5 Connections, 5 Insights: 31-35 of 100

Project Horizon is a global conversation experiment by executive coach and high-performance consultant Tim Dutton. It aims to uncover diverse human perspectives by connecting with 100 remarkable people worldwide, linked through six referral-based chains.

ON THE GO? LISTEN TO THE INSIGHTS 🎧

31. Free-spirited yogi and artist with no fixed abode

32. Christian pastor who likes to experiment with hobbies

33. Web designer, artist and (I would say) modern-day philosopher

34. Indian CEO of a games designing company, passionate about personal development

35. Bangladeshi medical researcher living in Germany

This call cost me £168.

Neither I nor the free-spirited yogi had enough signal for Zoom, so I decided to phone her. Without thinking, I just clicked her name in my contacts and hit call.

Do not be mistaken: it was a wonderful conversation.

She told me her story. Moving to Japan at 17 to model. Overcoming life-threatening illnesses. Moving to India to study yoga with the masters. Building a successful fashion business there and exporting to the UK. Getting married and having a daughter. Becoming a sought-after wedding photographer after following her instincts and capturing more artistic shots. Reinventing herself again as an artist, showcasing work at exhibitions in Barcelona. And, above all, living by a simple rule: say “yes” to life.

The free-spirited yogi has no fixed abode, having sold all her possessions years ago. She spends much of the year staying with friends in Spain.

Unfortunately, this didn’t alert me to the Spanish number I had called. And even if I had noticed, I assumed charges only applied if the receiver was physically abroad.

Wrong. Despite her being in Yorkshire, I was charged an arm and a leg. I only discovered it months later when the phone bill came through, followed by some detective work on my part.

Well, now I know. But when all is said and done, what I’ll remember most is an inspiring conversation with a unique woman who truly lives life her own way.

Connecting with a Christian pastor was exciting because it was so different to everyone else I had spoken to.

He had been referred to Project Horizon by the ex-Army MMA gym owner who had found God later in life as a way of making sense of his experiences. The pastor had guided him on that journey and was therefore a meaningful person in his story.

This insight isn’t really about religion, though much of our conversation touched on Christian values, beliefs, and misconceptions. Instead, it’s about how even the pastor sometimes doubted his impact in the world.

His story was that he had worked in the corporate world at Jaguar Land Rover before realising that the company’s values jarred with how he wanted to live as a Christian. He left and trained to become a pastor.

For those who don’t know, a Christian pastor’s role usually involves providing pastoral support to the community, offering spiritual teaching and leadership, and handling church-related administration.

What struck me was that the pastor admitted that, on difficult days, he sometimes questioned whether his work truly made a difference. He spoke about resisting the temptation to compare his current role in a small town in the north of England with his old corporate career. I sensed he sometimes wondered what his life might look like financially and professionally had he stayed on that path.

This surprised me because I had made a few false assumptions. I thought that because his faith was unshakeable, he would also have an unwavering belief that his role as a pastor was the one thing he must do. To hear that he occasionally daydreams about alternative paths, including his old corporate job, didn’t fit with my expectations.

Why did I assume that strong beliefs automatically remove self-doubt? How peculiar.

The web designer was described to me as a philosopher. As a result, I was expecting a heavy-ish conversation. Like his referrer, he studied physics at university, which definitely seemed to underpin his way of seeing the world.

In his spare time, the web designer creates art. He told me that he’ll do things like painting a landscape over a period of many days at sunset. By returning to the same scene at sunset, the variation in light from day to day emphasises or deemphasises certain features of the painting.

He explained that a sunset is an example of an interstitial or liminal space. I had heard these words before, but hadn’t really considered in the context he used them. The web designer used the words to describe “places which mark the transition between different states, at which there is communication and interaction between elements, leading to interesting behaviour”. These “interesting behaviours” tend to lead to a lot of human interest.

The web designer gave me a bunch of liminal spaces to consider:

1. Sunset and sunrise. The space where day meets night and the behaviour of light makes the world appear different (e.g. golden hour).
2. The coast. The point where the sea and land interact to create unique landscapes like beaches and clifftops. There also tends to be interesting climates and biodiversity in these places.
3. Storms in particular, where high- and low-pressure fronts meet and mix, producing energy which can lead thunder, lightning, hurricanes.

The web designer sent me an enormous email after our call with more examples, including climate and geological transition points, as well as stuff around stellar evolution. I say ‘stuff’ because I don’t understand it. When he mentioned looking up “anti-de Sitter/conformal field theory”, I was flattered that he thought I had the required mental capacity.

I began thinking about other examples of liminal spaces. Dreaming, for instance, feels like a liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, where consciousness shifts and vivid imagery emerges.

New Year’s Eve, where two years meet, seems to be a constructed liminal space which inspires people. Despite it being (objectively) just another day, the moment can stimulate reflection on the year just gone, as well as a provide a renewed energy for many to embrace change and chase their goals.

I really enjoyed my conversation with the web designer (or should I say, the philosopher). Now that I know about these fascinating transition points, I wonder if I will seek them out more intentionally and enjoy them even more.

Connection 34 was an impressive guy.

Originally from Delhi but living on the Isle of Man when we spoke, he’s the CEO of a company that builds bespoke games for online gambling sites. What stood out was his relentless drive to improve himself. It wasn’t surprising when he mentioned that he had hired executive coaches in the past.

Having spoken to an American executive coach a few weeks earlier (see my last article), it was fascinating to hear a CEO’s perspective on the process.

The key point he highlighted was that a coach must remain more “mature” than their clients. By “mature,” he meant continually developing in areas such as self-awareness, self-regulation, constructing effective mental models, and honing their coaching ability. If a client’s development begins to outpace that of the coach, he felt it often marked the end of the working relationship.

Having spoken to people who described leaving their coaches because they’d “got all they could out of it”, this idea really resonated with me and is a reminder to invest in myself just as much as I invest in others.

This reminds me of a semi-related phrase I heard years back which was “you can’t pour from an empty cup”. Whoever said it was describing how you must put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others. That’s where this insight can be abstracted from the coaching realm and translated into everyday life.

In my own field of human performance, the pressure on universities to increase student numbers can sometimes mean that research topics feel narrow or uninspiring.

That’s why it was refreshing to hear from someone working in a different discipline, where it sounds like some inspiring work is being completed.

At the time of our conversation, Connection 35 was completing is PhD in molecular biology. He’s from Bangladesh but studying in Germany.

His research project specifically focuses on developing cell-based therapy for bacterial infections on implants. He’s essentially engineering cells to be autonomously responsive to infection. This involves getting the cells to secrete antibacterial proteins to kill bacteria. These cells are then attached to the implant which goes into the body to reduce the chances of implant failure.

The PhD researcher explained that whilst a solution is far from being established, the field of genetic engineering and modification has come a tremendous way since Watson and Crick discovered DNA in 1953. He pointed to a number of rare genetic diseases which have now been proven to be treated by the deletion or addition of specific genes.

It’s always inspiring to speak to someone who is pushing the frontier of human understanding. What’s more is that his work could lead to developments which truly impact the quality of life of many in a way not previously thought possible.

These five conversations reminded me that saying “yes” to life can open remarkable paths, that even people of deep faith still experience moments of doubt, and that humans are fascinated by the spaces between things. They showed me that investing in your own growth is essential if you want to help others grow, and that science continues to push boundaries in ways that can genuinely transform lives.

Next time: Insights from connections 36–40.