Why Supporting Collaboration Really Matters to Me for Co-Creating The More Beautiful World

I grew up never really feeling like I fit in with my family or community.

I loved them very much but somehow I couldn’t relate to the things that mattered to them like luxury vacations, and who was getting married or having babies in the community.

I always felt like I came from somewhere out in the stars, and couldn’t help but look up every so often and feel puzzled about who or what had determined my particular landing coordinates on Earth.

Growing up as a young child, in the maze-like metropolis of central London, where play consisted of hitting a tennis ball against a brick wall outside the front of my parent’s small townhouse in a concrete cul-de-sac, I always knew that other worlds, dimensions and timeline possibilities existed, and that somehow, in my dreams or a liminal space that often felt like a dream, I could fly between those worlds.

And as I grew up, and navigated the world of elite corporate and international labour law, that spark never left me.

Deep inside, I always knew.

But I rarely dared to venture into that knowing, for fear of the depths of sadness or depression it might launch me into in light of the London Underground commute, high-rise office, staunch and conservative hierarchy of management and heavy admin-type duties that characterized my day to day reality.

After all, I was “successful” by most peoples’ standards. I was being paid six-figures, so what did I really have to complain about?

And so I settled for the occasional glimpse of heart swelling possibility, through my forays into MDMA at Saturday night electro-dance music parties in Kings Cross with my besties, or while summering on the club circuit in Ibiza.

But, over time, the feeling that so much more was possible rubbed increasingly like friction up against the Truman-show type repetitive grind that I was living. And that spark inside me started to pulse and rumble.

But I didn’t have anywhere to point it or any outlet for it, so the frustration built and I would let off steam by playing it out through one dysfunctional intimate relationship after another. I created drama left and right, sometimes getting away with it and getting an enlivening thrill from it, and other times things would turn nuclear in a way that would affect not only my relationship but risk my income, my job security and my friendships too.

After a series of repeat experiences like this, I developed the idea that the spark that lay inside me actually rendered me radioactive in normal reality.

In 2011, off the back of a dramatic affair, where my life was threatened by the very person I’d been in relationship with for 3 years, I ended up on sick leave from work, with PTSD, taking anti-depressants and hit my knees beseeching to a Higher Power to show me what to do with my life next.

I hungrily consumed personal development material and spiritual texts, trying to figure out how to get happy and how to stop sabotaging myself when, despite the antidepressants, I was exceptionally privileged and really did have everything going for me and therefore had no excuse not to sort my sh*t out.

And all the while I maintained the belief that there was more to life than I could take in from my 5 senses, and that the magic and multidimensional possibilities of my childhood were accessible if I only knew how.

I was inspired to train as a professional coach, with the top ICF accredited coach training program in the US, and finally felt like here was a profession where you could make money WHILE also pursuing your own personal development at the same time. In fact, working on yourself was a win-win in how it also supported you to better serve your clients.

And in the coaching industry I saw the potential for a scalable solution to the lifeless misery I’d seen and lived in the corporate world. I saw a way for people to understand themselves better and to shift out of working habitually for a paycheck and coming into alignment with their true life purpose.

I bought the license to the professional coach training program I trained with, set it up in the U.K., trained hundreds of people from over 50 different countries and turned it into a million dollar revenue generating business in 16 months (from my childhood single bedroom in my parents house, off the back of another failed and toxic relationship, this one having ended after a brief and turbulent marriage).

I was largely working alone in the business, but when I did hire people to support me locally so I wasn’t having to handle absolutely everything myself, it didn’t go well. I would spend 6–12 months training them, pay them almost the same as I was paying myself, they would pedestal me or treat me like some kind of mentor and then something would blow up and I would lose them, be out of pocket and feel like all that time I’d invested in training them was wasted.

And I experienced a similar intensity of conflict in my relationship with the licensor as I had repeatedly experienced in my intimate relationships.

Something was clearly off.

So (a) it became clear to me that this version of reality wasn’t “it” either (it still involved endless striving and grinding to keep my head above water); and (b) I was the common denominator in all of my repeat painful experiences, but for a long time, I couldn’t seem to find someone who was able to support me to bring it to light and move beyond it (until I met Paul Cooper, more on that below).

But again, to the outside world, I would have looked “successful”, given that I had more freedom than most, and my business was making enough money to support me.

After 3 years, in May 2015, I sold out of that company, pocketing somewhere in the region of $300k+, and then, like so many of us — I received a vision.

A Divine download.

It was HUGE.

Humanity. Global consciousness. The planetary tipping point.

You get the idea.

I wasn’t convinced, and questioned the signs I was receiving from Source,

“What?

Me?

Are you serious?”

Apparently, it was.

And there was no ignoring it, or trying to tuck it away in a corner, no matter how hard I tried.

It was crystal clear that the vision wanted my attention and it wanted it NOW.

So I went ahead and put everything I had into building it.

All $300k, and all the time, energy and faith that I had……..

And there were times when I ran out of all of it.

Because even though I had a magnificent, sublime, Divine vision, in order to make it sustainable I would need to:

- Create a robust business model;

- With a solid and consistent revenue generation plan;

- Put out consistent marketing material; and

- Learn and implement whatever tech I would need to build to scale it.

And quite frankly, I didn’t have the skill set. I didn’t know what I didn’t know and no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t born with all the innate gifts and talents to bring the vision fully into reality.

It was so much work trying to handle it all alone, and for the most part I was thrashing around blindly, resenting the living daylights out of the endless marketing and sales coaches who were all spouting the same scripts about getting clear on my “ideal client” and “targeting their pain points”, as the money was hemorrhaging from my account month after month.

And I just kept running into brick wall after brick wall with a finite financial runway to play with.

Even when I hired or partnered with people who had lots of experience, I still found myself without a way to make money.

And, as I soon found out, paying for all those expertise was EXPENSIVE!!

So it wasn’t long before it became clear that I couldn’t do it alone.

That’s when I came across Charles’ Eisenstein’s The More Beautiful World Our Heart’s Know is Possible, and the story transmission right at the end called The Gathering of the Tribe.

When I read it, it I had an experience of viscerally feeling like someone had plugged my heart chakra directly back into Source and my body was noticeably vibrating from it for a while.

It felt like some kind of homecoming. Like everything I had ever known in the depths of my being was being reflected and confirmed back to me as Truth through this story.

That also happened to coincide with me being invited by my then coach, Paul Cooper, to Colorado, with the words, “Come to Boulder, you’ll find your tribe here.”

So as you can imagine, against the backdrop of just having found the Gathering of the Tribe, I didn’t hesitate to book my ticket.

I had already known I was going to need a tribe of people who were equally invested in the vision and that were committed enough to come into a depth of shared reality with me that I wouldn’t be left holding the magnitude of the vision alone.

So, even though many of my friends and family back home in London thought I was a little crazy (or perhaps more than a little irresponsible) I headed out to Boulder on my cosmic treasure hunt.

In Boulder, through Paul, I came into contact with a group of exceptional human beings, that I finally felt met by in all my magic, meaning-making and multi-dimensionality. We would spend hours upon hours deep in conversation and I found that I just kept coming back to Boulder to spend more and more time with them all.

I shared the Gathering of the Tribe story with them and it sealed some kind of shared reality between us.

Over time we started to coalesce around a shared vision; a vision of the more beautiful world that our hearts all knew was possible.

We spent months getting to know each other, continually returning to the fire-pit to tell our stories and share what we were seeing happening in the world at all the different levels of reality.

After 9 months, Paul miraculously received some funding, poured it all unconditionally into the centre of the group, and we discussed and crystallized our shared values as a team.

We had all the gifts and talents needed to bring that shared vision into reality in the world together, but if we were going to traverse dimensional realities (which is a whole other topic for another post), truly embody the more beautiful world and be emanating it here and now, we knew we would likely have to resolve and alchemize the kind of things that have kept human beings from truly collaborating and co-creating from a space of unconditional love, sovereignty and freedom.

So we devoted ourselves to experimenting in in how to do things differently, committed to putting our development as human beings and our relationships with one another first. Restoring to centrality the creative power of a small group of devoted individuals.

Now, before things get weird here, I’m not necessarily advocating that you do the same as we did. Your vision is your vision, and it won’t necessarily require anywhere near as much wading through the relational muck as ours did. But if you’re planning on doing something that you consider to be transformational, or new paradigm, or whatever you want to call it, make no mistake that you’ll still have to alchemize the relevant energetics that have anchored that kind of thing in the limitations of the current paradigm up until now.

What I can tell you is that it was priceless to finally start to cultivate shared reality with a small group of people, who were as devoted to the vision as I was, with a diverse gift set, who finally normalized my experience and perspective in a way that I’d never experienced before and who were not only invested in reflecting back the things that were in my blindspot that would have previously turned things nuclear, but who were also prepared to navigate through them with me from a place of unconditional love, no matter how messy it got.

Because, as you’ll discover if you’re visionary whose received a vision that you can’t not birth into the world, the journey takes more faith, courage, humility and perseverance than you can possibly imagine when you start taking those first steps as a group together. Because when you choose to go into a collaboration together, or delve into even more intimacy by co-creating and birthing something together, it’s not a decision that should be taken lightly.

It’s often tantamount to a serious relationship, a marriage or even shared parenthood.

You’re going to have to learn how to see every one of those teammates as an extension of yourself and to learn to forgive them (and yourself) in times of stress and pressure accordingly, because with a startup success rate of about 5–10% (on a good day) if y’all can’t get past your egos, your tendency to bounce out of uncomfortable situations and hold the other person as the one who’s in the wrong, then chances are, you’re not going to make the evolutionary grade or go the distance together.

And know that, as hard as it is to swallow sometimes, the other people are showing up in your reality in the way they are to offer a reflection back to you of exactly what you need to learn NOW to take things to the next level in both you and the group.

So that’s why collaboration is so important to me for co-creating the more beautiful world.

Because I now know what’s possible in terms of our human development, our relationship development, and our ability to access and express our inspiration, creativity, and act consistently in the world through having a small group that you feel you belong to and can mastermind with in ways that go far beyond our individual selves capabilities to bring something to fruition alone.

If you’ve found your peeps and you’re ready to start laying the groundwork of the foundational team dynamics that’ll set you up to explore and experience the synergy, emergence, fun and adventure in your magical evolutionary co-creation then hit me up.

I’m now opening 3–5 one-on-one coaching slots to work with me, every other week, to support powerful women to access the collaborative and co-creative power that lies within their relationships.

If you want support then reach out to me. Or comment below if you’re interested in having a conversation with me.

With blessings,

Anna