We weren’t escaping a terrible life.
That was perhaps the hardest part.
We were leaving a perfectly secure one.
A good home.
A familiar system.
Predictability.
A life we knew how to navigate.
But underneath all of that security was a feeling that had become increasingly difficult to ignore:
This isn’t quite how we want to live.
We wanted more nature.
More space.
To grow and eat more from the land.
To see our daughters outside more than inside.
To watch them grow according to the rhythms of nature, family and freedom rather than constantly adapting ourselves to the rhythm of the system around us.
So, two years ago, we drove south.
And I don’t think I understood then just how much that decision was going to ask of me.
Leaving certainty changes you
There is a romantic version of changing your life (the one that happens on the coach at night)
The one where you follow your heart, move somewhere beautiful and everything suddenly falls into place.
That hasn’t been our experience.
We have absolutely found beauty here.
But choosing a different life also meant letting go of many of the structures that had previously made life feel safe.
I became a relatively new entrepreneur in a foreign country.
I became the sole earner for our family, without the social safety net I had been accustomed to.
We lived through extreme flooding and a cyclone back in January.
I’ve had to build businesses, find clients, navigate Portuguese systems, raise three daughters, support my family and somehow learn how to stay grounded through all of it.
And I’ve had to do that while becoming increasingly aware of something else:
My nervous system had spent a very long time learning how to survive through reactivity.
Move quickly.
Solve the problem.
Carry the responsibility.
Stay useful.
Keep going.
That can make you incredibly capable.
But, it can also make it very difficult to hear yourself.
And as the world becomes noisier, faster and increasingly accelerated through AI, I think that ability to hear ourselves is becoming more important, not less.
Suffice to say, the last two years have compressed a decade of growth
I sometimes feel as though I’ve grown more in these last two years than I might have in ten had I remained inside the life I already knew.
Not because Portugal possesses some magical answer.
And not because difficulty automatically makes us grow.
But because uncertainty has continually brought me face-to-face with myself.
There hasn’t been anywhere to hide.
Over these two years, I’ve built my work around serving neurodiverse leaders and coaches through 1:1 somatic and Human Blueprint depth work.
Much of that work is about helping people see the narratives they have unconsciously built their lives around.
The beliefs about who they need to be.
How much they need to carry.
What success is supposed to look like.
Which parts of themselves are acceptable.
And which gifts they’ve spent years dismissing because they didn’t fit neatly into the environments they were in.
Interestingly, the deeper I’ve gone into this work with others, the more I’ve had to live it myself.
Not just teach it.
Then we bought a mountain
Well, technically, some land and a guest business in the mountains.
But some days it feels like a mountain.
Earlier this year, we bought O Homem Verde: our little piece of land in Serra do Espinhal, with yurts, forest, mountains and space for people to come and breathe.
And rather than having a gentle six-month transition into hospitality, we effectively hit the ground running with guests.
At the same time, since January, I’ve also been helping oversee a community of more than 60 incredibly talented leadership coaches inside The Elevated Coaching Collective, alongside founder Joel Burgess.
That role has stretched me in very different ways.
Holding people.
Seeing patterns.
Having difficult conversations.
Helping someone find clarity when their own mind has become noisy.
And accepting the responsibility that comes with being trusted by a community of humans doing meaningful work.
Then there are the slightly less glamorous responsibilities of our new life.
Twenty-six chickens.
Three roosters.
And a rescue puppy called Ollie.
Plus some difficult lessons involving foxes, birds of prey and mongooses that have resulted in six fewer chickens and five fewer chicks than we started with.
Nature, it turns out, doesn’t always match the Instagram version of living closer to nature.
Despite everything we’ve held over these two years, I’ve never felt more thankful.
More alive.
More satisfied.
Or more fulfilled.
And I’ve been trying to understand why.
Because objectively, there is probably less certainty in my life now than there was two years ago.
My income isn’t guaranteed by a salary.
I can’t predict exactly what the next twelve months will look like.
There are considerably more humans and animals depending on me.
And owning land seems to produce a never-ending list of things that need fixing.
But the fear that once sat heavily on my shoulders has lifted significantly.
Not completely.
But enough for me to notice the difference.
I feel more.
I trust myself more.
I recover faster when things go wrong.
And perhaps most importantly:
I no longer believe I need certainty before I can move.
That has been one of the biggest lessons of these two years.
For much of my life, safety meant knowing what came next.
Having the salary.
Having the house.
Understanding the system.
Knowing what role I was playing.
Knowing where the edges were.
But there is another kind of safety I am slowly learning.
The safety of knowing that even when you don’t know exactly what comes next, you trust yourself to meet it.
I often think about life as a narrow path.
Not because I believe that there is one predetermined destiny waiting for us.
But because there is usually a difference between the life that is expected of us and the life that feels deeply true.
The expected path is often wider.
It comes with signposts.
People recognise it.
They understand your job title.
They understand your mortgage.
They understand the progression.
The narrower path asks for something different.
It asks you to listen.
To tolerate misunderstanding.
To leave things before you necessarily know what will replace them.
To stop outsourcing every major decision to what looks sensible from the outside.
And increasingly, that is the work I find myself doing with the people I serve.
Because many of them aren’t struggling because they lack ambition, intelligence or capability.
Quite the opposite.
They are often extremely capable people who have spent years becoming successful inside lives that no longer fully fit them.
And eventually, something begins to whisper.
There has to be another way.
Sometimes that whisper shows up as burnout.
Sometimes restlessness.
Sometimes ADHD diagnosis or greater awareness of neurodivergence.
Sometimes losing interest in a career that once meant everything.
Sometimes just a strange sense that the person everyone else sees is no longer quite the person you feel yourself becoming.
The temptation often is to immediately find the next answer.
The next business.
The next strategy.
The next identity.
But perhaps the first step isn’t knowing where you’re going.
Perhaps it is becoming silent enough to hear what you already know.
Two years ago, we drove away from Holland without knowing what this chapter would really become.
Today, I can look around at our daughters, the mountains, the people I get to work with, the guests arriving on our land, the chickens roaming around outside, and the extraordinarily imperfect life we are building...
…and feel deeply grateful that we listened
Not because every decision has worked.
Not because it has been easy.
But because it feels ours.
And I think that is what so many of us are really searching for.
Not the perfect life.
Not the safest life.
A life we can recognise and feel ourselves inside.
