The spark* blog
Thoughtful insights for socially responsible entrepreneurs who give a ****! Honest conversations about impact, wellbeing and creating sustainable change.
Don’t look it in the eye
Time, money, experience - a founder I worked with knocked down every excuse for not building her new product, and still wasn’t building it. This is about the creature we call excellence, what happens when you look it in the eye, and the safer direction to look when you’re stuck halfway up. Written the week it happened to me.
The rules of a game I was already winning
At 17 I was told two in a hundred of us would make it as artists. I’d been selling work since I was 14 and had no idea that was unusual. This is about what happens when someone hands you the rules of a game you were already winning - a year of strange drawings, 1,200 wishes on three cherry trees, a founder whose gut was right, and the design I didn’t bother to protect.
Are all those courgettes?
The packet had fifteen seeds in it, so I planted fifteen seeds. A quarter of everything I could grow that year went into a vegetable I ended up leaving on a footpath for strangers. A client who’d sold her business and given herself a year out made the same mistake with her time, filling it with everything she wanted in slivers too thin to get into. This is about the difference between deciding what you want and deciding how much of it you want at once.
Now class, we’re going to do downwards dog
A woman I trained with had been a clown, touring Europe with a circus. The first thing they teach you at clown school is to walk out, look up, look round at the faces, and pause before you begin. A founder I worked with used to go blank in pitch meetings because she cared too much about the outcome, and what she found to take into the room with her came out of a yoga class. This is about doing the confident thing before you feel confident.
‘Always in beta’
Three words changed everything for one client who was waking up at 3am unable to breathe. 'Always in beta' sounds simple - but it's one of the most powerful tools I've seen founders use to break the loop of perfectionism and procrastination. This piece explores where that phrase came from, why the 'right moment' is usually a myth, and what it really means to give yourself permission to begin.
The choice was never between pressure and vanilla
Are you using pressure to drive yourself forward - or to prove you're not going backwards? A client recently told me that stopping the push would be 'like giving myself a lobotomy.' I knew exactly what she meant. This piece explores what high achievers get wrong about pressure, ambition, and the fear of going vanilla.
You're not stuck. You're thinking alone.
She'd been running her creative business for 14 years. She knew exactly what she wanted to do next. And for six months, she'd done absolutely nothing. Sound familiar? In this post, I explore why founders get caught in the spin cycle - and what actually breaks it. Spoiler: the answer isn't more thinking.