In the early days of smart cities, I worked on developing the Liveability Index, a metric. The job was mapping what urban studies knows onto a city's data — making the invisible legible.

Somewhere in that process, something began to bother me. There are values that resist being turned into numbers. My job was to fit as many of them into the Index as I could, and yet what kept drawing my attention was the value I couldn't quantify. And it tends to be the thing that gets overlooked when a decision is actually made.

There's a name for this in economics. Goodhart's law — when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

Take raising a child, for example. If we measure the quality of parenting by hours spent together, an hour lost to a phone and an hour spent attuned to what a child is feeling end up counting the same.

Measuring isn't the problem in itself. But when what can be measured becomes the goal, doesn't what cannot be measured get taken less seriously — and slowly come to harm?

That discomfort turned into my master's thesis at Aalto University. The title of my thesis is Beyond Measure — the far side of measuring.

What the thesis set out to organise was this contrast — the two modes of thinking that drive how cities are planned. What can be measured, and what can't. The question of how to handle both.

When you turn a value into a number, your relationship to it becomes one of use. Under calculative thinking, both the environment and people become things that can be exchanged for numbers.

Facing a value you can't see, what matters instead is a relationship of being-with — responding to one another. Response-ability. It's this value-rational thinking that becomes the ground authenticity — of a place, or of a person — grows from.

This idea of “being-with,” together with the Japanese word honne — 本音, the wish or intention that rises up free of fear, anxiety or self-interest — gave me a hint. Rather than being pushed around by our surroundings, maybe we could listen to our own honne, and let that be what we respond with. That's what occurred to me. Enough of that response, repeated, becomes the force that lets a person, and a place, find their way back to who they are. That's the sense I hold now.

From here, my interest shifted from the city to the individual. I cared about environmental and social problems at the time, and felt powerless in front of something as large as a city. But putting my own inner awareness in order sits inside what I can actually influence — my Circle of Influence.

Wanting an easier, richer life for myself and the people I love, I studied urban planning — trying to fix what was outside me. But I learned, firsthand, that the more I looked outward, the harder it got.

When you try to change only what's outside you, instead of what's inside, you go looking for the cause of your pain in your circumstances. Where you live — the country, the place — the people who make up a society, school, work, the era you were born into, the economy, how fast technology is moving. Searching every direction for a cause is really just manufacturing more evidence that you're at the mercy of your surroundings. Circumstances are hard to change, so all that's left is complaining. Little by little, a victim mentality builds, and your relationship with each of these things twists out of shape.

I felt this myself — the more my attention went outward, the worse it got, and I was simply pushed around by it. I cycled through burnout more times than I can count. Then, one day, I got completely tired of that way of holding my mind, and felt — “enough, already.” And, slowly, my attention began to shift from outside to in.

What I believe now is this: whatever my circumstances, I want to be someone who can always find beauty and kindness in the world. And someone who can create joy and abundance.

Still, a habit of mind built up over many years doesn't change overnight. What helped, in the end, was something I'd picked up studying architecture and urban planning — the ability to see a structure, and to draw it.

Thoughts and awareness are information that lives inside your head and your heart, invisible. Making that as visible as possible makes it easier to sort through.

Psychology has a concept called emotional granularity — how finely and accurately you can name your own emotional state. There's a difference between only being able to say “something feels off, I'm sad,” and being able to say, “this is anger at being treated unfairly. Underneath it, a wish to have been treated as though I mattered.” People who can make finer distinctions are less thrown around by their feelings, and have more options when it comes to, “so, what would help now?”

Putting feelings, and the experiences behind them, into words — and drawing the relationships between them — makes both easier to sort through.

For myself, making my own inside visible and putting it in order has changed which world I notice. I used to see mostly what I had reason to complain about. Now I notice more of what I have reason to be grateful for. My body loosens more easily, and that feeling of ease comes more often, and lasts longer.

I am still putting my own inside in order. But, like a climber a half-step ahead on the same mountain, I can tell you where the loose stones are. I'd be glad to build, together with you through coaching, a world where we can enjoy who we are, and what a place is.