For many of us, there’s a gradual “molting” that occurs before the world sees our new identity.

The first thing to change was my sense of style. I was raised a Christian, with a dress code that was smart, conservative and old fashioned – dresses that went all the way up to the neck, down to the wrists, and fell below the knee, topped with no make-up and a wet-look curly perm or straightened hair. It was important to look like a modest, perfectly behaved girl, which I was. We all bought our frilly church-friendly crêpe dresses from a shop in Brixton at the end of Railton Road. The dresses had pleats – the tinier the better. I had a white one that I wore to church and I hated it. Those tiny pleats were hell to iron. You had to try and line four of them up at once then make sure the iron was exactly the right temperature, but once you sat down they would crease and never fall the right way again. I hated that shop because the clothes made us all look the same. By this time, The Kids from Fame were on TV, and we were obsessed. We all wanted to be those leg-warmer-wearing, somersaulting dancers in the show. We also had our minds blown when Jerey Daniel of Shalamar body-popped on Top of the Pops. That was a revelation to us – a completely new style of music, fashion and dancing. The next day we were all trying to ‘pop’. Watching this, we knew our Stepford Wives-style God dresses had to go!

As we got bigger, so my interest in fashion grew, and I started to see the art in fashion instead of just clothes that cover my back. Style and music are interlinked, feeding off each other. I was becoming aware of how I could use fashion as a tool to enhance my stage show and my personal self-worth. Clothes directly influence my mood – if I get it right my confidence is boosted and I feel high on life with the audience in the palm of my hand. Get it wrong and I feel like a scruy mouse that needs to crawl back into its tiny hole. I have to feel comfortable in my own skin, so what I wear has to be functional and suit my shape.

She instinctively shifted from being a problem solver to being a tool builder— don’t just solve the problem, use the problem to build a tool!

But as I got deeper into this research, observing the vast differences across the people in this study and how they flourished at their best when life lined up with their encodings and what fed their inner fire, I gradually began to change. Subtly at first, I began to shift away from trying to change people into what I wanted them to be. Simultaneously, I shifted toward finding or creating the best possible match between their encodings and their responsibilities. It didn’t happen overnight, it was more of a managerial form of simplex stepping. I’d sense something about a person’s encodings, and then I’d make a shift in their responsibilities to fir those encodings. Then I might observe something else about their encodings, discovering something wonderful about them when they thrived in a task, and I’d make another shift in responsibilities. Together, we essentially simplex stepped toward them coming into frame in a seat on the bus.