It Started With a Cup of Coffee

I didn’t set out to create The Minerva Manifesto. There wasn’t a grand plan, a business model or even an idea that what I was exploring would eventually become something. In fact, at the time I was recovering from burnout and finding my own way back after a long career working in transformation, people development and changing human behaviour.

During that period, I attended an event about success for women. Perhaps because of where I was personally, I was listening and observing differently. I had spent years working with people and organisations through change, so noticing behaviour, patterns and what sits beneath what people say was second nature to me.

As I listened to the women around me talking about success, their businesses, their aspirations and what they wanted to achieve, I began to notice something interesting. There was plenty of positive language about confidence, possibility and creating the life you wanted, but the words and the body language didn’t always seem to match.

There was a lack of congruence that intrigued me.

I wasn’t interested in judging it or deciding what it meant from the outside. I wanted to understand what was actually going on for the women themselves. And perhaps my own experience had made me particularly curious about the gap between what success can look like from the outside and what might actually be happening underneath.

So I started asking questions.

I invited some of the women to meet me for coffee and conversation. There was no intention to coach them, fix them or tell them what they should be doing. I wanted to listen. I wanted to understand their experiences of business and success, what they wanted, what got in the way and what happened beneath the language we so often use when we talk about creating a successful life.

Those initial conversations led to more conversations and eventually became a three-and-a-half-year exploration. I spoke to women about business, money, success, identity, confidence, relationships and the realities of trying to create a life that worked for them. Over time, patterns began to emerge, ideas developed and the questions became deeper. Eventually, that body of work became The Minerva Manifesto.

One of the most important things I took from those years was that business can never really be separated from the person creating it. We can talk about marketing, sales, financial planning, strategy and commercial viability — and we absolutely should. I am a firm believer that a business needs to work commercially. But every one of those things is ultimately being interpreted, decided and acted upon by a human being.

We bring ourselves into the prices we charge and the conversations we have about money. We bring ourselves into how visible we are prepared to become, the opportunities we pursue, the risks we take and the boundaries we create. We bring ourselves into the clients we choose to work with, the businesses we build and even our definition of what it means to be successful.

This is where self-awareness becomes so important.

Self-awareness isn’t about endlessly analysing ourselves or looking for another thing to fix. It is about understanding enough about ourselves to recognise when we are making a conscious choice and when we are simply repeating something familiar.

When we understand our patterns, preferences, strengths, behaviours and influences, we have more information available to us. We can begin to notice the difference between what we genuinely want and what we have absorbed from somewhere else. We can question whether the way we are building our business actually suits us. We can recognise when an old pattern is influencing a new decision. Most importantly, we can choose what we want to do with that awareness.

That distinction matters because there is no single right way to build a business or create a successful life. What works beautifully for one person can be completely wrong for another. The business model somebody else loves may leave you exhausted. Their version of freedom may feel restrictive to you. Their financial aspirations may be too small for what you want — or completely irrelevant to the life you are trying to create.

The more conversations I had, the less interested I became in universal formulas for success and the more interested I became in the relationship between the woman, the business she was creating, the money she wanted to make and the life she actually wanted to live.

That eventually became one of the simplest expressions of The Minerva Manifesto: Do Business. Make Money. Enjoy Life.

The three belong together.

There is little value in creating a business that looks successful from the outside but requires a life you don’t enjoy in order to sustain it. Equally, doing work you love while continually struggling financially creates its own pressures. And making money at the expense of everything else may be commercially successful, but it might not be your definition of a successful life.

The interesting question is how we create our own relationship between the three.

For me, that begins with awareness. Before another strategy, another blueprint or another person telling us what we should do, there are some much more fundamental questions worth asking. What do I actually want? What does success mean to me now? How do I naturally work at my best? What am I doing because I choose it, and what am I doing because I think I should? What kind of business supports the life I want rather than consuming it?

Those questions have been woven through The Minerva Manifesto since those first conversations over coffee. They are still questions I return to myself because self-awareness isn’t something we acquire once and tick off the list. We change. Our circumstances change. What mattered to us ten years ago may not matter today. What once worked beautifully may eventually stop working at all.

There is a certain irony in the fact that The Minerva Manifesto began while I was recovering from burnout. I had spent years involved in transformation and understanding how people change, yet I was also having to look at my own life, my own choices and my own relationship with success.

Perhaps that is why the conversations mattered so much. I wasn’t standing outside the question looking in. I was living it too.

And more than a decade later, I still believe self-awareness is one of the foundations that allows us to Do Business, Make Money and Enjoy Life — in a way that actually belongs to us.

Where does your journey begin?

Self-awareness isn’t about having all the answers. It is about becoming curious enough to ask the questions — about who you are, what you want, what is influencing your choices and what success actually means to you.

The Journey is an invitation to explore those questions for yourself. To reflect, become more aware and make more conscious choices about how you want to do business, make money and enjoy life.

If this has sparked something for you, explore The Journey and see where it takes you.

Explore The Journey