INTIMACY &
Introducing TEAM
Every structure is built from resources. In the Sovereign Operating System, there are five.
Time. Where your hours actually go, not where you intend for
them to go.
Energy. What you have available, and what depletes it versus replenishes it.
Attention. What you are actually focused on, moment to moment, regardless of what is on your calendar.
Money. Where your financial resources flow, and what that flow says about your real priorities.
Movement. Your body, your physical environment, and the literal
motion of your daily life.
These five resources are your TEAM. They are not separate categories you manage independently. They are the actual material your structure is built from. Every commitment you hold, every habit you maintain, every relationship you invest in is drawing from this TEAM.
The question this month is simple, even if the answer requires honesty.
Is your TEAM currently building a structure with integrity? Or is it being spent on a design that no longer matches who you declared yourself to be?
presence
THE 100% - 0 Issue
Connection is Life
Most of us can master ourselves if we invest even a little effort. It's when we engage the outside world that it becomes a big challenge. There's a reason that monks and nuns go into isolation as part of their spiritual growth.
There's value in taking time to yourself, for yourself – so you can see your SELF without interruption and distraction. And then there's life.
There's people, There's a whole world that we live and engage with...and that's when it gets interesting. Connection gives us the abundant opportunity to live deeply, feel fully, and make meaning that matters and creates impact. The quality of our lives is exponentially enhanced by connection because the truth is...We Are One.
"Can you tell us about love?
Hmm, well, there's love of children
Love of self
Love of God
Love of a partner
And all of them have a different shape
But all of them is the same in the end
It's about sensitivity, it's about passion
It's about unconditional giving of self to another person
And there's love of humanity
That's the love that is right now needed most
Love of humanity"
The Carters
Your Connections Are Showing You Something.
opening letter
Six months in and we have arrived at the one that changes everything.
If you are showing up, you have done the real work of building your identity, intention, integrity, clarity, and vitality. But here is what there is for you to understand about this arc – all of that internal work eventually shows up somewhere. In your choices. In your body. In your daily structure.
And in your relationships.
Your connections are not separate from your sovereign life. They are the evidence of it. Every relationship you are in right now — with yourself, with the people closest to you, with your work, with your community — is reflecting something back to you about where you actually are on the inside. Who you have declared yourself to be. The level you are operating from. Whether your structure is working...or not. How present you actually are.
You are connected to it all..because you are the source of it all.
Your life has been speaking to you on loudspeaker. The question is whether you're listening to what it's telling you.
Check it out.
For a long time I thought of connection as something that happened to me. Something I was lucky to have or unlucky to lack. Something that depended primarily on other people — whether they were the right people, whether they showed up, whether the relationship had what it needed to work.
This month we are going to look at that mirror in truth.
We are going to use the evok Connection Scale — a tool we built that measures who and how you're being WITH another, not how much you like them or how good they are– but who you are actually being together. Where you are on that scale in your most important connections right now is data about your internal world and where your internal work is integrating or not.
We're also going to look at what makes connection real beyond shared values or compatible personalities or good communication skills. Those elements are useful but only if who you're being can leverage them for connection.
That kind of connection changes everything it touches. It is also, a new way to see and be in connection. Most of us are Co-existing in a significant number of our relationships while telling ourselves we are connected.
This issue is about telling the truth about that — and then shifting it if you want something new.
Let's go.
Your connections are not separate from your sovereign life. They are the evidence of it.
What I eventually had to see is that connection starts with me.
Who I am being.
How I show up.
What I am actually present to in the moment.
The corporate career that didn't fit. The business vision that kept stalling. The chronic fatigue that exposed my suppression. The relationships that felt hollow even when they looked fine from the outside. All of it was information. Evidence of my internal world expressing itself in the outer one. My life was trying to show me something and I kept looking for the problem outside of myself instead of reading what was right in front of me.
Connection is not about other people. It is a mirror. it is 100% - 0. You have an interpretation and story about eveything around you and that is what you're connected to...your story -aka- YOU.
Connection Is Not Optional
essay
Harvard has been following the same group of people since 1938. Nearly ninety years of data on health, habits, careers, marriages, and what actually determines whether a human life goes well.
The finding is clear and it has held across every decade of the study.
The quality of our relationships is the single most important predictor of long-term happiness and health. These results have been controlled for wealth, IQ, class, and professional achievement. The things we are most likely to optimize for — career, income, status, productivity — are not what determines the quality of a human life. Relationship does.
The participants who were healthiest at age 80 were not those with the most accumulated wealth or perceived success, but those who had been satisfied with their relationships at age 50. Relationship satisfaction at midlife was a better predictor of health at 80 than cholesterol levels. Having a close-knit circle is thought to have a protective impact comparable to, or greater than, known mortality risks including smoking, consuming alcohol, and living a sedentary life.
One more time. The quality of your connections is a health intervention. It is a longevity strategy. It is, by the evidence of the longest study ever conducted on adult human life, the most important factor in whether you thrive.
And most of us are treating it like an afterthought.
The Harvard study tells us that the quality of relationships matters. What it does not explain is what creates quality in a relationship. What makes a connection real rather than nominal. What is the difference between two people who are in the same room and two people who are actually together.
Connection is a whole-being experience. It goes beyond values, compatibility, and personalities. Connection happens when two or more people combine and invest their time, energy, attention, and presence toward something they have declared together.
Connection is a declared, maintained, living commitment. An engaged choosing, renewed in how you show up, expressed in how you actually invest yourself in the relationship and in the shared outcome you are both in it for.
That is what makes connection strong. The combining of whole selves, showing up together, for something that matters to all.
When that is present, connection becomes one of the most powerful forces available to a human life. It does not just feel good. It protects the body. It sharpens the mind. It extends life. It is, as the data shows, the thing that matters most when everything else is accounted for.
When it is absent — when you are co-existing with people while calling it connection, when you are physically present but not actually there, when the commitment has become a contract and the life has gone out of it — the cost is not just emotional. It is physical. It is measurable. It shows up in your health, your cognition, your longevity.
Connection is not optional. It is a requirement for a long and strong life.
The question this month is what quality of connection you are actually living...and does it matches the internal world you have been building across the last five months.
SUMMER
LOVE
The Sovereign Life
LIVE >
FUEL >
READ >
LISTEN >
MOVE >
Lazy Girl Lasagna
FUEL
- Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan over medium heat.
- Add the onion and any optional chopped vegetables. Cook for 2–3 minutes.
- Add the garlic, season with salt and black pepper, and cook for another 2 minutes or until softened.
- Add the beef mince and cook for about 5 minutes, breaking it apart as it cooks, until browned.
- Add the pasta sauce, chicken stock, ricotta, cottage cheese, and Italian herbs. Season with salt and pepper, mix well, and cook for 5 minutes.
- Tear or snap the lasagna sheets into smaller pieces and add them to the pan.
- Using tongs, gently submerge the pasta into the sauce, spreading the pieces out as evenly as possible. Cover and cook over the lowest heat.
- Add a splash of extra stock if the sauce becomes too thick or sticks.
- Check the pasta with a fork—it should pierce the lasagna sheets easily when cooked.
- Sprinkle the mozzarella over the top. Cover again until melted.
- Finish with fresh basil and Parmesan before serving.
- 1 cup ricotta • 100g cottage cheese
- Salt & black pepper, to taste
- Italian herbs, to taste
- 4-6 lasagna sheets
- 1 cup grated mozzarella
- Fresh basil, for serving
- Parmesan, for serving
- Optional: Finely chopped carrot, zucchini, capsicum, or other vegetables
I made this and baybeeee, it was a hit. Oh, and when I took out the cottage cheese, everybody ate it in my house. :)
- 🛒 Ingredients
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 onion, finely diced
- 2 tsp minced garlic
- 1lb lean ground turkey
- 1lb lean hot italian chicken sausage
- 32oz bolognese or pasta sauce
- 2 cups chicken stock, plus extra if needed
The cash flow game
read / watch
If you want to test your connection, play a game and deal with money. Cashflow does both and the wayyyyyys we were being about money, choices, risk, and possibility were not a game. What a time, LOL!
There's a learning curve for this one, but once we got going it was a human behavior experiment on steroids. Bankruptcy, debt, deals, etc. tested our loyalty and connection and it was fun to notice. The bonus was in how quickly financial calculations, terminology, and deal evaluations became natural instinct. Love this game!
WRITING
LEADERSHIP PERFORMANCE PAPERS
I've been writing position papers and articles on identity ownership and leadership capacity versus capability. There is a difference between what you can do and what you WILL do in real time.
Dr. Roni and I are highlighting the real gap between capability and performance, and putting it on paper. Leaders often know what to do and even how to do it, but their self perception is a driving force regarding if and how they actually do what's required in the moment.
Our identity, the idea we have of ourselves, is the lens through which we live and lead and it shapes our beliefs, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ultimately our actions.
Back to heavy lifting and strength traininG
move
Maybe it's the change of season or my own personal rhythm, or both, but I was not in the mood for heavy lifting. I know how important it is, particulary at my age and phase of life – but I just didn't have it in me. I needed ease to the point where it felt like I wanted to be carried, more so than lifting or picking up something else. I know the cost of not listening to my body, so now I stay connected and tapped in to what it's telling me. For now, that's heavy lifting and lot's of stretching.
Redefining "We"
This month it's redefining "WE" as Calvin and I approach empty nesting and retirement. We're streamlining and restructuring the way we operate from "divide and conquer" to whatever TF we want, as long as it's together. Ironically we ended up at dinner at 5pm with matching sweatshirts on...on a Friday. Maybe "we" have already defined it.
LIVE
What Connection Actually Is
It is proximity. It is history. It is obligation dressed up as relationship. It is the comfort of familiarity mistaken for depth. It is two people who have been in each other's lives long enough that the question of whether they are actually connected stopped getting asked.
The evok Connection Scale exists to ask that question.
essay
The evok Connection Scale
How to read the scale
The scale is a truth teller, just like the Intention Scale. It is information, not judgment. Where you are in any given relationship right now is data about your internal world and about the quality of presence and investment you are bringing to that context.
And it can shift. The same relationship can move up or down the scale depending on who you are being in it. You are not fixed at any level. Your being is always in motion.
The question the scale asks is simple and demanding at the same time.
Who are you actually being in this connection right now?
Connection as a reflection
Before we look at the scale, I want to establish something that changes how you read every relationship in your life.
Your connections are a reflection of your internal world.
The quality of how you show up in relationship — the level you are operating at with another person — is a direct expression of who you are being. Your declared identity, your intention level, your integrity, your clarity, your vitality — all of it shows up in how you connect. Or how you don't.
This means the Connection Scale is doing something different than measuring whether a relationship is good or bad, healthy or unhealthy, worth keeping or worth releasing. It is measuring who you are being in that relationship, in this context, right now. And that is information about you.
Your connections are not just relationships. They are data.
What makes connection real
Connection is a whole-being experience. It is created and held through belief, thought, feeling, emotion, and action — all engaged simultaneously, all present at once. When you are fully in a connection, all of you is there. Your mind, your spirit, your body, your presence. You are not managing the relationship from a distance or performing your role in it. You are actually in it.
What holds connection in place is what I call an engaged commitment. This is different from a contract. A contract is transactional and static — it defines terms, sets expectations, and holds people accountable to what they agreed. An engaged commitment is alive. It is a declared, maintained, actively renewed agreement about what you are in this for and how you are showing up. It is re-chosen every time you show up with your full investment rather than going through the motions.
The source of genuine connection is the combined investment of whole selves toward a declared shared outcome. The outcome can be anything — raising children, building a business, playing a board game on a Sunday afternoon, being in a friendship. What matters is that both people have declared it and are investing their actual time, energy, attention, and presence toward it together. That combining is where the connection lives. That is what creates the real experience of being together rather than simply being near each other.
What My Life Was Telling Me
FROM THE FOUNDER
I did not always know how to read my own life.
For a long time I treated my circumstances as things that were happening to me — challenges to overcome, problems to solve, situations to manage. I was always working on the outside of my life. Adjusting the variables. Optimizing the conditions. Looking for what needed to change out there so that things could feel better in here.
What I eventually had to understand is that my life was not happening to me.
It was my own personal life report
It was reflecting me
Every domain of my life was speaking with real receipts. The corporate career that never quite fit no matter how well I performed in it. The business vision that was clear and real but kept stalling in the execution. The chronic fatigue that arrived when I had been suppressing my emotional and spiritual reality for long enough that my body took over the conversation. The relationships that felt hollow even when they looked functional. The connections I maintained out of history and obligation while privately knowing the investment had gone out of them long ago.
My life was giving me accurate information about my internal world — about where I was on the scale, about what I had declared and what I was actually living, about the gap between who I said I was and who I was being in my relationships, my work, my body, my daily life.
The problem was not that my life was broken. The problem was that I didn't know how to read it as data. I kept trying to fix the outside when the message was always about the inside.
When I started reading my life as a reflection rather than as a series of problems to solve, everything changed.
The corporate career was not a failure to be defended. It was eighteen years of information about fit, identity, and what it costs to suppress your knowing in order to belong somewhere you have outgrown.
The business stalling was not evidence that I could not build something real. It was information about the intention level I was operating from and the structure I had not yet built to hold what I was trying to create.
The hollow relationships were not the other people's fault. They were a reflection of the level I was bringing to them — of how present I actually was, of whether I was investing my whole self or going through the motions of connection while being somewhere else entirely.
Reading my life as a mirror is one of the most useful things I have ever learned to do. It is also one of the most confronting. Because once you see your external world as a reflection of your internal one, you can no longer outsource the responsibility for what you find there.
The one question I ask myself when things aren't "working" is "Who am I being, such that I'm experiencing my life this way?"
And that is useful information. Because it gives me agency and I can always shift it. The scale moves. Your being moves. The moment you choose differently on the inside, the reflection outside begins to shift.
Your life is always speaking. It is never not telling you something true.
The question is what are you willing to hear.
All of it was data
The career was telling me something about the gap between the container I was in and who I knew I was as a human being despite it. The business was telling me something about striving versus building from a clear foundation. My health was screaming at me to say what my life was costing me...out loud. My relationships were telling me about my own level of intention with others and with myself.
I was co-existing in more of my life than I was co-creating. And I could see it everywhere once I knew what I was looking at.
stop.
Once a day, pick one connection in your life and ask one question:
What is this connection reflecting back to me right now?
That's it. One connection. One question. One honest look.
Read the reflection. Every connection in your life is showing you something about who you are being – what you are believing, how you are showing up, what you are bringing in and what you are holding back.
The answer tells you where you are on the scale. The question is whether that is where you are choosing to be.
If it's working for you. Stay intentional.
If it is not, the worksheet is for that.
The Practice
Take sixty seconds. Choose one connection. Ask the question. Write one sentence in response. That sentence is your data.
Over a week, you will have seven sentences. Over a month, you will have a map. The map will show you what your connections have been telling you all along.
You will see patterns. You will see yourself.
That is the point.
CHECK.
Connect Consciously and Intimately
Connection is not something that happens to you. It is something you bring to the table — literally and figuratively.
You get to make a conscious choice to show up present and truly BE with another person. That's where you choose to open up, see, and invest into who each of you truly are separate from your stories about each other.
Every connection in your life right now is the result of who you have been showing up as in it. Your beliefs about the other person. Your thoughts when their name appears on your phone. The emotional tone you carry into the room. What you are willing to invest and what you have been quietly withholding.
Your connections are your mirror. They reflect your internal world with a precision that nothing else can.
That is the gift in this work. When you learn to read your connections, you stop being confused by them.
This month, you are not fixing your relationships. You are taking responsibility for your role in them — with full awareness, high intention, and the kind of presence that changes the temperature of a room before you say a single word.
You already know how to show up. You have been doing it your whole life.
The question is whether you have been conscious about it.
That Friday night dinner at 5pm in matching sweatshirts was no accident. That was us being so available and present with each other, that we reflected each other naturally.
That's sovereign connection.