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I’m going to tell you about the tools I use to run my business that would get me laughed out of most boardrooms I used to sit in.
I’ve always been woo-woo curious. It all started when I was five, when my father had a workplace accident. He had a near-death experience, and had a few unexplainable things happen to him that were far too cosmically connected to be a coincidence.
But as I grew up, I attached myself to my logical brain and traded the unknowable for hard facts. I mean, I’d become a strategist with an MBA and close to two decades building businesses that relied on making money, not magic.
Then in 2017, it all came apart. I’d moved my family across the world for the job I’d spent my whole career chasing. Big title, big salary, the global role, everything I thought I wanted.
I remember the exact moment I knew things had to change. I was standing at the kitchen sink, washing my hands, and I heard a voice. Loud and clear. It said: you’ve spent your whole life climbing this ladder. And I knew, the way you know something in your gut before your head can argue with it, that I’d climbed the wrong one.
I lovingly refer to this as my breakthrough now. At the time, it was a total fucken breakdown. A shit show like no other. In the thick of it, none of my existing tools worked. No amount of strategy or logic or sheer competence could tell me who I was without the professional identity I’d been chasing.
So I started reaching for unconventional tools. The kind that get me centred enough to tell the difference between a yes I’ve argued myself into and a yes my body actually recognises.
I haven’t ditched the strategy; I’ve just stopped letting it overrule what my gut already knows.
I know. This sounds a bit extra, but maybe I’m just drawn to this stuff because in astrology, my sun sign sits in the eighth house, the house of death. Either way, these are the tools I reach for when I’ve lost sight of what actually matters, and they’ve done the heaviest lifting by far.
I contemplate my own death, on purpose, and often.
It all started with The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer, a book I’ve recommended to everyone I’ve worked with. There’s a chapter on death that asks what you’d do differently if you knew your days were numbered.
I use it as a filter. When I’m spiralling over something in the business, an email that stung or a number that didn’t land, I ask whether it would register at all if my time were nearly up. No surprises here, but most of it wouldn’t. I feel the knots loosen on the spot, and what’s actually worth my energy gets obvious.
Death is the most honest prioritisation tool I own.
The next one you’ve heard me talk about before. I hold funerals for the versions of me whose time is up.
When I left corporate, I gave my corporate self a proper one. This is not a metaphor; I held an actual burial. I wrote her letters and played sad music, and I cried like I’d lost someone, because I had.
It sounds dramatic, but keep in mind I am of Italian heritage, have a Leo star sign AND a third child. Joking aside, the drama is the point. Your head can decide to move on all it likes. The old version only loosens its grip when you mark the ending with your body. Only then can you see who you’re becoming clearly enough to start rebuilding. I do a smaller version every time I outgrow a way of working that used to run me.
The next tool is a little weird…when someone or something is still living rent-free in my head - a touch boss or a past situation that’s holding me back - I cut the cord. Literally.
I set four candles around me, loop a cord around my body, cut through it four times, and name out loud what I’m letting go of. This is called a Cord Cutting Ceremony.
The body needs the ending made physical, same as the funeral. Resentment is a tether, and you can’t build forward while a chunk of your energy is still wired into something you’ve left behind.
I know it’s worked when I stop rehearsing fake arguments in the shower.
The next lot are different. The death tools clear space and show me what matters. These tools bring in information I can’t reason my way to.
The biggest calls in building something new have no data behind them, and this is where my corporate brain can short-circuit. There’s no business case for a thing that doesn’t exist yet. So when logic taps out, I ask for input from somewhere else.
The first is asking the universe for a sign.
I got this from Laura Lynne Jackson’s book, Signs. Her rule: ask for something specific and unusual enough that you can’t miss it. She asks for aardvarks and armadillos. I ask for owls.
Late last year I knew I had to change one of my most lucrative income streams, and I was terrified, because the old one was making good money but deep down I knew the market was changing. So I asked the Universe to show me an owl, in a drawing, somewhere I’d never expect it, within 72 hours. Then I forgot about it.
Two days later I was watching some random show my sister told me I had to watch immediately, and a character knocked on a bedroom door. Beside it, there was an enormous drawing of an owl.
Out loud, to my empty living room, I said, “oh, fuck. There it is.”
I made the change, and I’ve never once doubted it.
The second is believing in Big Magic.
For years I sat on the fact that I was building my whole method around Human Design. I was sure I couldn’t validate it, that the corporate crowd would write me off as a woo merchant the moment I said it out loud. So I kept it to myself and called it being a ‘smart business person’.
Then I watched Lacy Phillips bring a neuroscientist, Dr Tara Swart, into To Be Magnetic to put real science behind manifestation. The exact move I’d been too scared to make. She did it brilliantly, and it was the kick up the ass I needed. Someone braver had simply done the thing I was sitting on. This is what Elizabeth Gilbert means in Big Magic when she says ideas are alive: sit on yours too long, and it gets bored and goes looking for someone who won’t.
So now, when something lands, I move on it before it leaves. The version of me that waits for permission has cost me enough.
The third is the tarot.
I’ve pulled cards since 2017, and I still can’t believe how spot on she is. I had a Tarot reading a couple of months ago, and the reader told me I’d come down with a sinus infection. A week later, having completely forgotten the conversation, I woke up with one.
Come on, that’s weirdly specific.
I use Tarot most before a big client day. I get still, pull a card, and ask what this person needs to hear from me today. One morning I pulled the Three of Swords, the heartbreak card. I’m a business mentor, and I thought, what am I meant to do with this…was there business heartbreak?
On the call, I followed it anyway and steered us gently toward matters of the heart. My client went silent, then told me she was on the edge of leaving her marriage. We spent the session making room in her business for what was actually happening in her life. Best conversation we ever had.
I’ve stopped trying to explain how it knows. I just trust what comes up, and I bring it into the room.
Signs, big magic and the tarot are the tools I reach for at a crossroads, when I need input I can’t generate on my own. This last group is different. They run underneath everything I do every day.
These two aren’t about big decisions or cosmic questions. They’re how I manage my own mind and body in real time, so the fear and the old corporate programming don’t end up driving.
The first is catching my limiting beliefs and putting them on trial.
When a fear thought shows up, something like this will never work or I can’t pull this off, I catch it. I picture myself plucking it out of my head and holding it up where I can see it. Then I interrogate it like a detective. What’s the actual evidence this is true? What evidence have I got that it’s false?
Most of the time the belief is running on nothing, just old programming and a bad day. So I loosen its grip and swap it for something truer. I do this with my clients, and with my son!
It’s the most portable thing I do, and it costs nothing.
The last one is Human Design, and I lean on it harder than all the rest.
If astrology is your wise auntie, Human Design is the friend riding shotgun, practical, present, telling you when to turn. For me it’s a somatic tool, a way of reading my own body as data.
In my twenties and thirties I’d let my logical brain talk over my body every single time. The body would say no, go tight, go cold, and I’d push through anyway because the plan made sense on paper.
Human Design taught me to stop doing that.
Now, when my mind is building a beautiful case for something and my body has contracted, I pause. That contraction is information. It’s usually right, and it’s usually faster than my thinking. The whole point of everything else on this list, the death, the signs, the tarot, is to get me back to that signal. This is what keeps me there, every day.
On the surface, these tools have nothing to do with each other. Underneath, they’re all doing the one thing corporate trained out of me: they let me act on what I know without having to prove it to anyone first.
Because for two decades those rooms trained something specific into me: a deep distrust of any knowing I couldn’t put in a slide and defend. So I overrode the gut, talked myself out of the thing I’d sensed on day one, and called it being “rigorous”. Most of the women I work with have done exactly the same, and the clarity was never the problem, only the permission to trust it.
So no, none of this is in a strategy deck, and yes, it’d still get me a few raised eyebrows in the rooms I used to sit in. I’ve made my peace with that. These tools gave me back my own authority to know something is right for me without a single person in a meeting agreeing, and I’m never handing that back.
PS. These tools aren’t something I only do alone at my kitchen sink. They’re built into how I work with people inside Polywork: the strategy and structure you’d expect, sitting alongside Human Design, reading the body as data, and the practices that get you back to your own signal when the noise takes over. Most of the career advice out there hands you tactics and stops. I work the other layer too, because the calls that actually shape a portfolio career rarely come from a spreadsheet.
Polywork hit 60% capacity in its first three weeks, and I’m a bit stoked about it. While there’s still room, you can come in as a founding member: one payment, lifetime access. Once I’m full, Polywork moves to a monthly membership.
I’d love to welcome you in before it does.
If this landed, share it with someone who’s sitting on raw materials and doesn’t know what to do with it yet.
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