Leadership coach | 3P + systems lens High performance = mental health Inside-out change, not self-improvement Chartered MCIPD | HG.Dip.P | Ex-EY Dir | ICF
South West, England
Joined April 2011
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‘I can do it. I just can’t say that I’m confident.’ Someone said this to me recently, with real frustration in her voice.
At the start of last year, my son was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumour. Thankfully, the operation and his recovery have gone well. I couldn’t control what happened. What I could do was keep showing up, one day at a time.
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ALT An older man rests his hand on a younger man’s shoulder as they walk along a beach at sunset.
This week I walked out of the wrong door, onto a street I’d never seen.
There’s a small lurch in the stomach that comes with that. A slightly childlike feeling of being lost.
Two instincts arrived almost at once. Go back, or go forward.
Which one shows up first in you?
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ALT A man in a long coat stands at the end of a narrow brick passage, looking out at a river and an arched bridge at dusk.
In 2022 I wrote: ‘I am the jailer and the jailed.’
The feeling was every bit as heavy. What changed was how much authority I gave it.
If you can’t reach out, someone may still see you. My wife, Val, did.
Who has taken you by the arm, and do they know?
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ALT A single key resting on a sunlit windowsill.
From nineteen I looked for the answer on the outside. The next course. The next book.
Sydney Banks pointed to something plain. Life works from the inside out, like the sky behind the weather.
Where are you still looking on the outside?
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ALT Clouds moving across a wide sky over hills, with clear light behind the weather.
In 2010, at my lowest, I was turned completely inward.
Every step of the logic held. Nobody noticed the starting point was a state of mind.
I was asking the right question in the wrong place.
What if you held your own thinking a little more lightly?
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ALT A dark window at night with a warm lamp glowing inside.
The Toltec tradition says that before we could choose anything, we were handed a book. In time we call it our values.
As far as I can tell, mine guide my own conduct. Nobody else signed my book.
Where might you hold someone to a book they never signed?
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ALT Misty allotments, with rows of vegetables beside a tangle of pink cosmos behind an old wooden rail fence.
I notice the words we reach for when we try to change. I must. I should.
‘I must stop being such a perfectionist’ is a perfectionist sentence, written in the same ink as the habit.
Which ‘must’ in your week might sound different as a ‘what if’?
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ALT A black and gold fountain pen lies on a blank cream sheet beside a bottle of dark ink.
For years, a feeling sat beneath what I did. I’m not enough. Try harder.
In my mid-fifties, it shifted. Same man, same desk, same pile of books. The drive used to be lack. Now it is curiosity.
What is doing the driving in your hard work right now?
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ALT A wooden desk by a window in soft morning light, with a stack of books, one open book and a slatted chair.
We tend to believe that achieving difficult things produces the good feeling. As far as I can tell, it is closer to the other way round.
The last time something good happened and you barely felt it, what was your attention busy holding down?
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ALT A lone swimmer floats on a calm sea under a low, golden sunrise.
An image I keep coming back to. Wellbeing as a ball, resting at the surface. Thinking holds it under.
Get it done and the gripping stops. The ball comes up, and the achievement gets the credit.
Then the feeling fades.
What is the fading telling us?
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ALT A small sailing dinghy with a white sail sits on calm, still water at dawn, reflected below it.
A client told me about the day a project he had carried for two years landed well.
He felt nothing.
The reaching was so continuous that the arrival could not get in.
When something good happened recently, were you in it, or on to the next thing?
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ALT A wooden rowing boat with two oars rests on a pebble shore beside a still, misty lake at dawn.
A feeling arrives, is felt, and passes. Unless something holds it in place. Which suggests that what a feeling mostly needs is room.
When we rush to fix someone’s feeling, we send a quiet message: this shouldn’t be here.
There’s a part of me that is very good at fixing. I’ve noticed it steps in mostly when I feel a bit useless.
So I’m practising thanking it, and asking it to wait.
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ALT An empty, light-filled room with an open window, a white curtain lifting in the breeze, and a small wooden stool on bare floorboards.
A simple test for any one-to-one this week.
Afterwards, the question is simply: who did more of the talking?
If it was you, you were probably handing over answers. If it was them, you were probably helping them see.
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Someone touched something real, and a helpful frame arrived a beat before the feeling had finished arriving.
The frame was partly for me. Sitting with someone’s loss with nothing to offer is hard, and a good idea relieves that.
What I’m noticing is how small the change might be. A beat. A breath. Letting the idea form, and not saying it yet.
When someone tells you something heavy, what do you reach for, and who is it really for?
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A solicitor’s duty to the public sits above the duty to the client. Breach it and you can be struck off.
That’s the point of a duty. It binds when it’s expensive.
Notice how close “we had no choice” sits to “I have to”.
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An email arrives at ten at night. This time he noticed he wasn’t in the right state, and went to bed.
From inside a state of mind, the thinking doesn’t feel like thinking. It feels like the situation.
Is it you thinking, or the state thinking?
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I should. I have to. I need to.
Each of those words brings forth a world where someone else holds the pen.
Say it again starting with “I’m choosing to” and you are back inside your own decision.
What world are your words bringing forth this week?
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The one who forecasts is usually the one who is frightened.
Fear goes straight to fixing. What it quietly drops are the questions.
When a leader can say, I do not know, something in the room loosens.
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Someone senior maps the next eighteen months. The mood changes. Options that were live quietly stop being options.
A story about the future becomes knowledge of the future.
The forecast is part of the weather.
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Notice what you reach for to explain someone whose position makes no sense to you.
The moment the explanation arrives, curiosity leaves. They become a type. You have pinned them down, and the conversation has nowhere left to go.
Catch that moment.
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