About Floris
The question I work with today did not begin behind a desk. It grew slowly from my own life: from what helped, what began to constrain me and what I could not see for a long time.
It is not a method I apply to other people. It is a way of seeing that is still changing.
I live and work in southern Portugal with my wife Doreen and our four children.
For years, I thought my work was about freedom. I looked for it in recovery, faith, entrepreneurship and autonomy. Each gave me room and later showed me its limits.
Gradually another question emerged. Division does not always begin between people. It can begin when something does not fit who we think we should be, cannot be said in a group or has no place in a system.
What finds no place there does not disappear. It shapes what we see, our relationships and the systems we make together. Freedom turned out not to be a starting point, but a possible fruit of having to exclude less.
That way of seeing runs through my mentoring, Syntrociety, the digital products I build and my work as Flourish.
My journey
I grew up on a farm, where faith and duty were often spoken about and feelings rarely were. My mother died when I was fourteen. I withdrew and learned to keep parts of myself outside my awareness so I could carry on. Division first became personal there: adjusted to the world around me, cut off inside from what I felt.
Numbness led to addiction and homelessness. Recovery began when denial stopped working. I discovered that rejection does not set us free. What finds no place still shapes us.
Later I sought freedom in faith and entrepreneurship. Within my digital agency we experimented with autonomy and self-management. There I saw how organisations make the same human patterns visible: control, dependence, the need for recognition and the difficulty of sharing responsibility.
I let my company go bankrupt when a safe takeover did not feel right. Later, Doreen and I moved to Portugal with our children, without a detailed plan. Those choices taught me that freedom does not mean avoiding consequences. It asks whether you are willing to carry the cost of what feels true to you.
Everything I do now explores the same question in a different form. In conversations, communities, software and music, I look at what is allowed to take part and what changes when we stand less against ourselves and one another.
Read about the bookI do not have a complete system for people or groups. I do keep seeing that what falls out of view retains influence.
Not everything is true or good. Not everything should be followed. But what may be examined has less need to steer through the back door.
I see the same movement in relationships, organisations and communities. Difference hardens when safety, identity or power prevents relevant information from taking part.
Freedom does not arise by leaving everything behind. It grows as we need to exclude less in order to act. The different forms of this inquiry come together on the homepage.
I write to find words for what kept recurring in my life. Not to persuade anyone to adopt a view.
Someone may recognise something of their own here: a pattern, a question or something that had no language yet. If that happens, this website has done its work. The blog contains shorter studies; in the book I am trying to find the longer thread.
Are you facing a choice you can no longer make in your familiar way? We can examine what you see, what you allow and what you are prepared to carry.
Read about mentoringWhat becomes visible between people may begin with something that finds no place within us.
Not everything is true or good. Not everything needs to be followed.
Freedom grows as we live less divided lives. It is not the starting point.
The mentor too. The same questions keep returning.