There’s a question I ask the people I coach more than almost any other. Where are you right now? Not geographically. I mean in the arc of whatever you’re going through.
A lot of the time, the honest answer is: in between. The old version of you doesn’t fit anymore, and the new one hasn’t shown up yet. It’s uncomfortable. Most of us treat it as a corridor to hurry through.
My guest this episode has built a whole life on the opposite idea.
Ana Bugalete grew up in communist Romania in the ’80s and ’90s, where the formula for a safe life had three parts: get a diploma, get a well-paid job, and hold on to it until you’re too tired to enjoy whatever comes after.
She left at 23. First Jordan, then Amsterdam, then Bali, and now a small community on the coast of Oaxaca. Along the way, she stopped seeing uncertainty as a threat and started treating it as fertile ground. She calls it the space between.
A few things from our conversation I keep coming back to:
On intuition. She doesn’t dress it up as a gift or anything mystical. “Intuition is perception we haven’t yet become aware of,” she says. It’s a capacity you can train, sitting underneath reason rather than against it.
On collapse. Ana reads tarot, and she used the Tower card to describe what happens when the structure you built your security on falls down. What’s left, she says, are the bricks. And you get to rebuild in a shape that actually fits you.
On belonging. I asked what she’s no longer willing to do to belong somewhere. The answer came back without a pause. “I am no longer willing to be someone else.”
And the big one: in a world of AI, what is the human edge? Her answer has nothing to do with processing power. It’s about being here, in a body, paying attention.
You can listen now: [LINK]
If it lands for you, forward it to someone who’s standing in their own space between.
They’ll know who they are.
I always write these emails hoping something lands at just the right moment. Did anything hit home for you today?
Hit reply and tell me. Even two sentences helps me understand what you need most right now. And I genuinely read every one.
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