Some of the most capable people I know are quietly running on information that never shows up in a business case. Not intuition in the vague, decorative sense. Something closer to data they can’t fully explain and have learned not to ignore. I think dismissing that, in ourselves or in the people we work with, is a leadership failure dressed up as rigour.

I have a friend in California who hears the voice of her dragon. It’s not loud, not scary, not frequent. But when the planet has something to say, it speaks through her dragon, and she acts on whatever message she gets.

I don’t have a dragon. The only voices I hear belong to me and whoever’s in the room. But I don’t disbelieve my friend, and I don’t think you would either if you knew her.

She has both feet on the floor. She works in medicine. She runs a thriving practice. Nothing about her reads as anything but normal, and she doesn’t mention the dragon unless she trusts you completely. I take that trust seriously.

I tell you this so you understand why, when this month’s guest told me the land had spoken to her, I wasn’t suspicious. I was barely surprised. So many of us have this kind of knowing. Most of us never say it out loud.

Nicola Robins was auditing a mine when she heard a voice say, “This is sacred ground. Stop this mining.” What would you do with that? I know what I’d do. Shake my head, look around, push it away. Because nothing like that is real, is it?

Except she couldn’t push it away. In the weeks after, she developed anxiety and a shakiness she couldn’t place, along with a fuzziness in her thinking that wouldn’t lift. It progressed into panic attacks. Colours started looking wrong. She’d see small dots in the air. Meetings became a gamble. She never knew if she’d stay focused or start hearing and seeing things that had nothing to do with what was happening in the room. Eventually the work itself became impossible.

She went looking for help, and Western medicine offered her antidepressants, because, of course, whatever we can’t explain must be happening only in our heads. Nicola didn’t accept that answer. She followed a different path, one that led her into the traditions of the South African indigenous tribe known as Ngoma.

What she learned changed how she, a Yale-trained scientist, understood herself. She wasn’t imagining it. She really was hearing the land. Ten years later, almost by accident, she got confirmation. The mine had, in fact, been built on sacred ground. Over time, she brought those same methodologies into her work with businesses, and that’s the work she’s bringing to you this series.

It’s also why this guest, of all the guests I could have chosen, is the one launching our new season.

Clarity that arrives sideways instead of head-on. Courage to hear something you can’t explain. Commitment to act on what you know, even when you can’t prove it to a boardroom. Compassion for yourself when it costs you your footing for a while. Collective wisdom that outlasts any one person’s certainty.

That’s the 5Cs, and that’s Season 5.

I’m not asking you to hear a dragon or a mine. I’m asking what you’ve been quietly certain of and never said out loud, because you couldn’t back it up. What is it?