Jannine Barron doesn’t talk about business in the way most people do.
Her work didn’t begin with a gap in the market or a five-year plan. It emerged slowly, through listening, paying attention, and allowing space for what wanted to take shape. After selling several businesses and stepping away from constant doing, people began to find her, asking for guidance, mentoring and perspective.
What followed wasn’t a single offer, but an evolving body of work rooted in regeneration, justice and relationship, with ourselves, each other and most significantly, the natural world. Over time, this has grown into The Growth Experience, Nature’s Boardroom and a small number of deeply held mentoring pathways. Her work continues to expand.
In this conversation, Jannine reflects on thresholds, activism, business, nature, intuition and impact, and what it really means to build work that grows without losing its integrity.
How did this work begin for you?
It didn’t really begin with an idea at all.
I’d run four companies, and I was exhausted. I knew I needed a break and a big change, but I had no sense of what would come next. I felt like I was standing on a threshold without a plan.
Then people started calling me out of the blue. They asked if I would mentor them. I had no website, no offer, nothing set up. I had a Gmail address and that was it. I wasn’t trying to build anything, and I’d actually given myself a year to listen, receive, travel, spend time with family and reconnect with parts of life that had been squeezed out by constant work.
But the calls kept coming, so I answered.
At some point I realised something was forming, even though I hadn’t named it. I wrote a small Facebook post, then later said to a few people I trusted that I was thinking about starting a newsletter, without really knowing what it was about. About thirty people said yes.
Then lockdown happened…
I moved to England with my husband with a plan of being closer to our grandchildren. I got to know the land before I got to know people. I walked a lot, discovered woodlands, followed paths, and wrote stories. The trees became my companions, and at the same time, people were still reaching out to me.
Looking back, I wouldn’t call it a spark. It was much more about listening and allowing. The work found me, rather than the other way around.
That period gave me something I hadn’t had in a long time. It gave me space to breathe, to notice what was emerging, and to trust that I didn’t need to force the next chapter into shape.
Where do your values around regeneration and justice come from?
They’ve always been there and this isn’t something I arrived at later in life.
When I was seventeen, I discovered a serious human rights abuse in Australia. It completely blew my mind and set me on a path into activism and human rights work for the next decade. I went to university very young, from a working-class background, and that experience itself was confronting. I saw class, exclusion and hierarchy up close, and it changed how I understood power.
I became politically active early on. For example, we set up Students Against Racism, I was involved in student organising, and I started to see how systems actually operate, not just how they’re supposed to. Around the same time, I was drawn to community-level work rather than top-down structures. I’ve never been interested in hierarchy. I wanted to understand how people organise, care for each other, and survive at the grassroots.
After university, I spent a long time travelling and living very simply. I worked on farms, lived off-grid and spent a lot of time in the bush. That shaped me as much as any formal education. It showed me different ways of living and relating, and it made it impossible to unsee how broken many of our systems are. I saw how communities functioned as a unique system based on collaboration and cooperation. This formed how I saw systems.
Later, through academic work and time spent learning from Indigenous communities, I began to understand that regeneration isn’t some concept, strategy or green buzzword. It’s a way of being in relationship, with land, with people, and with time. Once you see that, it’s not something you can switch off or compartmentalise in business.
So for me, regeneration and justice aren’t values I apply to my work. They’re the ground it stands on.
How did nature become part of your work, not just your thinking?
It happened very naturally, long before it became something people talked about in business.
As I mentioned when I arrived in England, I spent a lot of time walking. I didn’t know many people, so I got to know the land first. I found woodlands, paths, quiet places, and I kept returning to them. Over time, those places stopped feeling like scenery and started feeling like companions.
I wasn’t using nature as a metaphor or a tool. I was listening. I was learning how to slow down, how to notice cycles, and how to be guided rather than driven. That way of relating began to shape how I thought about work, decisions and leadership.
Later, when I was mentoring people, it felt obvious to take our conversations outside. Sitting across a desk never made much sense to me when walking side by side in nature opened things up so easily. That became what I later called Nature’s Boardroom, though at the time it wasn’t a programme or a concept. It was just what felt right.
What mattered was the quality of attention. Nature has a way of settling the nervous system, of reminding people they’re part of something larger, and of offering perspective without judgement. When you bring business questions into that space, they tend to change. People stop forcing answers and start seeing what’s actually possible.
So nature didn’t become part of my work as an idea. It became part of it because that’s where I learned how to listen, and listening is at the heart of everything I do.
What did you learn from your earlier businesses?
One of the biggest lessons was not to get attached to form.
With my earlier businesses, especially Hugabub and later Nature’s Child, I was always deeply attached to the purpose, but never to the product itself. The design could change. The model could change. What mattered was why it existed and who it served.
Hugabub came from a very practical and emotional place. I was a new mother, frustrated by how disconnected and uncomfortable baby equipment was, and I was drawing on what I’d learned from Indigenous communities about closeness and connection. The carrier made sense because it supported bodies and relationships, not because it was a clever piece of design. When people first saw it, many thought I was mad. That’s something I got used to. The people who understood it were often strangers at first, and they became the community around the work.
With Nature’s Child, I learned about boundaries.I wanted to create alternatives to wasteful, harmful products, but I was also very clear about where my red lines were. When suppliers or partners crossed those lines, especially around materials and plastic, I walked away. Even when it would have been easier not to.
I also learned that it’s possible to build something meaningful without following the usual rules. I had no money at the start. Everything was scrappy. I relied on trust, relationships and a lot of persistence. What kept things moving wasn’t strategy in the traditional sense, but a strong sense of responsibility for the impact of what I was putting into the world.
Looking back, those businesses taught me that if you stay rooted in purpose and values, you can let go of identity, titles and even success as people usually define it. That way of working made it possible for me to step away when the time was right, without feeling like I’d failed or lost something.
When did you realise this wasn’t going to be a traditional business?
I realised it quite early on, once I started mentoring people regularly.
At first, it was mostly one-to-one work. I loved those early conversations, but I could also see the limits straight away. This kind of work relies on your presence, your energy, and your attention. If I kept going in that direction, the business would always be dependent on me showing up in a very direct way.
Having run product-based businesses before, I knew what it felt like to build something that could operate without you for periods of time. This was very different. There was a responsibility in it that I hadn’t experienced before. People weren’t just buying a product. They were bringing their lives, their uncertainty and their livelihoods into the space.
That was the moment I had to ask myself whether I really wanted to do this, and if so, how. I knew I couldn’t treat it like a conventional consultancy or coaching practice. I didn’t want to turn it into a formula or push people through a system.
It became clear that if I was going to do this work with integrity, the business would need to be shaped around care, capacity and trust, not scale for the sake of it. That realisation set everything else in motion, even though I didn’t yet know what the structure would look like.
How did your current business model begin to take shape?
Back to what I mentioned earlier, it really started during lockdown.
At that point, a lot of people were reaching out in real distress. They’d lost work, they needed income quickly, and they didn’t have the luxury of long-term planning. I realised that one-to-one mentoring wasn’t going to be enough, or fair, given the scale of what was happening.
So I created a course called Go Digital in 33 Days. It was very practical and built to help people clarify what they offered, create a digital presence, and get their first client. It was responsive, not polished, and it came together quickly because it needed to.
What surprised me was how well it worked for most people. Around eighty per cent went on to create some form of enterprise. But instead of focusing on that success, I became deeply curious about the people who didn’t. I didn’t see that as a failure but as information.
I started to notice patterns. It wasn’t about intelligence or effort. Something else was getting in the way. That curiosity changed everything because it shifted my attention from teaching skills to understanding what people needed in order to actually move.
That period taught me that the business couldn’t just be about strategy or output. It had to hold people more fully. It needed to work with mindset, nervous systems, identity and readiness, not just action plans. From there, the shape of the work began to emerge naturally, step by step, in response to what I was seeing rather than what I thought I should build.
Tell me the story about the Bridge Meditation
It happened completely in the moment. While I was running the Go Digital in 33 Days course and feeling a bit frustrated. I could see that some people still weren’t really landing what they needed to do, even though the structure was there. I remember thinking, something isn’t connecting here.
Then I heard this very clear inner voice saying, “Do a guided visualisation.”
My immediate response was to argue with it. I thought, I can’t do that. People will think I’m mad.
This was six years ago, and this kind of thing wasn’t as normalised as it is now. But before I could talk myself out of it, it was already happening.
I found myself telling everyone to put their pens down. Another part of my mind was panicking, thinking, what are you doing? I had no plan. I didn’t know what I was going to say next. I just started speaking and trusted that the words would come.
The Bridge Meditation came out of that moment, fully formed. I wasn’t consciously creating it. I was following it.
When it ended, there was this collective sense of relief and clarity. People said, “We get it now.” Something had shifted. I realised then that this was a turning point, not just for the course, but for the work as a whole.
That experience showed me I couldn’t keep the intuitive, embodied part of myself separate from the business. The trees had been telling me this for a while, but this was the moment it became undeniable. From then on, I knew the work had to be done differently.
How did The Growth Experience evolve from there?
After the Bridge Meditation, it became clear that the work needed more space.
I created something called the B Experience first. The name arrived fully formed, like many of the things I do. It stood for business, being, and the B Corp way of thinking. I didn’t want to explain it too much. I wanted people to feel their way into it.
It was a three-month programme, and something unexpected happened. People finished it and didn’t want to leave. They asked if they could do it again. Some people repeated it two or three times, not because they hadn’t understood it, but because they wanted to stay connected to the process and the community.
That showed me that this wasn’t about delivering information. It was about holding people through change.
From there, The Growth Experience took shape. At first it was also three months, then six. Each time, it became obvious that it still wasn’t enough. People were unwinding years of conditioning around work, worth, money and identity. That doesn’t happen quickly.
Eventually it became a nine-month journey, and that’s when it settled. Nine months gave people the time they needed to move through resistance, rest when they needed to, and actually integrate what they were learning rather than rush to apply it.
What’s important is that I didn’t design it upfront. It emerged through listening to the people in the room. Each cohort taught me something that shaped the next one. That’s how the work stays alive. It isn’t fixed but grows in relationship with the people it serves.
How do people tend to change through this work?
The biggest shift I see is that people stop pushing themselves so hard.
Many arrive believing that if they’re not making money, getting clients, or moving forward in visible ways, then they’ve failed. Through the work, that story starts to loosen. Periods that once felt like stagnation begin to be understood as necessary space, rest, or integration.
People also stop taking things so personally. A lack of clients becomes information rather than judgement. A slow period becomes part of a cycle rather than a reason to panic. That change alone can be profoundly relieving.
Over time, people begin to trust themselves more. They become clearer about what they’re here to do and less attached to proving it. When that happens, something interesting occurs. They often find that opportunities, referrals and conversations start to come to them without the same level of effort.
I often talk about flow, not as a peak state, but as a way of being. It’s not about everything going well. It’s about knowing what the next right step is, even when things feel uncertain. When people start to live and work from that place, their energy changes.
They show up differently. They feel more grounded. And that tends to be what draws the right work and relationships towards them, without forcing or performance.
How do you think about marketing and visibility without falling into hustle?
I don’t see marketing as something separate from how I live or work.
There’s a place for discipline and habits. I’m not anti-business acumen. But I’m very intentional about where I put my energy. I know, for example, that if I want to connect with professionals, LinkedIn makes sense. If I wanted a different kind of audience, I’d choose a different channel. I don’t believe in being everywhere.
Search has been important for me. Regenerative leadership is still an emerging field, which means people are actively looking for it. I started investing in SEO early, long before it was fashionable, simply by writing clearly about what I do and letting it build over time. Now I regularly hear from people all over the world who’ve found me that way.
Social platforms are something I treat lightly. I use them if they feel good. Instagram is interesting, but I don’t rely on it. If a platform starts to feel performative or draining, I step back. For me, that’s part of staying out of hustle.
What matters most is resonance. When you’re clear and grounded in your work, people feel it. Visibility doesn’t come from shouting. It comes from being present in places that suit you, speaking honestly, and letting the right people find you in their own time.
What does impact mean to you now?
Impact, for me, isn’t something loud or easily measured.
I’ve always known that the real ripple of this work would come through other people, not through me being visible or credited. What I see most clearly is how people change internally. They stop seeing themselves as a problem to be fixed. They stop treating every quiet period as failure.
People begin to recognise that rest, pauses and uncertainty are not signs that something has gone wrong. They’re part of a living process. When that shift happens, everything else changes. Decisions become clearer. Energy returns. Work starts to flow again, often without the same level of effort or anxiety.
I’m proud of that and proud when someone becomes more grounded, more trusting of themselves, more able to meet life as it is rather than constantly trying to control it. Those changes might not look dramatic from the outside, but they change families, businesses and communities over time.
What feels different about where you are now?
I feel a deep sense of maturity and clarity that I haven’t felt before.
It’s been seven years since I sold my last business, and I can see now that those years were a necessary cycle of listening, allowing and letting things emerge without forcing them. For the first time, I’m completely clear on what I offer and how I offer it.
At the same time, I’m not attached to it. That might sound contradictory, but it’s not. I care deeply about the work, but I’m not identified with it. If something needed to change, or if I were called into a different form of leadership or contribution, I could move towards that without feeling like I was losing myself.
That feels important. The work is strong enough to stand on its own, and I’m steady enough not to cling to it. That combination brings a lot of ease.
What does good growth mean to you?
Good growth is growth that doesn’t cost you your integrity.
It’s growth that emerges rather than being forced. Growth that listens to what’s needed, rather than chasing what looks impressive. It doesn’t rush people or flatten complexity in the name of scale.
In my work, good growth means holding people for as long as they actually need, not as long as a programme outline suggests. It means letting the shape of the business evolve in response to real human experience. It means staying responsive, even when that’s less predictable.
Good growth also means understanding that impact doesn’t always look like expansion. Sometimes it looks like depth. Sometimes it looks like restraint. Sometimes it looks like saying no.
Ultimately, good growth is about relationship. Relationship with ourselves, with others, with land, and with time. If growth strengthens those relationships rather than eroding them, then I know we’re on the right path.