Chapter 6 intro

This chapter was written by Corien Botman, writer, investor and member of the Explorers Club. She brings all her capacities to bear — personal, social, spiritual and financial — in service of regeneration.

In 2026 she wrote “Vrucht en pit, op reis met mijn heldinnen”, a magazine featuring portraits of eleven women who work from feminine values toward the restoration of land, community and life. They are the heroines in Corien’s portfolio. The magazine speaks especially to women with wealth who have turned away from their money, because it became saturated with masculine energy — caught in the language and mechanics of profit, control and harm.

Narrative plays a central role in this: at their deepest, stories are survival strategies that tell us what it means to be human, how to live — and how to manage our wealth.

This chapter invites you to see the dominant investment story — and to supplement it with what has always existed alongside it, but was rarely told. The portfolio Corien describes at the end is not a theoretical Explorers model, but the reality from which this chapter was born.

Connecting the Iceberg to the Undercurrent

Upto this point in our Fieldbook, we have talked about and designed infrastructures, wrestled with dynamic metrics, and plotted heatmaps to navigate the complexity of our portfolios. We have looked at systems from the outside in the hopes of moving things differently, more coherently, more effectively.

But looking again at our Systems Lens Model and the Iceberg, The biggest leverage point of any systems sits at the foundation of it al: Mental Models, Narratives, and Belief Systems.

You cannot shift a system using the same paradigm that built it.

Going back to our three dots introduced in chapter 1, and chapter 2 where we zoomed in deeper on Systemic Mindsets, this chapter takes a deliberate deep dive straight to the bottom of our Iceberg, to talk about what happens when you start questioning those mainstream narratives.

Instead of looking at this from a theoretical framework, or pretend like there’s only one narrative that can help with that shift, in this chapter we want approach this from the lived experience of Corien Botman, one of our Explorers.

This chapter is a reflection on what happens when a wealth holder steps into the underlying logic of her own wealth and questions her entire way of looking at it. How much of our relation with and thinking about wealth is actually dictated by beliefs and narratives we taken for granted, and what happens if you start moving things around there?