One thing stays the same: Change is ever-lasting.

We're in a comfortable seminar room somewhere in central London, England, in the year of 2018. An evening event, well-attended, with fans whirring quietly to keep the audience cool in the summer heat. Startup founders who've been running their businesses for several years each present their journeys. They are light on slide decks and big on storytelling. Their financials are good, too. The companies are unusual in that they are not merely profitable, but built to support broader social goals.

It's a room filled with earlier stage startup founders and people like me: those who are at either side of their journey. For some, they're finding their ideas, ready to test them out. I'm a few years past stepping away from offering products or services arising from my own ideas. I'm here for reasons I'm not quite sure of. Perhaps I'm looking to rekindle a spark of excitement that's faded? I don't have a business in the present moment, although I've just recently started writing a book...

After the speeches we mingle. The most interesting people tend to be the quiet ones, and I find just the person in a corner of the room: an engineer. Like others here, she's motivated to help her community doing things she's passionate about and opens up about her aspirations.

I offer assurance that it is ok to test and iterate - and fail sometimes - just as engineers must do in prototyping a machine. People will be watching and, yes, they may be harsh. But businesses that succeed require action, bravery, refinement. Ideas that become dreams must stand up to scrutiny and naturally transform over time to respond to customer demands. Change must happen - and it's not a bad thing.

Present day: 2025. Entering rooms like those described above, I usually saw myself as separate. I felt like a bit of a 'has-been' because I'd stepped away and no longer earned any money from a business. I could be proud of the achievements, but the party was over and I felt it. Your soul provides feedback, and I knew that a long-term 'safe' and easy conventional lifestyle wouldn't work for me... But that's what I'd chosen, because I lost much of my confidence. What I didn't know then is that this was down-time as part of a longer-term cycle. Sometimes our soul wants to explore a theme fully and will take us to different extremes. Over the years, my belief that we should take opportunities and go with the flow mutated into a belief that we have to guard against things getting worse. It happened unconsciously

We learn a lot from significant contrast; this is why we are challenged to endure it. My soul took me a long way on one career path, then led me down another, and then others, until I ended up roughly on the same track. I started off supporting others to find ways to pursue their life aspirations, mostly through conventional corporate careers. Now, I assist others in finding fulfilment across all areas of life, through embracing these cycles of change and moving with them rather than against them.

While we have a near-infinite number of choices we can make, I firmly believe that each path we can take has certain events timed to happen. This is what we mean by 'destiny'. We are not destined to take a particular path, but once we choose one dress over another in the store we find ourselves inevitably entering into conversation with someone who's wearing the exact same dress... This is why choice, fate and free will are not mutually exclusive. We have free will to choose and we're operating within a giant decision tree system that funnels us towards certain outcomes. Whichever we pick will have opportunities for huge amounts of change.

Given the choices I made, and the self-sacrificing patterns I continued to embody for many years, I was on a path towards finding reasons to dramatically change myself. Without these detours and experiences I wouldn't have the insight required to serve my audience, my clients, my community. Without wandering down other paths I wouldn't know the true value on being on a path that felt empowering, that felt natural.

I spent a long time not understanding why these changes and cycles were necessary in my life, why these cycles of destruction and rebuilding had to happen. It was far more unpleasant because of my resistance to the reality and what I felt was a slow progression. I like to move fast, so being forced into a sort of 'holding space' to wait was simply not acceptable. The religious dogmas that I was brought up with made me question whether I was, perhaps, just a terrible person. Was I merely being punished for not being supportive enough to others? Or maybe I was simply being too selfish? What had I done that was so wrong? If there was anything that I did 'wrong', it was not prioritising my own happiness and fulfilment from the start. You won't become happy from fulfilling vague duties to others, or consistently doing excessive overtime because you're looking for a promotion at work.

By seeking to understand myself by deconstructing my beliefs, I learned a lot about the kind of person I'd been and who I might be instead. And eventually, with time and effort and the benefit of years spent acquiring knowledge, I started to heal from a past identity that I'd held on to too tightly. My identity could then shift because I became able to perceive it as more mutable. Just because your past would logically take you to a particular destination doesn't mean it has to. Sometimes you're the only person who can't see the person in the mirror, so if you're unsure you would do well to seek advice from someone you can trust.

To summarise, our beliefs shift over time and we don't notice this. We wonder why we're drawn in a certain direction, or why we couldn't avoid a certain experience. What we choose to believe might not actually change the circumstances, but we can find much greater happiness, fulfilment, contentment and peace when we realise it doesn't stop us from getting where our soul wants us to go. Will you trust it and let the hard times roll on, knowing you're going to grow? Change will take you into those dark nights of the soul, but it will be through change that you grow, become stronger and more resilient, and you'll arrive in a new perspective ready for greater challenges.

Thanks for reading, thanks for all you're doing in your corner of the universe. Sharing blessings, friends,

Jules