The Dichotomy of Who I Am.
Two systems, if you believe in either, place me at odds with myself. Numerology puts me at Life Path 5 — the number of movement, curiosity, and change. Astrology puts me under Taurus — the sign of the anchor, the fixed point, the thing that does not move once it has decided to stay. I don't hold either as gospel. But I've learned to treat them the way I treat any mirror: not as truth, as a lens. And this particular lens has been useful, because it names something I've lived my whole working life without a word for.
I have never stayed in one lane. Golf instruction. Business development. Real estate consulting and writing. On paper that looks like drift. It isn't. It's curiosity doing what curiosity does — refusing to accept the room it's given, going looking for the next one. That's the Life Path 5 in me, if you want to call it that. Adaptability that doesn't lose its centre. A hunger to understand how things work by getting close enough to touch them, not by reading about them from a safe distance.
The clearest evidence of it isn't in my career history. It's in my address. At some point I picked up and moved to South Africa — a country I had never once set foot in before the decision was made. No slow trial run, no scouting trip to test the water first. Just the same instinct that's run underneath every career shift, pointed at a continent instead of an industry: go and find out, rather than sit still and wonder. That's the explorer part of the 5, if the label fits — not restlessness for its own sake, but a genuine appetite for the unfamiliar, trusted enough to act on before it's been fully mapped out. And it settled. That's the part people don't expect. I need to be precise about what that word means, though, because as a Taurus I don't use it loosely.
Home, for me, was forty+ wonderful years with Angela. That's not a comparison South Africa was ever going to win, and it isn't trying to. When she was no longer physically beside me, staying still stopped being the option it once was — not because I went looking for the next adventure, but because the ground I'd been anchored to for four decades had genuinely shifted, and pretending otherwise wasn't going to change that. Change, this time, wasn't curiosity chasing something new. It was necessity, met by the only instinct I had built for meeting it. What I found on the other side of that isn't a replacement for what I had. It's a place I've settled into as fully as a Taurus is able to settle into anything that isn't the original ground. Curiosity got me here. Something steadier is what's kept me.
But movement on its own is just noise. Ask anyone who's watched a career, a relationship, or a business run on curiosity alone — it burns bright and it burns out. What kept mine from doing that is the other half of the equation. The Taurus half. Stubborn. Direct. Allergic to anything fake. Slow to trust, and once trust is earned, permanent. That's not poetry — it's the most accurate description I have of how I actually operate. I don't move fast on people. I move fast on ideas.
That word — permanent — is worth sitting on, because it's the part of the Taurus half that does the heaviest lifting. Getting into my life takes time. Staying there, once you're in, isn't something I revisit. I'm not slow to trust because I enjoy making people wait. I'm slow because trust, once given, isn't given again halfway or provisionally — it's given for good. That's a high bar going in and a permanent floor once you've cleared it. I have relationships that have run the length of my adult life for exactly this reason, and I can count on one hand the times that's ever reversed. It takes something serious to end up on the wrong side of that line, and it very rarely happens by accident. Once someone's earned the floor, I don't go looking for reasons to move it.
"Trust is what I sell. Trust is what I am." — Chris Arnold
This is where the five values I build everything on start to make sense as one system rather than five separate traits.
Curiosity is the mover. It's why I can't sit still in an industry, a conversation, or an idea long enough to let it calcify. It asks the next question before the last one has finished landing.
Candour is the anchor talking. I say the direct thing because the indirect thing wastes both our time. I'd rather be blunt and understood than smooth and misread.
Integrity is what candour costs if you're not careful — and what it protects if you are. It's the refusal to say one thing and do another, even when the other thing would be easier.
Kindness is not softness. It's the Taurus loyalty — moving mountains for the people who've earned it — paired with the Life Path 5 gift for reading people well enough to know what they actually need, not just what they're asking for.
Congruence is the whole thing working at once. It's what happens when the mover and the anchor stop pulling against each other and start doing the same job. Curiosity without an anchor is restlessness. An anchor without curiosity is just stubbornness with better manners. Congruence is the discipline of running both, on purpose, every day.
None of this is destiny. I don't think a number or a star sign decided who I'd become. But they gave me language for a pattern I'd already lived — and once you can name a pattern, you can start choosing it on purpose instead of just falling into it. That's the difference between a personality and a character. A personality happens to you. A character is something you keep choosing.
Every conversation I have, every piece I write, every room I walk into — carries this fingerprint whether I intend it to or not. Character isn't the thing you perform when someone's watching. It's the residue left behind after you've already left the room.
This is Who I am - next up, later today, what I do and why I do it.
If trust is the thread running through all of this, The Trust Whisperer is where I unpack how it actually gets built — and kept.
Originally published on LinkedIn.