06.08.26 · 10:00 AM · A Cafe Somewhere in Britain | 23rd Av 5786
A simple way to read your past seven years, take control of the one you're in, and plan the next seven on purpose.
Everyone is trying to sell you something. A course. A masterclass. A twelve-module something-something that you’ll buy at midnight and never watch. You know it. I know it. I’ve done it. My worst midnight mishap was purchasing something called “The Renegade Millionaire” by Dan Kennedy. I paid this man $3,000 and we received two FedEx boxes of binders from 1980’s full of facsimile sales letters and a bullet USB drive filled with Windows 95 documents. All we could do was laugh, and we did. We didn’t even return it. What a salesman. It wasn’t his fault, it was mine. A story for another time. Back to the point.
You have a graveyard of good intentions sitting in your downloads folder right now. But you know what you will do? You’ll cycle around the thoughts of your past for hours on end. You’ll obsess over that thing you said the other day to that person and you can’t believe it left your mouth.
You are interested in you, and nobody ever gave you a proper way to examine yourself.
I built this for people whose private patterns are now setting the limits of the public things they are trying to build.
That is what LIFECYCLE 7 (LC7) is. It’s a way to reflect on and observe your past seven years, the seven-year cycle you’re in right now, and the seven years ahead of you.
I am going to show you over the next seven weeks what a life looks like on a framework of seven-year cycles. Not so you can marvel at who I am. Far from it. So you can recognise how powerful this framework is when it is applied to a real human life. Mine. Cycle by cycle. The good times, the strange times, the bad times, and all of the successes (and failures) along the way.
Who am I, and why should you listen to me?
For the record, I did not arrive here empty-handed. Twenty-seven years in technology. Director of Direct-to-Consumer Technologies at The Walt Disney Company. Metaverse strategy lead at Accenture. Global stages at SXSW. And businesses I built from nothing, bootstrapped from the ground up on blood, sweat and tears. Keep all of that in your back pocket. It matters later. And it is nowhere near where the story starts.
By the end, you'll know how to map YOUR life the same way. For self-mastery. So you can quietly (or loudly) unpack all of your stuff into the ladder of LC7, finally have closure on the past, and plan where you're going in the seven years ahead.
Faith is the ground I stand on. I am not going to hide that, and I am not going to preach it at you either. Take this as one woman’s testimony—a clay vessel minted in 1983—telling you the truth about her own life. Where Jesus Christ of Nazareth (Yeshua) shows up in the story, and He does, I will say so plainly.
“They triumphed over him
by the blood of the Lamb
and by the word of their testimony;
they did not love their lives so much
as to shrink from death.”Revelation 12:11
The origin
LIFECYCLE 7 started as an observation my husband, Jonathan, made about me and our lives together. Every seven years, we seemed to enter a new phase of life. Some things repeating, some transitioning to new fields. It led to further research.
What began as an observation became years of research into Biblical time, natural cycles and the recurring role of seven.
We built a framework around the average human lifespan. Take that average, and you get thirteen cycles of seven years. Thirteen cycles, from the Seedling at the very start, all the way to the Reflection at the far end. A whole life, laid out on a ladder you can finally see.
When Jonathan first built the framework, I’ll admit it took me a long time to understand why any of it mattered, and why it mattered to me. I was a sceptic. He asked me to start writing things down, so I did. I started sharing my journals with him. And so it began.
The answer
This is not therapy and does not replace professional support. It is a structured way to begin examining your own life privately, in your own time and in your own hand.
Reflecting on each cycle of your life—pinning down the highlights, the lowlights and everything in between—creates space for honest reflection. And room for the quieter, spiritual work too, if you want it.
Once you’ve gone through each cycle, you’re able to identify many of the whys behind your own behaviour. You can begin to find closure on the past, understand yourself more deeply, recognise where you are in your current cycle and, importantly, plan where you’re going next in the seven years ahead.
I completed it. All of it. On myself. I am not going to tell you it was easy, because it wasn’t. Human beings are complicated, period. We have many contexts, situations, emotions, relationships, etc. There was even a time I couldn’t face my own past. What I had said. What I had done. What happened to me, and what happened to others.
The traffic lights
Every cycle leaves marks on you. We call these Tribulation Markers and Emotional Markers. Significant events that changed something in you, and there are usually at least three in every cycle.
They carry a charge, like traffic lights. Red is the marker that still stops you dead, the one that stings years later. You can be forty-two and still sitting at a red light that went red when you were sixteen. Green is the one that still warms you, the one you move forward on. Amber is the work in progress, the marker in the middle of changing colour, the one you are muting and neutralising while time does what time does.
The strange part is that the colours change. A red marker can turn green. A green one can turn red. What wrecked you at sixteen can become the reason you understand someone at forty. A negative in the past can be a positive in the future. And vice versa.
LIFECYCLE 7 audits through two moves, Reflection and Acknowledgement. You look at the marker, and you name it for what it was, and for what it has become.
Cycle 1
So. We start where everyone starts. Cycle 1: The Seedling. Nought to seven years old. This is the cycle where the ground rules of who you are get laid down, long before you ever get a vote. Now we go hunting for the markers.
We all have a beginning. Every one of us has Cycle 1, The Seedling, and most of it is cultural. Yours laid something down in you before you could read it, exactly as mine did. It was handed to you by society and the world around you. Something you never chose. So read what follows as a mirror for your own life. I go first only because someone has to.
The last time I saw my birth father, I was in the back of a red Nissan car, around five or six years old. My mother laid a blanket over the back-seat window. I peered out and watched him disappear. That is Emotional Marker number one.
I called my grandmother “Nanny”. She spoiled me. I was raised in Southern California with everything a child could ask for. Weekend trips to Disneyland, Knott’s Berry Farm, SeaWorld. Always at the mall, or a park, or the beach. My early childhood was a blur of fun-filled distraction laid over a fault line I could not yet see.
That is Cycle 1. The ground rules are installed without your permission, before you can read them or understand what they are.
Cycle 2
Cycle 2. Seven to fourteen. The Blossoming, when the self that was seeded starts to show itself. And my biggest Tribulation Marker yet.
We go deeper next week.
What it does
That is the point of doing this out in the open. I can now sit in front of the exact cycle where each thing was seeded and read the whole board. LIFECYCLE 7 is the tool that lets me. It does two things. It lets you look back with clarity, and plan forward with intent. It’s your own personal ‘long-count’ calendar, and it doesn’t ask you to hand your wounds to a stranger to get either one.
There’s one more piece. The framework maps time at seven scales at once: seven years, seven months, seven weeks, seven days, seven hours, seven minutes, seven seconds. Most change fails because you plan it at the seven-year scale, demand it at the seven-day scale, and then lose it at the seven-second scale, where the urge to quit turns up again and again while you’re not looking. Map that, and you stop losing the same fight in the same place.
That alone is worth the seven weeks. And I’m handing it to you free.
The build
Feral Founder is built on one principle: your business reflects your behaviour back to you.
The walls you built as a child to survive can become the ceiling on the business you are trying to build now. The independence that once protected you can become the reason you refuse help, hold everything too tightly or build a company that cannot move without you.
You cannot out-work that wall. You take it down cycle by cycle, and the business rises to meet the new height.
That is what these next seven weeks are really about.
The free essays will show you the LIFECYCLE 7 framework through the life I have actually lived. The paid companion articles inside The Seventh Cycle will help you apply each part to yours: the cycle-by-cycle prompts, the twelve concerns you tag your life against, the worksheets and the seven-month method where the real reconstruction happens.
And when the seven-week series ends, the membership does not. Members continue to receive one new premium article every week for the remainder of their annual subscription.
The free publication points at the map. Inside The Seventh Cycle, I hand you the pen.
Your turn
Reading about a framework and running your own life through it are not the same thing. So I built the on-ramp.
The Sevens Map is a 31-page printable PDF workbook: a guided self-audit of the life cycle you just left, the cycle you are entering and the cycle you are standing in now.
First, you use the Cycle Finder to locate yourself inside the thirteen-cycle framework. Then you work through the same kind of questions I used on myself: what you expected from the last cycle, what actually happened, the words that are still stuck in your head, the patterns that helped you and the ones that cost you.
Then you turn forward. You stand seven years from now, name what is true about your life, work, faith and relationships, and build backward from that destination—Year 7, Year 5, Year 3, Year 1, this month and this week.
You can complete it in one long sitting or across a series of quiet mornings. You finish with your recent life cycles mapped, your patterns named and your next direction written in your own hand.
Not a course you will never open. A private piece of work between you, the page and God.
A look inside The Sevens Map
Become a Launch Member
The doors are open now.
Until 11:59 PM BST on Thursday, 24 September 2026, you can join The Seventh Cycle as a Launch Member for $47 a year.
This is not simply a first-year discount. As long as your subscription remains continuously active, $47 remains your annual renewal price.
Your membership includes:
The full seven-week paid companion series
The private articles, prompts and deeper cycle-by-cycle work behind A Life Laid Bare.
One new premium article every week for a full year
Private writing on self-mastery, life cycles, behaviour and the patterns beneath the work you are trying to build.
The Sevens Map — delivered immediately
The complete 31-page printable self-audit, yours to download, print, complete and keep.
Decoding Life’s Matrix — delivered immediately
The full ebook Jonathan and I wrote on the hidden programme shaping your life, the thirteen seven-year cycles and the methods for reading and rewriting the patterns running beneath it. Yours to keep.
Your two downloads remain yours, whatever you decide when the year ends. Access to the private paid-article archive remains active for as long as your paid subscription does.
You can manage or cancel your subscription directly through Substack.
If you have spent more than that on a course you never opened, a subscription you forgot to cancel or an hour with someone who told you what you already knew, you understand the maths.
Stop rehearsing your past for free.
Become a Launch Member and map it on purpose.
Launch Member enrolment closes 24 September 2026 at 11:59 PM BST. The $47 annual rate remains locked while your subscription stays continuously active.
Before you go.
Disclaimer: LIFECYCLE 7 is a personal reflection framework, not therapy, medical advice or a substitute for qualified professional support. Where professional help is needed, please seek it.
I am not looking for validation. I am looking for the ones who this is for. The rebels. The odd ones. The founders of depth who never quite fit the room and stopped trying to.
Seven weeks. Thirteen cycles. One life, laid bare, so you can learn to read your own.
Yallah! Let’s begin.
Not ready to enter The Seventh Cycle?
Subscribe free to follow the public seven-week A Life Laid Bare series.
Someone came to mind while you were reading this.
Send it to them. They will know why.
The line about being forty-two and still sitting at a red light that went red at sixteen stopped me. That’s such a precise way to describe how old wounds don’t actually age at the same rate we do.
I’m curious about the seven-second scale you mentioned, the moment the urge to quit shows up “while you’re not looking.” That feels like the real unlock in this framework, more than the seven-year mapping itself. Most of us can name our big cycles in hindsight; it’s the tiny, repeated moment of almost giving up that’s harder to catch in real time. Looking forward to Cycle 2.