Sunday was my wife's birthday, and on Saturday evening we all went out as a family to play padel, which I had never played before. My nineteen-year-old plays regularly. I was fine for most of it, right up until the end, when the game was all but over and I went for a ball I had no business going for, because I wanted him to see me get it. I had not stretched, my calf went, and the pain was immediate enough that I could not drive us home. We iced it the moment we got in, and I spent her actual...
about 7 hours ago • 4 min read
Years ago, working in corporate finance, I sat across the table from my CEO working through the forecast for the next twelve months. It had already been one of those long days, the kind where your ability to think clearly starts to go. About 45 minutes in, he ordered pizza. We stopped working, and a conversation about family turned into a much deeper one about marriage. It lasted about 90 minutes. I had been married seven years and had two children. He was more than 30 years older, married...
7 days ago • 3 min read
He has been leading this team for years now. Before that, he was one of them, in the numbers himself, before anyone called him the person responsible for them. Now he carries a global, eight-figure P&L, and at his level the actual job is strategy: sitting across from other leaders and shaping direction, not being the one who jumps in and fixes the problem in front of him. In our session this week I watched him do it again: reach for the detail two levels below his seat, offer the answer...
28 days ago • 3 min read
My wife and I have spent close to fifteen years doing pre-marriage and post-marriage counselling together and fter working with over a hundred couples, I have noticed something. A lot of couples think they are fighting each other. They are not. They are fighting something neither of them can see. Their past. They thought they were fighting each other, when what they were actually experiencing was the collision of patterns formed long before they had ever met: things learned in childhood about...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Recently my wife and I went to a concert; the show hadn't finished when my wife turned to me for the third time and said she loved the tracksuit the group were wearing. Everyone in the room had been asked, on the way in, to wear either the group's merch from previous shows or a plain white T-shirt. The tracksuit the artists had on wasn't part of any of that, nobody in the room had seen it before, and she'd already said as much twice. Third time round, I told her to go and find out if they had...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
This week I was ill in a way I haven't been in years, something that felt like COVID without testing positive for anything, bones aching like they were arguing with each other every time I moved or sneezed, and a migraine behind my eyes for days on top of a cold. Physically, I was a hot mess. It landed on top of business news that had come in at the start of the month, the kind of last-minute update that rearranges a whole timeline in one phone call, big enough that working harder or thinking...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
The email came in at ten at night. One line: "I know what's supposed to start tomorrow. We can't. I need to call you and speak to you urgently." My heart was racing before I'd even called back. We'd been running this programme for four years, the next cohort was starting in the morning, and whatever this was, it was already too late to fix quietly. It turned out to be circumstances beyond either of our control. We tried to resolve it fast, calls, lawyers going back and forth, every angle we...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
A few weeks ago I sat across from someone who had spent twenty years building a career with her own hands, and who could not tell me a single true thing about where she wanted it to go next. She could tell me everything she regretted, and that part came easily, almost fluently. What she could not do was say out loud what she actually wanted, and I suspect you know that particular silence better than you would like to admit. When she finally ran out of regrets, I asked her one question, and it...
2 months ago • 4 min read
My wife and I were planning a holiday. We went back and forth on where, then started on when, working around both our calendars. She gave me some dates. I told her I would go away and check whether those dates actually worked on my side. We left it there. In my head, that was almost done. We knew where we were going. I had her dates. As long as mine lined up with hers, I could book it. So I booked it. A couple of weeks later an email landed in her inbox. Flight details. Locations. The...
2 months ago • 3 min read