

That’s what fully owning my identity as a writer has felt like.

My thinking has become clearer.

My writing thesis has become clearer.

My actions are flowing more easily and I’m feeling momentum that had stalled over the last two years as I consciously unravelled the ego-constructed identity built around performance and the approval of others.

It’s a strange experience because deep down I’ve always known this was me.

Yet somewhere along the way I negotiated myself into becoming someone else.

Not completely.

Just enough.

Enough to become more sensible.

More strategic.

More professionally acceptable.

More focused on survival and security than fully living.

Somewhere along the way we start believing our thoughts more than ourselves. We make logical and rational decisions based on the conditioning we’ve received from the world around us. Many of us have an inner negotiation where we’re wrestling with the part of us that knows something is off and the part that’s convincing us everything is fine and to just keep calm and carry on.

I had no idea that the ego-constructed version of me was so strong.

So focused on survival and security that I slowly lost touch with the Glin who was the experimenter, the adventurer, the fun, playful go-getter who wanted to experience everything life had to offer.

The truth of who I am is becoming clearer and clearer.

And my ability to recognise what’s true and what’s ego-constructed is becoming clearer too.

The ego is focused on looking good and avoiding looking bad.

My truth is internally driven.

It has no need for external validation.

To name what I’ve been fearing is to free myself from its clutches.

I’ve been afraid of losing credibility in my professional network as I shift towards putting my writing at the centre of my work.

There’s a story I tell myself that people won’t understand where I’m going.

That because I’ve changed so much over the years they’ll think I’m incapable of sticking to one thing.

That evolution and change aren’t valued as highly as staying steady and stable in one field.

All of that may be true.

Equally, it may not be.

But if I continue making decisions based on stories I’ve created about what other people might think, then I’m allowing agreements I made years ago to determine the future I create.

I know it doesn’t mean stopping the work I currently do. It means the work I do now serves my writing. Every workshop, every conversation and every coaching session has become part of researching the thesis I’m exploring: the most powerful negotiation is the one you have with yourself.

Last Friday morning, before heading into hospital, I hosted the first circle inside The Expansion Room.

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There were six of us on the call.

Six witnesses to the inner negotiations unfolding in real time.

I went first because I wasn’t prepared to ask anyone else to go somewhere I hadn’t been willing to go myself.

As I spoke, I realised something.

The credibility wasn’t actually the thing I was protecting.

Safety was.

Credibility only mattered because credibility was what had paid the bills.

I’d confused commercial success with safety.

As each person shared, I noticed the same negotiation appearing in different forms.

One person was rebuilding her identity after a chapter of her life had quietly come to an end.

Another spoke about not backing herself despite a career that clearly demonstrated her capability.

Another questioned whether she was allowed to simply be instead of constantly feeling the need to do.

Different stories.

Different lives.

Different circumstances.

The same quiet question sitting underneath them all.

Who am I now?

And do I have permission to become who I already know myself to be?

It struck me that none of us had come looking for advice.

We’d come looking for a place where it felt safe enough to tell the truth.

Not because someone else could solve it for us, but because sometimes hearing ourselves say the quiet thing out loud is the beginning of seeing it clearly.

Nobody lacked intelligence.

Nobody lacked capability.

What each of us was wrestling with was an identity we’d either outgrown or hadn’t yet given ourselves permission to inhabit.

That’s when something clicked for me.

The agreements we make with ourselves determine the identities we’re willing to inhabit.

And the identities we’re willing to inhabit determine the lives we’re willing to live.

Which is why I’ve come to believe more deeply than ever that the life we live is the outcome of the agreements we make with ourselves.

The most fascinating part wasn’t that anyone found an answer.

It was watching what happened when someone finally said the quiet thing out loud.

Nobody fixed it.

Nobody solved it.

Yet something softened.

Because once something that’s been running unconsciously becomes visible, it begins to lose its grip.

Perhaps that’s why awareness changes everything.

Not because awareness gives us the answer.

But because awareness finally gives us something we can renegotiate.

Perhaps that’s what becoming wiser really is.

Not accumulating more knowledge.

But becoming willing to question the agreements we’ve been living by.

Somewhere inside each of us is a younger version of ourselves who negotiated those agreements with the understanding they had at the time.

Those agreements probably protected us once.

Some of them may even have been necessary.

But perhaps wisdom isn’t continuing to honour every agreement we’ve ever made.

Perhaps wisdom is having the courage to renegotiate the ones that no longer make room for who we’re becoming.

Keep going and keep growing.

Love Glin x

P.S. If this resonated with you, I’d love you to join us in The Expansion Room. There are five live sessions remaining, held fortnightly, with the next session on Friday 24 July at 8.00 am AEST.

The Expansion Room is a place to witness the inner negotiations you’re having with yourself, while also witnessing those of others. It’s remarkable what becomes visible when we slow down long enough to observe what has been running unconsciously.

I’ve also included resources for the community, including access to run your own Human Design chart and guidance to help you understand your design. They’re simply additional tools to help you see yourself more clearly as you continue your own journey.

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I’ve watched capable, intelligent leaders accept less than they know is possible from their teams. Not because they don’t care. Because holding the standard costs something they have decided, usually without realising it, they are not willing to pay.

What I keep coming back to is that so many of these leaders are working hard to keep people engaged. Trying to maintain morale, smooth friction, keep the team together. All of which sounds like good leadership. Except the thing they are actually doing is managing around a standard they have stopped holding.

Here is what I’ve come to understand about culture, from watching it up close for a long time: the floor of any organisation is set by what the leader is willing to accept. Not what they say in the all-hands. Not what’s written in the values document. What they actually let pass. What they work around rather than address. What they tolerate in the name of keeping things together.

That floor becomes the ceiling for everyone underneath it.

When a leader stops holding a high standard, it is almost always because holding that standard costs something they have decided they are not willing to pay. The cost is real. It means having conversations that are uncomfortable and overdue. It means being willing to lose someone you’ve invested in, someone you like, someone who has been loyal, because loyalty and capability are not the same thing and you’ve been treating them as if they are. It means being the person in the room who still believes it’s possible to do this at a genuinely high level when the team around you has stopped believing that.

Most leaders I’ve worked with are not avoiding high standards because they don’t care. They are avoiding them because caring, at that level, is exposing. It requires you to be accountable to a vision you’ve declared. And if you hold the vision high and the team doesn’t rise to meet it, you have to deal with what that means, about them, about your hiring, about your leadership, and sometimes about whether the vision itself is one you truly believe in or one you’ve been performing.

That is the inner negotiation. Most leaders don’t see it clearly until someone names it for them. Not because they lack self-awareness, but because the deal gets made in small increments, each one justifiable, none of them feeling like a decision to lower the standard. The gap between what they know is possible and what they are willing to ask for widens without anyone formally deciding to widen it.

The cost of that negotiation is not just cultural. It is personal. When you consistently accept less than you know is possible, you are not just lowering the standard for your team. You are lowering it for yourself. You are teaching yourself, repeatedly, that the gap between what you know and what you are willing to act on is acceptable. And that habit, once established, does not stay contained to the office.

Sometimes the floor drops not because the leader is afraid of conflict, but because somewhere along the way they stopped being fully convicted by their own vision. They are still running toward it, still talking about it, still building the strategy around it. But the aliveness has gone out of it. And people feel that. Teams are not stupid. They read the energy of the person at the front of the room before they read the words.

You cannot hold a high floor for a vision you are holding at arm’s length. The standard you maintain is a direct reflection of how much you actually believe in what you are building.

This is why the conversation about culture and standards so often has the wrong argument at the centre of it. It gets framed as a people problem, the wrong hires, the underperformers, the ones who aren’t bought in. And sometimes that’s true. But more often, the people problem is a reflection of a leadership problem, and the leadership problem is a reflection of an inner one. What have you decided, without realising it, that you are no longer willing to ask for? What have you stopped believing is possible? What are you managing around in yourself that is now showing up as something you manage around in others?

A vision held with genuine conviction doesn’t need to be sold to the right people. It acts as a beacon. It draws toward it the people who are ready for it and makes it clear to those who aren’t that they may be more comfortable elsewhere. That self-selection is not a failure of culture. It is culture working exactly as it should.

The question I’d invite you to sit with is not “how do I raise the standard with my team?” That question keeps the problem outside of you. The more honest question is: what have I decided I’m not willing to ask for? And underneath that, do I still fully believe in what I’m building?

Start there. Everything else follows from that answer.

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Give yourself the gift of you.

Love, Glin x

P.S. The Expansion Room experiment kicks off on Friday. It’s a 90min conversation space held every fortnight for 3mths. It’s for leaders who want a space for them to be witnessed, for those who want to explore their inner negotiation and identify the agreements that they’re making with themselves that are costing them more than they want to pay.

No financial cost to join the experiment but it may cost you your comfort.

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Each month, I sit down and write a One Page Report - a way to capture where I am, what I’m learning, and how I’m evolving. It’s not a polished update or a highlight reel. It’s an honest reflection of the journey I’m on: experimenting with what alignment really feels like, challenging old patterns, and choosing to live my life in a way that feels true to me.

As a paid subscriber, you’ll get a real and unfiltered look behind the scenes - what’s working, what’s uncomfortable, and what I’m noticing as I continue stepping into who I’m becoming. I’ll share my thoughts on living authentically, identity, transformation and the inner negotiation, along with the moments that quietly change everything.

From time to time, I’ll also offer paid subscribers opportunities to go deeper. This month, as a thank you to my founding paid subscribers, I’m gifting two complimentary Mirror Sessions. If you’re already a paid subscriber, you’ll find the details in this month’s One Page Report.

This is for you if you’re curious about what it really takes to build something meaningful. If my journey resonates with you, I’d love to have you along for the ride.

Subscribe to receive my monthly One Page Reports and become part of the journey.

Let’s keep going and keep growing.

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