We Are All Still Becoming

I finished the New York Marathon on a torn calf muscle, slowly and in agony, because I didn't want my kids to watch their mother give up. That's not where my business journey starts. But it's where I understood what it was for.

Recently I was invited to share my business journey, the highs, the lows, and what I've learnt along the way. So let me go back to the beginning.

The person I was becoming started early

My childhood, teens and twenties were rough.

My father and two cousins passed when I was 8, and with my mother grieving and working full-time I largely raised myself. By eight, this was my lens of the world. I had a large, loving extended family, but at home, I was on my own, running household chores.

So I grew up fast. I became independent, a strength that still serves me well today. And through some genuinely poor choices - at school, in destructive relationships - I learnt the hard way that I owned the results of those choices. The successes and the failings, both.

That was the start of who I was becoming. My resilience, my values, my strengths - they didn't appear gently. They exploded out of that period and laid the foundation for everything since.

Three lessons from those years still run through how I do business:

• You alone are accountable for your choices. Blame isn't found elsewhere. Reflect deeply, or repeat the mistake.

• Control is mostly an illusion. There wasn't much I could control other than me - how I show up, how I read a situation, the assumptions and biases I carry into it.

• Life is SHORT. So I sped it up. I prioritised what mattered and stopped making room for the wrong people.

Finding my North Star

Fast forward eighteen years. I'd lost a few more people I loved by then, and "life is short" became more than a phrase and started keeping me awake at night. On paper, I had everything: 15+ years into a successful corporate career, the boxes ticked, two thoughts kept circling. You're selfish. And — why do I feel so empty?

The selfish thought won. I decided to give something back: run the New York Marathon, raise $50,000 for charity. I trained all year. Eight weeks out, I tore my calf. I pushed the physio to get me running again — and six weeks later, feeling confident, I tore it a second time.

The physio told me I couldn't run. I sobbed. I flew to New York anyway, carrying the failing that I'd let everyone down. The feeling overrode the sense, so I ran. Halfway, I needed medical attention. They wrapped me up and told me I was done.

I wasn't done. I finished it, slowly, in agony, broken and barely able to walk. And in that wreckage, I felt something I hadn't expected: a deep sense of fulfilment. It took another twelve months to name what it was. Purpose.

The moment came twelve months later on a day I was rushing interstate for work. On the way to the airport, I stopped in to see a dying family member. He told me, plainly, he was waiting to die. That was the moment I knew: I had to make life mean something. Not wait it out.

Translating purpose into a business

A North Star isn't a slogan you pick. It's something you excavate. Purpose, the values beneath it, what actually matters to you, your strengths and how they line up - eighteen months of that work, and on 1 April 2016, PeopleQ was born.

Our co-created purpose is inspiring cultures to thrive, so people thrive. It underpins what we do, how we do it, who we partner with, who we work for, what we celebrate.

If you take one thing from this: find your North Star. Define the contribution you want to make and the impact you want to have. Dream big enough to play yourself big. I knew the power of purpose then through experience; I understand it now through the science of wellbeing.

PeopleQ turned ten this year. Time flies when the work means something. Happiness, it turns out, lives here too.

Feedback is the price of evolving

Where PeopleQ started is not where it is today. We've evolved every single year and you cannot do that without feedback. We've become radically good at inviting it, formally and informally. Sometimes it stings. It's always a gift. Without it, you're navigating on intuition alone, blind to the facts you don't have and the view you can't see - because owners look inside out, while everyone else sees you outside in.

Get comfortable receiving feedback. Business and personal, both.

Failure is not a detour

Feedback is one half of growth. Setbacks are the other. My most memorable failures have become my proudest achievements - PQfactor, our workplace culture tool, was born directly out of getting culture wrong, experiencing what happens when you do culture part of the time, part of the way, with part of the people.

But a setback only becomes an opportunity if you change your relationship with failure and the narratives you hold. A setback should never divert you from your North Star. At their best, failures force you to improve and improvement has a way of handing back the confidence the failure took.

Business growth needs focus, too, which is why a business plan isn't optional, wherever you are right now. And it's why you need outside voices, people willing to challenge you, stretch you, and give you the "outside in" version.

Happy 10th birthday, PeopleQ.

Across a decade of highs and lows, these are the moments that remind me of the difference we make, and the difference we still want to make. We've never lost sight of two things: our North Star, and the fact that not one of us is finished.

We are all, still, a work in progress.