The Beginning

Circa January 2020, standing at the precipice of total burnout, a question settled quietly and unspoken into my body.

‘Where does my ambition come from?’

Sitting on rocks in the ocean, waves crashing, sky grey, phone vibrating with a steady and invasive stream of notifications, I tasted the question.

I rolled it around in my head and my body. Felt the weight of ambition, felt its edges. Felt where it has stung, where it has hurt. I started thinking about what ambition actually is, or more accurately what it is I was interpreting as ambition.

Where it has helped, and where it still helps.

Gradually this question let

Why do we push ourselves to burn out?

Where does our drive come from?

Whose expectations are they?

Who do they serve?

Can career ambition safely co-exist with thriving mental health and spiritual nourishment? Or are they fundamentally at odds, a dichotomy of capitalist society and harmonious free-thinking?

What roles can we play in supporting each other to set collective professional boundaries that create time, space and safety to find balance?

How do we reimagine how we work to prioritise social and environmental wellbeing?

Why do we not all have the privilege to ask these questions, make these decisions?

How do we create more space, more safety, more equity so everyone has the opportunity to choose, to challenge how much of themselves they have to give up every day to survive?

...and the questions kept coming, and coming and coming.

The Formative started as a deep, consistent questioning of why I am the way I am.

That gradually turned into why are we as a collective, the way we are? How did we get here? What are the systems, movements, ideas, beliefs and events that have shaped our world?

And what do we need to help us evolve collectively toward a healthier, more balanced world for all?

Part of the answer for me is rigorously challenging and reimagining our relationship to success, to work, to each other and to the planet.

It’s about prioritising practices for positive impact, on an individual, organisational and community level, and understanding the deep interconnections of individual, collective and plantery wellbeing.

And so The Formative came into being. This work exists in the intersections of self, wellbeing, business, philosophy and impact. It’s a space rich in complexity and nuance, grounded in community and connection, and oriented toward equitable wellbeing.

And it’s ever evolving.

Come along for the journey.