🐉 The Night We Remembered What It Means to Thrive

Some evenings pass gently.

And some evenings leave a mark.

Tonight’s Spark & Fire huddle with Sanne, Amy, and Tanya was one of those evenings.

It began, as many meaningful spaces do, not with polished insight, but with laughter. With teasing. With humans arriving as they really were. There was talk of halos, angels, devils, and becoming “a little more spicy.” There was warmth, playfulness, fuzzy cameras, cats making appearances, and the soft awkwardness of people settling into a shared room.

And yet, even before the topic revealed itself, something deeper was already there.

Because the way we enter a space often says more than the words we later speak inside it.

What unfolded tonight was a conversation about thriving.

But more than that, it was a collective remembering that thriving is not a performance, not a productivity state, and not a reward for perfection.

It is something far more human.

It is living in a way that feels like home inside your own skin.

The page that found us

As always, the group let the book choose.

The random page landed on page 215 of the The Leadership Leap book: https://www.theleadershipleap.org/, inside Rooted to Thrive, in the section on Support Systems and the wider theme of thrive factors.

I read aloud about environmental needs, time harmony, energy cycles, emotional well-being, physical needs, support systems, imposter syndrome, purpose, and the daily commitment of thriving.

But the truth is, the room had already started embodying the topic before the reading even began.

🔥 Sanne shared that she had sent bold emails and stood up for herself.

🔥 Tanya shared the unexpected soft launch of her new LinkedIn newsletter, Power Framed, after pressing the wrong button and accidentally distributing it more widely than intended.

🔥 Amy shared the spinning feeling of trying to get traction in life while also holding the realities of children, energy, and interrupted rhythms.

🔥 And I shared that after months of uncertainty and intensity, I had finally accepted a new role starting in May as a Principal Architect of Digital Transformation Consultant.

On paper, it was good news. Real good news.

And yet what I shared next mattered just as much: after all the effort of job searching, interviewing, navigating uncertainty, and holding myself together, I crashed. Not dramatically. Just quietly. The kind of collapse that comes when the body realizes it no longer has to survive on adrenaline.

I had stepped back from LinkedIn.

I had stopped producing.

I had stopped trying to keep up with the idea of consistency.

And in the session, something clicked.

I wasn’t failing my principles.

I was living them.

I wasn’t being lazy.

I was honoring my energy.

Sometimes the words we most need are the ones we once wrote for someone else.

The myth of thriving as self-sufficiency

One of the strongest truths that emerged tonight was this: thriving is not built in isolation.

For so many of us, especially those shaped by hyper-independence, support can feel foreign. Receiving can feel dangerous. Needing can feel like weakness. We learn to perform capability. We learn to carry. We learn to survive alone.

But thriving asks something different.

It asks us to admit that strength is not the absence of need.

It is the courage to remain open to connection.

That is why landing on Support Systems felt almost poetic. Amy immediately noticed the irony of being brought directly to the page about asking for help, because that very thing can be hard. And she was right. Hard for many of us.

Thriving is not just about discipline, ambition, or resilience.

It is also about who sees you. Who steadies you. Who reminds you of who you are when your own voice goes quiet.

And tonight added another layer to that truth.

We spoke not only about support in the practical sense, but about the quiet ache of beautiful moments that remain unshared. The kind of loneliness that is not loud, but tender. The kind that appears when you witness something meaningful and instinctively wish someone were beside you to hold it too.

A sunset can feel richer when someone sees it with you.

A breakthrough can feel more grounded when someone witnesses it with care.

Even joy can deepen when it has somewhere to land.

And yet thriving does not look the same for everyone.

Some of us are nourished deeply by solitude.

Some of us come alive most fully in connection.

Most of us move between both.

What tonight reminded me of is not that everyone thrives the same way, but that support, witnessing, and shared presence matter more than we sometimes admit.

Even dragons may fly alone at times, but it still means something to have a sky that answers their fire.

The environments that shape us

Another thread that came alive in the conversation was the reality that thriving is deeply environmental.

We often speak about thriving as though it is entirely internal. As though if we just managed ourselves better, thought more positively, or became more disciplined, we would finally flourish.

But that is not the whole truth.

The places we work, the sounds around us, the people near us, the structure or chaos of a room, the permission to think aloud or retreat inward, the presence or absence of light, noise, motion, and mental sparks, all of these shape us.

Different people described different needs.

Different sparks.

Different sensitivities.

Tanya spoke about sensitivity to noise and the paradox of needing just the right kind of background sound. Amy reflected on the invisible drain of trying to make calls or focus in open spaces. Sanne shared how a physical office move disrupted her team’s rhythm and performance, not because the people had changed, but because the environment had.

And that matters.

Because when an environment does not fit us, it is easy to assume we are the problem.

But often the issue is not deficiency.

It is mismatch.

Thriving begins when we stop treating ourselves like machines that should work anywhere under any conditions, and start honoring that we are living systems responding to context.

Some people need stillness.

Some need energy.

Some need background noise.

Some need spaciousness.

Some need people nearby.

Some need to be left alone.

None of that is weakness.

It is information.

And when the environment shifts out of alignment, we do not fail.

We signal.

The angel, the devil, and the integrated self

I want to come back to the beginning of the evening.

The joking about being angelic or devilish. The playful acknowledgment of becoming a little more feisty while still having an angelic core.

It may have sounded light, but it carried something powerful.

Because thriving is not about becoming pure.

It is not about staying soft at all costs.

It is not about being endlessly palatable.

Thriving often includes becoming more whole.

More honest.

More direct.

More willing to take up space.

More willing to let fire live beside kindness.

I shared that the whole Xebia experience was me being feisty. And yes, there was humor in that. But there was also truth.

Not recklessness.

Not cruelty.

Not ego.

Just a quieter willingness to stop shrinking.

To care less about being perfectly agreeable.

To trust my instincts more.

To let more of my force step into the room.

This is not losing softness.

It is integrating strength.

There is a kind of growth that looks less like becoming “better” and more like becoming less divided.

The angel does not have to disappear for the fire to rise.

When growth opens the hidden door

Another moment from the beginning stayed with me too.

I shared that after a recent dinner, something had opened in me emotionally. That the night afterward was filled with nightmares. That I cried for hours. That it felt as though some can of worms had been opened.

That matters.

Because we often romanticize breakthrough.

We speak about courage, confidence, truth, boldness, and stepping into alignment. But we do not always speak enough about what that can stir underneath. Sometimes when we move forward, old layers rise with us. Sometimes confidence unlocks grief. Sometimes standing taller reveals the wounds we once bent ourselves around.

This is not a sign that something is wrong.

It may simply mean that growth has finally made enough safety for buried feelings to emerge.

Sometimes the system only allows us to feel once it senses we can survive the feeling.

There is a tenderness in that.

And a cost.

Thriving is not a neat upward line.

It is not just expansion.

It is also integration.

Progress instead of perfection

Perfectionism hovered in the room too.

Not as a loud enemy, but as an old familiar pattern. The wish to get it right. To be enough. To earn safety through excellence. To prove worth through effort.

And what I loved about tonight was that no one tried to destroy perfectionism with force. Instead, we seemed to soften around it. To reframe it.

Because beneath perfectionism there is often something beautiful trying to survive:

❤️‍🔥 Care.

❤️‍🔥 Conscience.

❤️‍🔥 Devotion.

❤️‍🔥 A desire to do justice to what matters.

The problem is not that we care deeply.

The problem is when care gets tied to fear.

When progress becomes impossible because the imagined standard is unreachable.

When expression gets strangled by self-monitoring.

When rest feels undeserved until everything is done.

Thriving asks something gentler.

Not,

“How do I become flawless?”

But,

“How do I become aligned?”

Not,

“Am I doing enough?”

But,

“Is this life mine?”

That line landed hard tonight. So hard that Tanya asked for it to be repeated.

I’ve stopped asking, Am I doing enough?

And I’ve started asking, Is this life mine?

Because that’s what thriving truly is. Living in a way that feels like home inside your own skin.

Sometimes a sentence does not just resonate.

It finds the exact place in you that has been waiting to be named.

Movement, even without certainty

One of the most beautiful reflections came through the idea that movement matters, even when certainty is absent.

Sanne spoke about how changing roles, moving, or making a shift brings new information. Whether the move turns out “right” or “wrong” matters less than the fact that movement itself creates learning.

That is such an important truth.

We often delay action because we want guarantees.

We want proof before motion.

We want certainty before change.

But much of life only reveals itself in motion.

You do not always know if the choice is perfect.

But you discover more by stepping than by circling endlessly around the unknown.

Thriving is not rigid certainty.

It is the courage to keep adjusting as life reveals itself.

The courage of imperfect creation

Tanya’s newsletter story also felt like its own quiet lesson in thriving.

She did not launch in the clean, fully controlled, carefully orchestrated way she might have planned. She pressed the wrong button. The newsletter distributed in an unintended way. The launch became messy, public, and imperfect.

And still, it moved.

Subscribers came. Momentum built. Energy rose.

How often do we hold ourselves back waiting for the perfect doorway, when life is willing to use the imperfect one already open?

There is a freedom in that.

Thriving does not require pristine beginnings.

Sometimes it looks like pressing the wrong button and realizing that aliveness entered anyway.

The alter ego dragon

Another thread that shimmered beneath the conversation was the idea of alter egos, of names, identities, or inner energies that let us embody parts of ourselves we are still learning to trust.

Tanya spoke about Serafina. Amy reflected on the idea of embodied identity. And I found myself thinking about that interview version of me, the one with more sass, more boldness, less attachment to the outcome.

Not because I had become someone else.

But because I had allowed a part of me to step forward that had been waiting for permission.

That felt important.

Because confidence is not always something we slowly build from scratch.

Sometimes it is something we unlock.

Sometimes the bold version of us already exists.

Sometimes the wise one, the spicy one, the grounded one, the stage-ready one, the boundary-holding one is already inside us, quiet, watching, waiting.

We do not always need to fabricate a new self.

Sometimes we simply need to let one of our hidden dragons breathe.

The crash after the climb

I think one of the most misunderstood parts of thriving is what happens after success.

People often imagine that when something good finally arrives, the result will be endless energy, clarity, and confidence.

But that is not always how bodies work.

Sometimes achievement is followed not by acceleration but by exhale.

Not by lift but by release.

Not by more productivity but by temporary stillness.

You spend months holding pressure.

Then the moment passes.

And the body says,

“Now.”

Now you can collapse a little.

Now you can rest.

Now you can stop performing survival.

That is not failure.

That is often wisdom.

Tonight reminded me that rest is not the opposite of thriving.

It is part of it.

And maybe that is one of the reasons these huddles matter so much. They reflect something I believe deeply and keep needing to relearn: nothing in growth is truly linear. Thriving is not a finish line. It is a rhythm. A cycle. A living eco-pattern of expansion, intensity, release, and restoration.

🐉 Growth.

🐉 Fire.

🐉 Letting go.

🐉 Rest.

Not one of these seasons disqualifies the others.

They belong to each other.

The role of purpose

The conversation also touched something essential in me: the way this new role fits into my larger path.

When I described the work, entering organizations, helping untangle what is stuck, reforming structures, leadership patterns, product streams, and systems, I could feel why it fits.

Not just because it is impressive on paper.

Not just because of the title.

But because it speaks to something intrinsic in me.

I am a reformer.

I want to help things become healthier, truer, more effective, more aligned.

I like the challenge of entering complexity, finding the living pulse beneath the dysfunction, and helping shape something better.

And perhaps one of the reasons the role feels meaningful is that it allows movement. Reform, then release. Build, then go. That suits something in me too.

Purpose is not always loud.

Sometimes it is simply the feeling of inner alignment when you describe a path and realize your body says yes.

The real support system in the room

What moved me most by the end of the session was not any one idea.

It was the quality of the room.

No one was trying to dominate.

No one was performing expertise.

No one was fixing each other.

There was listening.

Recognition.

Humor.

Tenderness.

Honesty.

And that, in itself, became the living proof of the page we had landed on.

The support system was not just the topic.

It was the circle.

A support system is not always dramatic.

It is often a room where someone says,

“That line hit me too.”

A room where someone celebrates your newsletter.

A room where someone sees your bigger future before you fully do.

A room where you admit you are tired and no one shames you for resting.

A room where your becoming is witnessed without being rushed.

That kind of space matters more than many people realize.

Thriving as a daily act of truth

If tonight left me with anything, it is this:

Thriving is not a state you earn once you have optimized your life.

It is a daily act of truth.

Truth about your energy.

Truth about your needs.

Truth about your environment.

Truth about your limits.

Truth about your longing.

Truth about your purpose.

Truth about what kind of life actually feels like yours.

And perhaps most importantly, truth about the fact that you were never meant to carry it all alone.

So tonight, I leave with gratitude.

For Sanne’s boldness.

For Tanya’s momentum and fire.

For Amy’s emotional honesty.

For the laughter at the beginning.

For the tenderness beneath it.

For the page that found us.

And for the reminder that even the one who writes the words sometimes needs to hear them again.

Thriving is not about becoming perfect.

It is about becoming more at home.

More whole.

More honest.

More connected.

More alive in your own skin.

And maybe that is enough for tonight.

💚🔥🐉