I’ve got a confession to make
I once paid an agency £5,000 to write my LinkedIn About section, then took three months to publish it. Now writing every week is the best CPD I do.
Maybe just leave them with a smile on their face
After seventeen years in one business, I went job hunting and spent every meeting talking people through my CV. Then a loving kindness meditation asked me a better question.
Stop thinking, start hearing
I heard an old Alan Watts lecture over a piece of music the other day. If you talk all the time, he said, you never hear anyone else. The same goes for thinking.
Just trust in the universe, really?
During a year and a half of gardening leave, my yoga teacher told me to trust in the universe. I had no idea what she meant. I've been watching it play out ever since.
Maybe it’s not about creation, it’s about awareness
One season at Urban Outfitters we couldn't stop selling cheap plastic chandeliers. The next big thing turned out to be a box on a shelf that had been there all along.
Who was richer?
I parked in a stranger's field after the retreat. Long driveway, racehorses, the kind of property that communicates, without saying a word, that the person who owns it has done very well. He fed the horses and went inside. I sat in my chair under the awning and thought: who's richer?
It's not supposed to be so hard
I gathered up a collection of artworks and drove them to an auction house. I drove home, walked back in, and it felt completely wrong. Within the hour I was back in the car.
How to keep the door open
A client said to me: I connected to something really powerful. And then life got busy, and I lost it. How do I keep it? It's one of the most important questions there is.
Is your life a road trip or a commute?
I was talking to a woman who was heading to Dorset with her family. She was focused entirely on getting there. And I thought: she's already on the road trip. She just can't see it yet.
Getting high on my own supply
I spent two hours in a field in the New Forest working harder than I've worked at anything in years. Breathing fast, breathing deep, going all in. And at the end of it, I had nothing. Ten minutes of letting go gave me everything. This is what the breath showed me.
Performance is fragile. Expression isn't.
For most of my life, I performed. Not on a stage, in boardrooms. Then a couple of weeks ago I sang in public for the first time, and understood the difference.
I got there thirty years early
There's an exercise I do with almost every client. I ask them to imagine they're 90, looking back on a life well lived. This weekend I noticed I was already there.
The monk on the riverbank
Peace, presence, stillness, joy, we treat these as a retreat. Something we do instead of achieving. I think it's exactly backwards. And stranger than that.
I went on a retreat and all I came back with was the meaning of life
One of the outrageous goals I set myself six years ago was to be able to dance in public without alcohol. That tells you something about where I was.
You Can't Untaste Awareness
In a recent meditation, I asked myself a simple question. Where is awareness right now? And what does it actually feel like?
Removing the Shackles of Success
There's a moment many successful people reach that's hard to talk about honestly. From the outside, things look good. Inside, something feels tight. Not wrong exactly. Just constrained.
Energised by possibility
A client came out of breathwork and said something I haven't been able to forget. "Energised by possibility. Heading towards something beautiful." It's not a feature of youth. It's a state — and it never left you.
Three words that changed everything for me
Purpose. Balance. Joy. They arrived when I was still a CEO, out of nowhere — and became the compass for everything since. This is where the triangle began.
You are not at the mercy of your state
How you feel, how you show up, how clearly you think — it's not weather. It's a state, and it can be shifted deliberately, in minutes. Six tools from an ex-CEO who learned the hard way.