I read David Pearl’s book Wanderful cover to cover on a nine hour drive to Sun Peaks.

By the time we arrived, I couldn’t wait another day. I needed to test this theory immediately. So the next morning, I took myself out alone, set my question, and let the streets of a small BC ski town answer it back.

What happened next is hard to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it.

A chill that starts in the chest and spreads throughout the body. Your feet stop moving before your brain has caught up. You want to grab every stranger walking past and tell them what just happened, how absurd and perfect and undeniable it is, because the question you have been turning over in your head for weeks, the kind of inner churn that never fully quiets, has just gone silent.

Not suppressed. Not postponed. Gone.

The answer was clear. The rumination was over. Just like that.

I’ve been hooked ever since.

Here is why this methodology found me rather than the other way around.

My brain works by collecting. Facts, people, patterns, moments, things said in passing that I somehow know will matter later. I store them without always knowing why, and then at exactly the right moment in a conversation or a client session, the right thing surfaces.

My coach named this in four words: I see the unseen.

It is the innermost part of how I work. The thing underneath everything else I do.

Movement is where that retrieval happens best. Not at a desk. Not in a meeting room. On a walk, on a bike, in the flow of being in motion. Street Wisdom didn’t teach me anything new. It gave a name and a structure to something I had always known about myself.

Street Wisdom was founded by David Pearl on a quietly radical idea: that the answers to our most pressing questions are already out there, and that movement, not stillness, is how we access them. Not a boardroom. Not a strategy document. The street.

I trained as a facilitator and have since hosted nine WalkShops across Alberta, working mainly with women in leadership carrying real questions about direction, about what comes next, about the gap between where they are and where they sense they should be. The kinds of questions that don’t get resolved in meetings.

Every single time, the street delivers.

I’ve also used this training on my own biggest questions, including some of the most significant decisions I’ve made in building Look Ahead Consulting. The street has never once let me down.

Next, I’m bringing Street Wisdom into tourism and economic development work. Because if there is an industry full of people who need to get out of the boardroom and into motion to find what they are actually looking for, it is this one.

David Pearl has a line I keep coming back to.

Don’t think. Move.

I didn’t understand it the first time I read it. I understood it completely the moment the streets of Sun Peaks answered back.

(Image: Selfie taken in Downtown Edmonton, AB, in front of the Take a risk mural)