I've spent my entire career working with people.
From hospitality and professional kitchens to skills development, higher education and academics, health and wellbeing, coaching and leadership development, I've spent years exploring how people learn, grow, behave, connect and experience the world.
And while those fields might seem quite different, they've given me an appreciation for just how interconnected we are as human beings.
Our minds, our bodies, our emotions, our relationships, our experiences. None of these things exists independently of the others.
And across all of that work, something has become increasingly interesting to me.
How much of the work we do with adults centres around developing capabilities that matter long before we become adults.
Understanding our emotions. Recognising what's happening in our bodies. Becoming aware of our thoughts — and learning that we don't necessarily have to believe every one of them.
Learning to navigate difficult conversations. Understanding other people's perspectives. Being able to pause, reflect and respond rather than simply react.
Developing self-awareness. Building meaningful relationships. Understanding who we are, what we need, what matters to us and how we want to show up in the world.
These are significant things.
I've worked with capable, successful adults who are still learning how to slow down enough to hear themselves think. How to recognise what they're feeling. How to listen to what their bodies are telling them. How to connect more meaningfully with themselves and the people around them.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with learning these things later in life.
We never stop developing.
But it made me wonder:
What would it look like if we made more room for these capabilities to develop from childhood?
Not through formal lessons or another programme to complete.
But through the ordinary experiences, conversations and relationships that shape how children begin to understand themselves and the world.
And beneath that professional question was something profoundly personal.
Becoming a mother had changed me in ways I'm not sure I'll ever fully be able to explain.
It has been my greatest joy. But it has also been one of the most profound experiences of personal growth I've ever encountered.
There were things I thought I understood about myself that motherhood made me question. Beliefs, expectations, assumptions and ways of responding that I'd carried with me for years.
Things I had to reconsider.
Things I had to unlearn.
And parts of myself I was still discovering.
I wasn't simply learning how to raise a child.
I was learning who I needed to become to be the kind of mother I wanted to be.
And that was an entirely different kind of development.
Because alongside wanting my daughter to be happy, curious, capable and confident, I began thinking about the environment I was creating for those qualities to grow.
The conversations we had.
The questions we asked.
The things we noticed.
How we responded to difficult feelings. How we made decisions. How we connected.
And the language we used — not only when speaking to one another, but in the ways we might be shaping how she would one day speak to herself.
I started thinking about the little internal narratives we carry into adulthood.
The voice that tells us whether we're capable.
Whether our feelings matter.
Whether we're allowed to make mistakes, change our minds, ask for help or simply be ourselves.
Those narratives are shaped by many influences throughout life. But the interactions children experience with the people closest to them are among the places where that understanding begins to take form.
And that brought me back to something I'd seen so often in my professional work.
So much of what we're trying to develop in adulthood has foundations that we can begin nurturing much earlier.
But here's the thing.
Knowing how important these things are doesn't automatically make them easy to practise.
I can understand the value of being present and still find myself distracted.
I can know the importance of emotional awareness and still struggle to recognise what's happening inside me.
I can appreciate the value of curiosity and still catch myself rushing to provide an answer.
Being a mother hasn't made me an expert at any of this.
It's made me more conscious of how much I'm still learning.
And increasingly, I began wondering how we could create more opportunities for that learning to happen together.
Not just for mothers and children, but for fathers, grandparents, caregivers and the other grown-ups who are part of a child's world.
Because the way we listen, respond, speak, question, play and connect creates opportunities for everyone involved to learn something.
I wanted to find ways to make those experiences more accessible and natural in everyday family life.
Something children would be genuinely excited to explore.
Something that created meaningful opportunities to practise important developmental capabilities.
Something that made room for connection, conversation, imagination, discovery and joy.
And something that invited us, as grown-ups, to participate in our own becoming along the way.
Without turning family time into another lesson, obligation or measure of whether we're doing enough.
That was the beginning of Project Becoming.
A brand built around the belief that some of life's most meaningful opportunities for growth happen through the experiences we share.
And that while we're helping our children discover who they're becoming, we have an opportunity to discover something about ourselves, too.
Because it isn't only our children who are becoming.
We are too.