What I’ve learned while launching The EcoLeader Magazine.

and launching The EcoLeader has been an exercise in choosing that quiet intentionally – letting solitude become a room I enter by choice rather than a verdict imposed by circumstance – a space where I listen past the noise and unlearn the reflex to explain, negotiate, or shrink, and where boundaries and belief learn to live in the same breath.

I discovered that success often begins with the people you do not let in, because walking away from toxic behaviour is less a dramatic exit than a daily practice that sounds like declining quick visibility at any cost, stepping out of meetings that drain the idea of its coherence, and refusing pricing that asks you to apologise for your standards, while saying yes to slower conversations, to collaborators who care about substance, and to readers who understand exactly what you are building; influence changes shape the moment you stop performing for rooms that do not value your presence.

Solitude became a teacher in its own right: in early mornings, before the world had demands to make, I learned to sit with uncertainty long enough to name it, to wait until an idea felt clear enough to hold and simple enough to say out loud, and to accept that some days the quiet would feel like companionship and, on other days, it would make me cry my eyes out – both of which proved useful as I replaced the hunger for constant validation with a steadier rhythm of writing, refining, publishing, listening, and refining again – a cadence that leaves room for creativity without insisting on perfection. When doubt arose, I returned to the smallest proofs of progress: a paragraph that finally aligned, a message from a reader who felt that my work resonated, a story that paired nuance with exacting care. Those moments reminded me that the work stays alive through rhythm rather than spectacle.

The launch also taught me that self-respect is part of the product, because standing up for yourself is governance that lives in contracts and timelines and creative control, and that appears in the way you price your work and defend your calendar; whenever I kept the bar where it belonged, even when lowering it would have bought short-term comfort, the work improved and the right partners arrived, and the boundaries became a form of care for the idea and for the people who engage with it. I learned to trust the process because progress is uneven; trust the audience because the right readers find you when the language is honest; trust collaborators who match intention with competence; and trust yourself because the vision is a system you are still learning to operate, so resilience becomes a collection of small returns to centre – long walks that clear the mind, clean paragraphs that restore coherence, and conversations with people who speak in solutions.

Keeping faith with the idea required a realism that never slid into cynicism: there were days and months when nothing seemed to move and the next step felt like guesswork, yet faith did not mean pretending the work was easy – it meant returning to the why and completing the next clear task and then the one after that, improving what already exists, until trust accumulated as evidence.

Networking, too, changed my life: I once felt I wasn’t enough to sit at the same table as people who seemed to have achieved much more than I had, but instead I found people who care and are interested in my work – founders who open their playbooks, editors who make time, designers who see before they speak, and investors who ask relevant questions. I learned that there are more good people than the headlines suggest, that many are willing to help when approached with clarity and respect, and that generosity – offered first and accepted when it arrives – becomes a force multiplier that keeps the circle moving.

More than anything, launching The EcoLeader clarified my working definition of leadership: it is less about speed and volume and more about clarity and alignment, and what we call regenerative leadership is not a posture to be struck but a sustained form of attention to the systems our choices create, to the cultures our words reinforce, and to the people who are intrigued by the stories we tell, which means influence that restores asks us to hold aesthetic clarity and ethical coherence together and to keep refining the grip.

If you are building something of your own, take what is useful from the in-between: choose solitude when it helps you hear, walk away from what corrodes your standards, sit with uncertainty, including financial uncertainty, long enough to separate signal from noise, price with self-respect, treat trust as a craft and resilience as a rhythm, keep faith with the incremental gains, ask for help and give it back, and notice the good people who show up when the invitation is clear. The EcoLeader is still becoming, and so am I, which is precisely the whole point.