Perhaps you’re making the same mistakes over and over again. You know you are. Same arguments with your partner. Same problems at work. The same patterns repeating themselves in your life. The same poor decisions leading to the same disappointing outcomes. Why? Because you’re not reflecting. You’re just repeating. Reflection in its simplest terms is…
Everyone fails at some time in their lives and failure hurts, it undoubtedly leaves scars, mentally and emotionally. Every day of my working life I see people sitting opposite me telling me about something that has failed in their lives, their relationships, their body, their treatment, their marriage, their business, or something else in their…
Feedback is said to be the food of champions. It’s a key to successful practice and an essential part of how any learner actually improves, that’s why higher level performers in almost any field actively look for feedback. Not because they enjoy being told what’s wrong with them, but because they’ve worked out that without…
The simple way of thinking about the law of diminishing returns is what happens when you reach the point where the effort you’re putting in is no longer worth what you’re getting out. Sometimes in life you just keep going, grinding way beyond that point, and you need to stop and ask yourself an honest…
This article is about conditions of worth — a term coined by the psychologist Carl Rogers for something most of us carry without ever naming it: the terms other people set, usually without meaning to, for when we’re allowed to feel good about ourselves. Rogers’ idea, from his 1959 theory of personality, is that from…
You’ve finally done it. You’ve taken that big leap into what feels like the deep end. Something big, and perhaps something that felt brave at the time and now feels increasingly like it might have been stupid. Maybe you’ve left a job. Started a business. Ended a relationship. Moved to a new city. Signed up…
You’ve reached a pivotal point in this journey. And something fundamental has already shifted, whether you’ve noticed it or not. You can’t go back anymore. Not because retreat is physically impossible. Not because the bridge has literally burned behind you. But because the person who could retreat no longer exists. That version of you, the…
You took the first step. Congratulations. That was the hard part, right? Wrong. You’re still early in your journey. You’ve got to the starting blocks, you’ve taken the leap, and now you’re continuing to move forward in the new situation you find yourself in. Before long, something will start to become clear. This new situation…
You were born open-minded. Watch a child encounter something new. They don’t filter it through decades of assumptions. They don’t immediately categorise it as impossible or inappropriate for someone like them. They just accept it, explore it, and try it out. That’s what you used to do. Somewhere along the way, you lost that. You…
Sometimes, in new situations, it’s really common to feel like you’re faking it. You’ve done the work. You’ve passed the exams. You’ve got through the interview, you’ve got the job, even the qualifications to prove you’re competent. Yet there’s this persistent voice in your head whispering that you’re a fraud, that someone’s going to find…