Category Archives for presence
Are you being honest with yourself?
I mean full, deep, radical honesty.About how life is going.About what you want and don’t want anymore.What unexplored dreams you still have.What feels intolerable but you continue to tolerate it.What feels like a pull but you dismiss it out of hand as impossible.What feels like a tall order, but secretly excites the hell out of […]
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Do we call it out enough when we see toxic male leadership energy?
It can be hard, in the face of someone’s uncontained rage, dysregulation or unfettered narcissism, to take a stand. The fear of consequence and reprisal is real.And yet, there’s so much of the bad stuff around. It makes my flesh crawl when I see unreflective, hard nosed, toxic masculinity on display.Let’s at least recognise what […]
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Are you striving or soaring?
A distinction I often explore with my clients is whether they are running away from something or running towards.Running away is what we do when we want to avoid discomfort.The impossible targets. The crappy boss or board. The relentless pressure.The tedium. The loss of connection and affection at home.The challenging teen or parent.Running away implies […]
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Are you dancing on the goal line or the soul line?
Goal line: tangible, measurable goals…. That new job; the pay rise; the car; the house. Or in a wider context, completion of that community project. The charity marathon. The fitness goal achieved.All worthy, valuable and potentially fun (until they aren’t).Soul line: your emerging purpose. Being in touch with what life wants from you.The deeper question. […]
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My inner rulebook just sent me a strongly worded email. I marked it as spam.
You see, I’ve been thinking lately about how many self-imposed rules we carry through our lives without even noticing.Not the explicit ones.The ones we never wrote down but somehow agreed to anyway.Rules about looking composed, sounding certain. Or looking good…Keeping the surface smooth so no one sees the questions underneath.They’re subtle, but they shape so […]
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What if the universe is trolling you… lovingly?
I’ve been noticing something curious about the moments that catch me off-guard.Not the big crises necessarily, more like the subtle disruptions, the things that don’t quite go the way I imagined. A conversation that lands strangely. A plan that unravels. Or a day that refuses to flow no matter how hard I try to steer […]
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Your colleague didn’t trigger you. Your beliefs did.
The other day, I was speaking with a client who felt deeply triggered by a colleague’s response to their input.You know those moments. That comment which touches something tender inside… and suddenly it feels much bigger than it should?They’d gone from calm and capable to tight-chested and self-questioning in seconds.As we explored it together, I […]
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This stopped me cold
I found myself wondering how many productive days I actually have left. Not years. Days.It’s an uncomfortable question. Almost intrusive, like a stranger leaning in too close.I did a rough calculation. Nothing scientific or worthy of a spreadsheet. Just an honest estimate of how many days I might still feel mentally alive enough to create something meaningful, to contribute in […]
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No one warns you that midlife success comes with a free side of “What the £$%& am I doing now?”
See, there’s a moment in life where everything on the outside looks exactly as it should.Say your career is stable. You’re good with where your family is at. Your sense is that you’ve done well. Maybe even better than you once imagined.And yet, somewhere inside, there is a quiet point inside that isn’t so stable.You […]
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Are you shrinking your value?
This often comes up with clients (and is a good one for me too)…Do you know the real value you’re creating in the world?Or are you caught managing and packaging how you present your value based on what you fear others might think?There’s this instinct many of us carry. It looks like managing other people’s feelings. Trying […]
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