“You don’t hear a click. You feel it in your soul.”

“You don’t hear a click. You feel it in your soul.”

This is a line from Stephen King’s If It Bleeds, a book I took out of the library last week. Technology and the way we engage with it runs through parts of the book, which may well be where his language of the “click” came from. I am not sure it was written in quite the context in which I heard it, but perhaps that is the point: it landed somewhere entirely different in me, made perfect sense, and I would like to reflect on why.

For many years I have felt the pull to share my learning. It arrived at about the same time that I discovered I could write and, like every creative activity, my writing was likely terrible to start with, but through the process of writing something deeper seemed to flow through me. Over time I have come to believe that this is part of my sense of purpose.

Like other writers, I have also come to measure the impact of that purpose by clicks. Clicks on a website, clicks on social media, clicks on YouTube. And because those clicks are purpose-linked, they are not just heard, they are felt. At soul level.

Also, like other writers, I often question not just what I say, but why I say it. I come from a generation that balks more than slightly at the thought that someone might think I am simply looking for attention.

“What is wrong with that?” my daughter asked me when I verbalised this. “Attention has to come before engagement.”

How did I miss something so obvious? Of course it does. Before someone can engage with anything we put into the world, we first have to catch their attention, and perhaps a click is simply one small signal that this has happened.

Over my career I have written about many different things in both personal and professional spheres. Sometimes they interlink and sometimes they don’t, but everything I write is, in some way, a vehicle for sharing experience. I share how I have failed so that I can share how I have succeeded, because one of my most profound lessons was learning that failure, despite what the education system tried so hard to drill into me, is one of our most valuable paths to learning.

Failure is not something to be avoided but something to be understood, and the trick in entrepreneurial leadership is to fail fast, admit it and adjust. All three steps are hard, but that is just the lay of the road.

Entrepreneurs also have a very particular relationship with success because, somewhere along the line, there has to be money. Not greed, money. They are different things. Purpose may be the reason we start, but money is what allows that purpose to survive, because any venture that hopes to grow, employ people, reach more people or simply continue doing what it was created to do requires resources. Money is not the purpose; it is the vehicle that allows purpose to travel.

In Path of the Lion I created an entire pathway for entrepreneurial leadership, but in order to follow it, failure had to be placed into context, right from the first steps, and so did success.

Success in our personal lives, though, may be more complicated, because we have to understand not only how failure happened but how to separate what society has told us is failure from what meaningful success actually looks like to us.

In Writing Myself Home, I invited readers into some of the most traumatic experiences of my journey as a woman through gender-biased music and professional environments, through motherhood, through emigration and through the loss, in my mid-fifties, of a marriage that had spanned more than thirty years. In almost all of these experiences, society was telling me that I had failed in some way.

Writing about them was partly my way of processing what they had meant and why, but it also became about something bigger than me. These experiences were inherently linked to the journeys of women through the past decades and towards the next ones, and to the way expectations and traditions are passed between generations, often without us ever consciously agreeing to carry them.

At the heart of my book was the realisation that inheritance did not equal consent, and that consent does, in fact, require a voice.

I find myself thinking about that again now, because if entrepreneurial success requires financial sustainability, what does success look like in a personal capacity for a woman of my generation? And what will it look like for our children and grandchildren, who may inherit many of the same definitions but surely have the right to decide whether they consent to them?

Which brings me back to the click.

I felt one in the Stephen King novel I am reading. A novel I took out of the library in a brand-new town I have come to live in, as a woman navigating a brand-new life that looks very little like the lives of the women who came before me.

I am reading it while sitting in the spare room of my daughter’s house, while I wait for my knee replacement to heal, my new house to be completed and my new life to begin. It is a life I am starting out completely by myself for the first time ever, and one that parts of my social programming still try to label as failure: a marriage ended, a home lost, a life dismantled.

And yet my spirit continues to fight for the fire it still feels and the space to breathe, as I make my way towards a new landing space.

Perhaps this is where “inheritance does not equal consent” becomes more than something I discovered while writing a book, because I also get to decide which definitions of success I carry forward with me and which ones I leave behind.

And this, I think, is why I don’t hear clicks. I feel them.

Because every click says something. Sometimes it says “me too”, sometimes “I feel this”, and sometimes simply “thank you for saying it”. It does not necessarily say “I am looking at you”. It says that something I have shared has caught someone’s attention strongly enough for them to engage with it.

And this is where I can now close the loop my daughter opened for me.

Attention comes before engagement, and engagement comes before connection.

Perhaps that is what I have been measuring all along without quite understanding it myself. The clicks mattered to me because they were never really about the clicks. They were small signals that something I had learned, lived through, failed at, succeeded at or found the courage to say out loud had travelled across the space between me and somebody else and found a landing space.

Success, I am learning, looks very different in a personal journey. Here, perhaps, what allows us to travel and grow isn’t money at all. Perhaps it is connection.

And when something I write makes you think me too, or I feel that, or simply thank you for saying it, I don’t hear the click.

I feel it because I know that you have seen me.

And perhaps, somewhere on the other side of the words, you know that I see you too.