Most of the founders I meet start their marketing with a number. A follower goal, a launch date, a KPI. Charlotte Gomes, founder of Collective Roots PR, asks them to start somewhere else: in the body.
Charlotte booked over sixty live music shows across Europe by the age of eighteen. A decade later, while living with chronic symptoms, she found the same thing she had felt in those concert rooms: people gathering around something the surface world had no language for. She calls it the invisible thread that connects us. That thread became Collective Roots, where she combines storytelling design with nervous system awareness and brain energetics, for creatives and changemakers who want to be seen without burning out.
Here is what stayed with me from episode 7 of (re)connect.
We act like it's summer all year
"I think we're taught by society that we need to be in summer all year long," Charlotte told me. Constant output and constant visibility. For her, that is a direct road to overwhelm and burnout.
Her alternative comes from the forest. Trees return to their roots, shed their leaves and bloom again. Creative energy moves in cycles too, and those cycles don't follow the calendar. A few months before we recorded, Charlotte was in autumn, reworking her offers. By the day of our conversation, she was in full summer.
The four creative seasons
Winter is rest. It can feel like brain fog or a lack of inspiration. Charlotte sees it as the most important season of all, the bear hibernating.
Spring is planting seeds. It brings the impulse to start again, brainstorm and write. She links spring to copywriting.
Summer is expansion. This is when visibility comes easily, so it's a good time for events, podcasts, PR and interviews.
Autumn is letting go. You clear your desk, make space and get rid of what no longer feels like you.
Knowing your season tells you what kind of work your energy can hold right now. I recognised it straight away at Green Socials. We're in a big production phase at the moment, after months that followed the natural seasons quite closely.
Five pillars, starting underground
Charlotte's framework, the Collective Roots journey, maps onto those seasons:
Root (winter): nervous system awareness and somatic work. You tune into the felt sense of what wants to emerge, long before you think about a post.
Express (spring): finding the words and the story.
Embody (autumn): a visual identity that feels like you, from branded templates to your website. For Charlotte, a colour palette is a frequency people learn to recognise.
Connect (summer): digital experiences that let people live your story with you.
Expand (summer): PR, podcasts, publications and interviews.
"I really believe that most people actually start at Expand," she said. I see this in my own work. Some projects come to us wanting content production straight away, when the foundation isn't there yet. It's one of the reasons I sometimes turn work down.
Personal, public, sacred
This was my favourite practice from the episode. Before you plan your content calendar, take a piece of paper and draw three columns.
Personal holds what you feel able to share, even if it stretches you. You can feel the discomfort, and you know you'll be okay.
Public holds what you are fully comfortable sharing, in any format.
Sacred holds what is so vulnerable that sharing it would dysregulate you.
Charlotte has noticed that when people post from the sacred column, they often disappear for weeks or months afterwards. The exercise helps you see that line before you cross it. We don't owe online audiences all of ourselves, all the time.
A ritual before you open Instagram
Charlotte finds social media draining at times, as a sensitive person. So before she opens the app, she sets an intention: connection, curiosity or learning. She gives it a colour, for example blue for curiosity. Then she imagines herself inside a container filled with that light for the time she spends online.
The point is to avoid scrolling into dissociation and coming out drained. I relate to this a lot. People are often surprised by how little I scroll for someone who works in social media. It overwhelms me, and it rarely inspires my work.
AI and your own voice
Charlotte isn't against AI. Her concern is that people now reach for it before they tune in to themselves. She wants to make sure "the technology doesn't swallow our depth."
In the episode I described AI as another filter. We used visual filters because we didn't want to be seen in our imperfection. Now we lean on AI when we don't fully trust ourselves to tell our own message. I think we'll find our balance with it, and conversations like this one help.
When you feel stuck, find your path
If you've been trying to bloom all year, Charlotte's first message is simple: you can rest now. Then she suggests a creative ritual she calls "find your path". Intuitively collect twenty or thirty images you feel drawn to, on Pinterest or anywhere else, without overthinking it. Then look at them together. Patterns appear: a colour that keeps coming back, a symbol that repeats. They show you what your inner landscape is asking for.
The world Charlotte wants to live in
I close every episode with the same question. Charlotte described a world that slows down, where we "listen to the sound of birds before the sound of notifications." She wants online spaces that feel like a fire we gather around, the way our ancestors did. A world woven back into nature and creativity, where we remember that we're all connected.
Listen to the full conversation
Listen to episode 7 of (re)connect wherever you get your podcasts.
Find Charlotte at collectiverootspr.com, where you can take her free quiz to find your creative season, and on Instagram at @collectiverootspr.
Want help building a social media presence that starts from your roots? That is what we do at Green Socials. Get in touch.
