Rooted & Adrift

On finding abundance at the intersection of land, sea, and purpose

If you want to test your convictions, feel completely naked in the public eye, and question every life decision you’ve ever made, you can do one of two things:

1. Make a sailboat your home.

2. Start your own business.

And I did both. At the same time.

Sailing life has a steep learning curve and a steep budget with plenty of “Oops” line items — the occasional big surprise, like getting towed into a marina because your engine died, but usually it’s the small stuff: spending a month somewhere instead of a couple of days, never mind sorting out all the gremlins on a boat that’s new to you, even if it’s as old as you are.

Starting your own business means everything is on you. Even if you know what products or services you want to offer, there’s still choosing how and where to register, building a website, developing a brand, marketing, networking — each with its own steep learning curve and a million choices. And if you need investors, your business plan has to look like you know exactly what you’re doing, even while you’re questioning every step.

And I absolutely questioned everything, repeatedly. But what makes these two simultaneous life-altering transitions easier is that both decisions are an expression of my deepest values.

I have been an ocean advocate since preschool. Living on the sea, in rhythm with the currents and the wind, brings me closer to the source of all life and restores me. Dolphins playing in the wake of my bow, Minke Whales feeding in the distance, the colour of the water at anchor — these things don’t just remind me about what I’m fighting for or that not all is lost (despite what the news cycle tells us), they also help me maintain a feeling of awe, wonder, and appreciation for the marvel of life and all the beauty in this world.

Starting my own business is the answer to a question I’ve carried since I was a teenager: what can I do, with my specific set of skills and knowledge, to help build a better future right now? My whole life was spent searching for where I truly fit. I earned several degrees and stacked skills along the way. And when I realised no one was doing the kind of work I wanted to do — I created a business to do it.

My husband and I had walked up a hill with a beautiful view of a lush island and a tiny marina where our boat was safely docked after three and a half long days at sea. It was night. We watched the city lights twinkle and the clouds glow in the moonlight as they drifted past. My shoes were off; I could feel the earth under my feet. It felt so good, I wanted my whole body pressed against the Earth. Lying there, it hit me: I can be both. I can be a gardener and a sailor. I can be connected to the land and the sea.

So often we are taught to label ourselves as one thing, as if that’s all we’re allowed to be. It starts in school, when you’re practically branded as a jock or a nerd or some other stereotype. But human beings are so much more complex than that — and truly, I can’t think of anything in Nature that is just “one thing.” Land and sea are connected. All living things move through cycles and stages.

Lying in the grass, connected to both, I realised this was the abundance mindset I’d been cultivating starting to take root at a new depth.

There are several exciting business opportunities ahead of me, including work with value-aligned people and my own family. We are all doing our best to create abundance for one another because we share a belief that all flourishing is mutual.

Growing up, I never imagined I’d have opportunities like these. I never thought this much abundance would find me; that I could sail to present at a summit while planning a biodiversity-culture project in the Nordic countryside; that I could be an ocean person and share my green thumb.

And that was the wildest part of starting my own business: I just keep taking action as if everything is going to work. I visualised my goals — short-term and long-term — and pursued them, even when timelines stretched or something I’d counted on had to be postponed. I saw every step as going well, as aligning with the bigger picture, as things falling into place the way they were meant to.

And it’s working.

I had to laugh at myself — whenever I started questioning my qualifications or my capacity, I found myself reaching for my own leadership coaching tools. Ha. It *does* work, I giggled silently.

Starting this business is truly a reflection of everything I’ve learned, from my mom teaching me the meaning of “kill them with kindness” when I was three, to environmental decision-making in grad school. It’s built on my experience in program development and a deep appreciation for the power of community. Boat life reinforces that too — people come together quickly around a shared passion, and there’s a baseline of trust between strangers because of what they understand about each other.

The Resources page on my website is a direct reflection of my values. My core leadership coaching services are geared toward mid-career to C-suite professionals and organisations who want to embed regenerative sustainability into their work — but I’m committed to offering things at low or no cost, because accessibility is central to a better future.

There’s a free Leadership Self-Assessment, originally created as a gift for participants in my free workshop series, Rooted Leadership, but available to anyone who wants it.

Drawing on personal experience and an early dive into the harms of overtourism, I created The Place Audit: A Diagnostic Tool for Regenerative Tourism. I’m currently planning a five-week program for tourism operators that invites them to listen to the communities they work within, begin to heal any harms, and build something beautiful together that supports local culture and ecosystems.

The first self-paced course I published is Women Leading Conservation. As I wrote and recorded the visualisation exercises, it became clear this was something I needed to hear myself. The challenges of working in a field with scarce funding, high burnout, and a sense that you’re easily replaceable — we must build our capacity to rest, to feel connected to one another, and to identify the systemic issues we can actually change.

And of course, my love for the ocean shows up in the Restorative Ocean Community Programme Template for nonprofits — designed to be tailored to any organisation’s mission, the community they serve, and the local ecosystem.

Soon, I’ll finish the free community guide to starting a Restorative Ocean Farm and building community networks around it. Like nearly all of my work, it’s place-based, and therefore easily adapted to each ecosystem, permitting jurisdiction, business plan, and set of community values.

I was chatting with my mom about the first Rooted & Rising Leadership cohort. It’s a prime example of continuing to take action from your values, abundance thinking, and as if everything will work out: my mom is co-facilitating and we found the perfect venue in southern France for our Week 3 gathering, with hosts who share our values (and who I stumbled upon when I wasn’t even looking for a venue! But I knew it was mean to be when I saw their name: Root & Rise).

An abundance mindset really is a practice: you must practice seeing opportunities, train your brain to see abundance instead of scarcity or fear; and to do that, you need to be honest about what you want. That’s often deeper work than we expect.

To my readers, and especially my handful of paid subscribers: thank you. The comments, the conversations, and the small auto-deposits from those of you who chose a paid tier or bought me a coffee have been more encouraging than you know. It means everything to know I’m not alone in my thinking, my empathy, and my vision for a better future.