Hello lovely humans,

Lisa Gibbons met her reckoning on a Monday morning in Carcassonne, France. Flat on her back in an Airbnb, fully conscious, fully aware, but unable to move or speak a word. A brain aneurysm and a stroke had paralyzed the right side of her body and shut down her speech and cognition.

The Lisa I knew was the life of the party. Pure joy. Flying around the world at the drop of a hat. Effervescent is the word that comes to mind. We worked together for a few years, and my enduring memory is the consistent laughter and enthusiasm that bubbled out of Lisa. But on that day in Carcassonne it was anything but bubbly. Her friend was darting around the room in a panic. Lisa describes just laying there, taking it in. As she puts it with characteristic understatement, she had to be airlifted out through the window “just to add to the drama.”

In the middle of the drama, she discovered that she wasn’t afraid. She describes feeling peaceful. Calm. When the ambulance reached the hospital, her first instinct wasn’t to fight — it was to feel safe, and just close her eyes.

Two and a half weeks in intensive care, then a flight back to Amsterdam to begin rehab. Then came the bad news, because rehab came with a chorus of expert opinions, and most of them were grim. All of them pointing at a very different life than the one she had been living. The professionals were doing their jobs but they were also suggesting she wouldn't be who she used to be.

So Lisa made a choice. She decided to trust the voice insider that was saying, you’re going to be ok. In that moment, she decided that voice, not the prognoses, would be her navigator. Two years on, the word her own doctors reached for to explain her recovery was miracle. Their word, not hers.

Two months in, learning to walk and balance again, she’s wobbling through a little circuit her physio has set up. He’s bouncing a ball, chatting, and then without warning, he throws it at her. And she catches it. Right hand. The arm that hadn’t moved. The arm that had shown no sign of movement at all, snapping up in time on pure reflex. She burst into tears and screamed “do it again.”

That’s the moment. Not the catch. The do it again.

We tell ourselves resilience is about gritting your teeth and enduring. Lisa’s story is more practical than that. What she actually did was choose her own compass and then she did what Lisa always does, she made if fun. She gamified the recovery. Her phrase: “fear was my best friend.” She turned the terror of a body that wouldn’t cooperate into a game she could play one rep at a time, trusting that the brain is built to protect you and will, given the right prompts, find a way through.

Which is why we’re sharing Lisa's story with you.

Almost everyone in this community has, at some point, been handed a prognosis about who they are now. You’re past your best work. You’re a finance person, not a creative one. You don’t do change. The title, the company, the identity you built, that's all you are. This is the ceiling. The external voices delivering these verdicts are often credible. Sometimes they’re your own. And the temptation is to accept the grimmest expert opinion in the room because it at least sounds responsible. Being pessimistic often sounds smart, but it's not helpful.

Lisa’s life is an argument for a different move. Not ignoring reality. She still put in the work. She did the rehab, took it one wobbling step at a time. But she also refused to let the most limiting story be the one that navigates. She didn’t will a brand-new self into being. She trusted that the capacity was still in there, and she practiced it back into use, step by step, catch by catch.

You don’t need a stroke to learn that lesson. You need it any time you find you have accepted a smaller story than the one you suspect is true. So this week, ask yourself Lisa’s question: which voice are you letting steer your life? The one cataloguing everything that’s no longer possible or the one that keeps insisting there’s a next chapter worth practicing into existence?

Lisa would tell you to trust it. To feel the fear, and say do it again. In her own words “When we trust, and surrender, and live in love, the magic of life navigates you and provides everything you need.”

Here’s to trusting. Here’s to the rebuild.

Richard & Devon