Sarah de Souza is a psychologist, executive coach, and poet living in Portugal. She speaks several languages, memorised Robert Duncan’s poetry before she could write a sentence in English, and has spent most of her career helping people build lives of genuine meaning rather than just impressive ones.
She told me something early in our conversation that stopped me.
Happiness cannot be pursued directly. The more you chase it, the less of it you experience. What she chases instead is meaning — and she has engineered her entire life around finding more of it.
That framing matters because the rest of what she said follows from it.
Sarah founded the Network First Poetics Project — which is not about poetry. It is about paying close attention to language, and what happens when the words you use do not match the world you are trying to build. When she joined Network First, she noticed people using old corporate vocabulary without thinking about it. “All hands meeting.” “Project lead.” Borrowed from exactly the kind of hierarchical structure they were trying to move beyond.
Poetics changed that. “All hands” became “convergence.” “Project lead” became “catalyst.” Small shifts, but they changed how people thought about what they were doing together.
Her point is simple and I think most organisations have never once considered it. Language is not decoration. It is infrastructure. It builds the world inside you before it builds anything outside you.
We also talked about what happens when you get laid off. The email that arrives at four in the morning. Do not come back tomorrow. And with it, every relationship you built inside that organisation — gone, treated as though it had no real importance to anyone but you.
That is not an accident. It is the design.
The conversation is worth half an hour of your time.
