Blog 

One of the most powerful — and, in my opinion, most dangerous — words to emerge from the Covid chapter is normalize. We spoke of the new normal. We adjusted. We adapted. We moved on. That's good. But did we move on well? Normalize used to mean bringing something into conformity with an established standard. You took the outlier and brought it back into line. What it seems to mean now is something far more unsettling: we change the standard to accommodate the outlier. We don't

In a recent coaching conversation, I said to the person, "You know you're building a case to support that assumption, right?" A pause. A slow nod, the dawning realization. We were talking about a decision they'd already made — one that quietly crossed a line they'd set for themselves. And without realising it, they had taken the twenty minutes or so giving me all the supporting “evidence” that their decision “felt” right. They weren't being dishonest with me. No, it all sound

Putting Down What Was Never Yours to Carry We’ve spent three weeks looking at what to amplify, what to reduce, and what to finally get started in our lives. This final instalment is the most personal of the four — because stopping isn’t just a practical decision. For most of us, it’s a spiritual and emotional one. And it begins with a distinction that changes everything. Not everything you’re carrying was given to you by God. Some of it you picked up yourself — out of obligat

The things that really matter, that you keep putting off There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much. It comes from doing a lot — and still feeling like something essential is missing. You know the feeling. The schedule is full, the output is tangible, the people around you would say you’re doing well and are very productive. And yet there’s a quiet, persistent sense that the most important things — the things you were actually made for — k

The Honest Conversation You've Been Avoiding There's a passage in Romans that reminds us of the human-ness of the apostle Paul. Paul – an apostle, theologian, church planter, someone who had, by any measure, figured a few things out — writes this with disarming honesty: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." (Romans 7:15) This honest reflection is a powerful example of vulnerability, too. The man who wrote half the New Testa

The Art of Doubling Down on What's Actually Working There's a bias built into most evaluation processes — whether we're reviewing a business quarter or reflecting on a personal season — and it's this: we are far more drawn to what went wrong than to what went right. It makes sense, neurologically. Our brains are wired to flag problems, to scan for threats, to spend disproportionate energy on the gap between where we are and where we want to be. It's a survival mechanism that