What do You, Beavers, and the Tartan Army all have in common?
Flower of Scotland does something to me every single time. Football, rugby, doesn't matter — the moment it starts, I'm gone.
So the morning after Scotland won their first World Cup game, I went looking. Intentionally. I opened TikTok to find what the world had made of it — the Tartan Army in Boston, the anthem in the streets, all of it. An hour later I was still there, watching pipers and drummers fill the streets of Boston while strangers stopped, completely captivated by what was unfolding before them — the pure power of the pipes, the drums, the fans. It provoked an emotion in me I couldn't hold back.
What I kept thinking about wasn't the football. It was: this is what it looks like when people just show up. Completely, entirely, unapologetically themselves.
The Tartan Army have built one of the most unlikely reputations in the world for football. Scotland hadn't qualified for a World Cup since 1998 — nearly thirty years of near misses and heartbreak — yet the fans just kept going. Kept showing up. Not because Scotland always win. Because it's a community. It's pride. It's nationalism at its very greatest. Wherever they travel, they bring joy, they donate to a local children's charity in every country they visit — no agenda, just goodwill, and they leave people genuinely loving Scotland. They don't plan this. They don't have a strategy meeting before boarding the plane. They just are who they are — and an entire ecosystem forms around them.
Which somehow got me thinking about beavers.
Stay with me :)
Beavers were hunted to extinction in Scotland. By the 16th century, they were gone. Four hundred years of silence.
In 2009, eleven beavers from Norway were released into Knapdale Forest in Argyll. Britain's first legal reintroduction of a wild mammal. And nobody knew how it was going to go.
Nobody knew if they'd adapt to a landscape they'd never known. Whether they'd find what they needed. Whether Scotland's rivers and terrain would suit them, or whether the whole thing would quietly fail. These were animals going into complete uncertainty — a country they had no memory of, no map for.
But they heard running water. And they started building.
No instruction. No learned knowledge of these rivers, no memory of this landscape passed between generations. Just the instinct that was always in them — and it was enough.
The beavers didn't wait for the verdict. They just got on with it. And in 2019, Scotland made it official — a protected species, belonging here at last.
But wait - it gets better!
While all of that was happening officially in Argyll, another population had appeared entirely on its own — beavers released unofficially into Tayside in the early 2000s. No trial. No licence. Nobody planned them. They just got on with it. By 2021 there were nearly a thousand of them, spreading south, spreading west.
Now the two populations are beginning to meet. The Tayside beavers moving west toward the headwaters. The Knapdale beavers dispersing east. Separate starts. Same instinct. Finding each other anyway.
And what they're building around them — the wetlands, the filtered rivers, the wildlife returning to places that have been silent for centuries — none of it is intentional. They heard running water. They built. Everything else followed.
"When you do what you're built for, you create an entire ecosystem — and without even trying, the people around you get to live in it too."
This is the thing I keep coming back to in coaching.
So much of what holds women back isn't a lack of ability or information. It's the noise. Decades of being told — quietly, consistently — to override the pull toward the thing they're actually built for. To wait. To be more certain. To plan it properly. To ask permission first.
The Tartan Army didn't strategise their way to becoming a global symbol of joy. The beavers didn't engineer a masterpiece. They just showed up — fully, completely, as what they are.
And everything around them came alive.
What's your running water?
The thing that, when you encounter it, something responds before your brain has time to argue back? That pull. That flutter. The thing you keep coming back to even after you've talked yourself out of it a hundred times.
You don't need to be taught it. You just need to stop drowning it out.
That's the wee nudge.
— Lesley x
If you want a tool for getting clearer on what's actually yours — the Vision Board Pack is a good place to start. £33. Not decoration. A way of hearing yourself more clearly.
FURTHER READING:
- Scottish Beavers — Scottish Wildlife Trust
- The Scottish Beaver Trial — NatureScot
- Scottish beavers are now a protected species — Natural History Museum