When I built the course behind this website (Gifted Women Thriving - The Course)  I already knew, from my own life, how much plans and dreams a gifted woman can carry around in her head at once — projects, ideas, a calling she's been circling for years — and how strange it can feel that none of that translates easily into actually beginning. There are a lot of reasons for that gap, and a lot of blogs  on this website are devoted to exploring them. But before any of that, I want to say something else about the course itself: it isn't only about Doing — productivity, planning, or better habits. Its actual foundation is simpler than that. It's Being.

This might sound vague. Stay with me for a moment.

The simplest way I can describe it

Being isn't a spiritual concept you need to subscribe to. It's not about meditation retreats or achieving some special state of consciousness. It's much simpler and closer than that.

Being is what's present underneath all your thoughts, plans, and reactions. It's the simple fact that you are here, right now, alive and aware. Not thinking about being here. Not analyzing it. Just this.

I first found real language for this in Eckhart Tolle's work. He's the one who made the word "Being" click for me, long before I ever thought about creating a course for other gifted women. It sits close to what people usually call spirituality, but you don't need any spiritual background, belief system, or practice to recognize it — it's simply what's already here, underneath everything.

You've touched this ‘Being’ before, even if you didn't name it. The moment you were completely absorbed in something and time disappeared. The unexpected wave of gratitude that came over you for no particular reason — standing in a garden, holding a cup of tea, looking at the sky. The quiet that settles after a long walk. Those moments when nothing special was happening, and yet somehow everything felt exactly right.

That's Being. It's not rare and it's not reserved for monks. It's actually your most natural state — and here's the part that's easy to miss: it never actually leaves. Even in the middle of a stressful spiral of thoughts, fully caught up in your head, in everything that feels wrong, Being is still your deepest ground. What changes isn't Being itself, but whether you notice it. In those moments you're simply looking straight past it.

I know from my own experience as a gifted woman how easily you can get flung out of that ground. I know, underneath everything, that Being is where everything else grows from — the ground that carries me, the place where happiness actually lives. And still, staying there is often genuinely hard.

Why "just Be" can feel almost impossible for a gifted mind

For a lot of gifted women, this is exactly where the instruction to "make Being your foundation" easily falls apart. Your mind rarely goes fully quiet. It analyzes, connects, anticipates, imagines, and questions, often about several things at once, and that's simply part of how your mind works — often part of what makes you who you are, rather than something that needs fixing.

I want to be careful here, because I don't want gifted women to be reduced to "people who think a lot", or who always are “up in their heads”. In my experience, gifted women are just as often deep, spiritual feelers as they are thinkers, and usually both at once. You could say that for everyone, the real work is learning to reconcile Being and Doing. For a gifted woman, though, both sides of that equation tend to run hot: the longing for real spiritual grounding is strong, and so is the longing to create things, build things, get things done. Holding both of those at that intensity can be its own particular kind of difficult.

It can mean, too, that the still ground underneath all that activity is genuinely harder to reach, simply because there's so much movement layered on top of it, even though the ground itself hasn't gone anywhere. If this sounds familiar, the path back to being may just need to be sought a little more deliberately than "just Be" suggests. The ground is still there. It's only worth looking for on purpose.

Why we lose touch with it

Western culture doesn't tend to reward being. Doing, Becoming, Achieving, and Having rank much higher in the everyday hierarchy of value. That's not to say Being and Doing are opposites — they're not, and holding both at once is really the whole point of this work. But the culture around us rarely makes space for the first one.

We measure ourselves by what we produce, what we accomplish, how busy we are. At a party, you talk about your job, your latest project, your plans. You're unlikely to make much of an impression by describing how much you're enjoying just being.

So we do more. We plan more. We push harder. And underneath all of that activity, the quiet sense of simply being alive — which is actually the foundation of everything — gets buried.

What happens when doing takes over completely

When you lose touch with being, working on your goals starts to feel like a grind.

You become fixated on the end result. You compare yourself to others who seem further along. You feel frustrated when progress is slower than you want. Life begins to feel like a series of obstacles to overcome before you can finally relax, before you've earned the right to feel okay.

Doubt creeps in more easily. Motivation wobbles. You might find yourself going through the motions without any real energy behind them.

And here's the irony: the harder you push, the less creative you become. Pressure narrows thinking. Anxiety contracts the very capacities — curiosity, playfulness, openness — that make good work possible.

The paradox at the heart of this

Here's what I've found, both in my own life — not only creative work, but the whole of it — and in coaching others:

When you treat your goals as the most important thing, when your happiness and sense of worth depend on achieving them, you actually make them harder to reach.

But when you can hold your goals lightly, when you genuinely know that your value doesn't depend on the outcome, something shifts. You can throw yourself into your project with full energy and without holding back, precisely because you're not desperate for it to succeed. The pressure lifts. The creativity flows more freely. And paradoxically, your chances of succeeding go up.

This isn't resignation, and it isn't half-hearted. It's the difference between working from fear and working from presence, and that difference shows up in everything from how freely you experiment to how well you handle a setback.

Being is not passive

This is worth saying clearly, because "Simply Being" can sound like doing nothing.

Being is not passive. It's alive, awake, and fully engaged with what's in front of you. It's you in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, actually feeling the knife against the board, the smell of garlic, nothing else on your mind for a moment. It's holding your child on your lap after a fall, not thinking about anything, just being fully there together until the crying settles. It's walking the dog and actually feeling the wind, or the rain on your face. It's you, mopping the bathroom floor, simply mopping the bathroom floor — that's Being in action.

And it's just as much you typing the document, making the plan, making the phone call, working on your project. Being isn't reserved for quiet, ‘spiritual’ moments — you don’t need to be in church or in a Zen retreat —it can be fully present in the middle of your work too, the same way it is in the kitchen or on that walk with the dog.

Being doesn't mean you stop caring about the outcome. It means you stop making the outcome the condition for everything else.

You can still give it everything you have. You can still want to do good work and feel satisfaction when you do. You just no longer need it in the desperate, contracted way that makes the work feel like a test you might fail.

For a gifted woman, settling into this kind of being tends to be deeply comforting. You start to see that all your beautiful desires — the projects, the ideas, the callings — are wonderful things to pursue, and that your deepest ground is Being itself. Whether a project succeeds or not, nothing essential is ever really at stake, because the most important thing was never waiting at the finish line. It was already here. That's part of why the course behind this website works differently than most productivity-focused programs. It isn't only about planning, habits, and getting things done. Underneath all of that, the foundation stays the same: the enduring ground of Being you're already standing on.

Which raises the practical question: how do you actually find that ground, in an ordinary day, when your mind is already three steps ahead?

Simple ways back

You don't need to meditate for thirty minutes each morning to access this, though you can if you want to. Small things work too.

Your senses are always in the present. Rubbing your hand over your clothing and actually feeling the texture. Listening to the sounds around you without categorizing them. Looking at an ordinary object — a mug, a leaf, your own hand — as if seeing it for the first time.

Your breath is always here. Even a few conscious breaths, where you actually feel the air coming in and going out, can bring you back from the tangle of thoughts about what should be happening.

Movement helps. A short walk, not to get somewhere, just to walk, has a way of quieting the noise and returning you to the simple rhythm of being a body in the world.

One more thing worth remembering: you never have to create Being. It's already here, always. We wander from it, and then it can feel like we've lost it — but we never actually have. At most it's become veiled, and that's when we start to feel lost and separate, cut off from the quiet happiness that was never actually gone.

Why this is actually good news

Here's the good news: if your sense of okay-ness depended on your goals landing exactly as planned, you'd be handing your peace over to things you can't fully control — whether the book finds readers, whether the business takes off, whether people respond to your work.

But being doesn't depend on any of that. It's available right now, exactly as things are. That means the most important thing, the foundation of everything, is already here. Already yours. That's where happiness actually resides.

Your project becomes something you do from this place, not something you need in order to reach it.

And from that place, the doing tends to go rather well.

— Simone

PS: This is the ground we start from in the course — Module 1 is built entirely around coming back to presence, before any goal-setting begins. If you want a smaller first taste, the free Thriving Women’s 5-day challenge includes the free daily planner and a gentle way to start practicing this today.