Little Giants, Standing Apart
Specificity
Sometimes you’re very clear what help you need.
These little giants mainly wanted a storefront.
We just needed to land on what that looked like.
Sweet and simple.
Stories from the Foundry
Self-Starter
Han Lans spent decades photographing lives around the world. Lives staged, impromptu, at highs and in the depths of low. His signature reportage-style captures the emotions under the surface, making him a sought after photographer across genres — from fashion to medical, and everything in between.
Han’s ask was very simple. He wanted to put his medical campaigns portfolio onto a website — so existing and new clients could easily access samples of his portfolio.
But he didn’t want me to build it. He wanted me to show him how. So I happily took a trip to Amsterdam, where he was based, and over mugs of coffee, with his teenage kids popping in and out for chats, and sat with him as he learned how to put a simple website together that served his needs.
Reinventing Lives
I love me a woman who defies the odds.
“Saleemah Ismail is the CEO of New Life Stories, a non-profit dedicated to breaking the cycle of incarceration for families. With over 15 years of international development experience at UN Women and the UNDP across Asia, she is a lifelong advocate for underserved populations. She also co-founded Aidha, a financial literacy school for migrant women. Today, she serves on a few non-profit boards, championing social mobility, diversity, and inclusive growth for at-risk communities.”
That’s how she is described by industry peers. But I’ve had the privilege of being friends with her for 28 years, and when I met her, she was a manager at a call centre. Even back then, she had a dream to serve her community. Few believed in her - not even her closest friends - but she was undettered, enduring several years of underemployment to pursue her calling.
Saleemah asked me to do two projects for her. One: to help her write a proposal for support and funding for an idea she had to build a transition house for mothers newly released from prison — a place for them to continue building on skills to find work, and more important, a place for them to begin the difficult journey of reconnecting with their families and their children. And two: having successfully secured a large space for her charity, to help her design it as a multifunction space for her social workers to work from, and for families who come for counselling — a haven for the community and the clients she serves.
Boundaries
Gido was a former fellow-student when we were both doing a Masters in Applied positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology. Several years after graduation, he contacted me to help him build a website. A straightforward request. In our subsequent conversation to get a brief, we realised he also needed a positioning — in the sense of: what does GVDG stand for, and what makes him different from other executive coach?
His personal and professional trajectory was where the answers lay. Giving up his successful corporate life in search of meaning, while having to support a young family, his return to school and a pivot in career went against conventional wisdom.
And we all know, “conventional” is not a space where real change happens. It takes courage, but Gido challenges his clients to break down boundaries, the walls that hold them back from an expansive life of meaning and purpose.
Fundamentalist
Yvette had been teaching yoga for many years. But it had always made her uncomfortable. Modern day yoga focuses on asanas — brilliant but it misses the entire understanding of what yoga is. And for many who come to yoga for a way to connect more deeply with themselves, to learn the ways to de-stress from the hyperactivity of the modern world and their minds, what they found in studios and yoga retreats were bandaids where deeper excavation was needed.
She decided to go back to the fundamentals, and spotlight the practice of yoga to better help her clients; focusing on four principles: ethical living, breath awareness, meditation and self-realisation.
The help she needed was specific: talk her through how to transition her business, while staying true to her practice, and herself. There were doubts in the beginning — that’s par for the course for founders. Our conversations helped cut through the fog of what she felt called to do, the different paths open to her, and the cost of each — because there is always a cost in one form or another.
Accepting that reality is a fundamental part of the practice.