The Story We Keep Telling

Value is funny, isn’t it?

It came up this week in a conversation with a friend who is building her own consulting brand. We were talking about pricing and how to decide what your work is actually worth.

And sometimes the value of your work has very little to do with how long something takes. The value is in knowing what to look for, what to fix and how to get to the answer.

I’ve been thinking about that with The Nexus, too, for example.

I know its value because I’ve spent years inside of it. I know the conversations, relationships and opportunities that happen there. But knowing something deeply can make it surprisingly difficult to explain on paper.

You start assuming everyone else can see what you see, but sometimes they can’t.

So the work for myself isn’t changing the story, just learning how to tell it better.

I also attended the Trilith Foundation’s Flourishing Summit this week, where hundreds of people gathered around a question: What does it mean to flourish?

I listened to people who had lost nearly everything. People whose lives had changed in ways they never would have chosen, yet they stood in front of a room and shared what happened to them and what came after.

They had taken those experiences and used them to help someone else flourish. It touched me.

Because we don’t get to choose every part of our story. Some chapters arrive without our permission. Some change how we see ourselves, our work and the things we’ve built. But we do get to decide what we carry forward from them.

Maybe that’s part of flourishing, too. Not pretending the hard parts didn’t happen, but finding something within them worth passing on.

That’s what I’m trying to do with The Nexus: tell its story in a way that makes its value visible to people who haven’t experienced it by sharing the conversations, relationships and possibilities that make it matter.

And maybe the stories we keep telling are not only the ones that explain where we’ve been, but the ones that help someone else see where they might go next.

That’s value. That’s flourishing.