Two weeks before I married Shirene, she asked me a question I have never fully stopped answering.

What kind of father do you want to be?

I said, a good one.

She laughed, because three words was the whole plan I walked into marriage with.

We got married in our early twenties. Children came almost immediately, in the middle of a recession, with no savings buffer and nothing written down beyond a sense of the life I wanted to build for her and for them. I knew where I wanted us to end up. I rarely knew the how, and the times I thought I did, life corrected me anyway: plans changed, the maths never worked out the way I'd worked it out, the ground moved when I was certain it wouldn't.

This week marks twenty years, and looking back reminds me how much it actually takes to bring a vision to life. I still do not have it all figured out, and the more ambitious you are, the less the how makes sense some days. That has never been a reason to stop, only a reason to step forward anyway.

You know this pressure if you have ever been the one people look to for the answer, not always as a CEO, sometimes just as a husband, a father, a founder, whoever is supposed to have worked it out by now.

People assume steady on the outside means settled on the inside. Most days it does not. You show the room one version of yourself and carry a second version that is quietly asking what is actually going on. Nobody tells you that carrying both is simply what the job costs.

Twenty years on, that three-word answer is the only part of the plan that actually held. A good one has meant showing up for my kids, not just financially, but physically, emotionally, spiritually, with them in the good times and the bad. I have not always got it right, and I am not perfect and do not claim to be. We love each other. We have a great relationship. We do not always like each other, and that has been part of what it looks like to be a good one.

I always wanted an amazing marriage, and an amazing marriage does not mean everything is perfect all the time. It means learning to work through it, to communicate, and to grow together. My wife has been the person I lean on, someone I can count on in good times and bad. She has been my rock, and she has pushed me, intentionally and unintentionally, to do amazing things. She has also brought out sides of me I did not always want to see or acknowledge, and that is what it means to have a brilliant relationship.

None of that stayed at home when I went to work. It could not. I spent years leading transformation work across multiple continents, and the leaders I sat opposite were carrying exactly what I was carrying, a public version that had it handled and a private version quietly unravelling.

I remember sitting with a CEO who was meant to be talking forecasting with me. We spent the first hour talking about his wife instead, about a conversation he needed to have with her, about his kids, about the season he was actually in at home. By the time we came back to the numbers, something had lifted off him. We moved faster in the second hour than we had in months, because the thing blocking the business was never really the business.

That is the part people miss when they try to keep work and home in separate rooms. You are not two different people clocking in and out. You are one person carrying one gap between who you are performing and who you actually are, and it follows you everywhere, into the boardroom and into the kitchen.

Some of what you are carrying right now, you cannot take to your team, and you should not have to take it to your family every single time either. If you are sitting on decisions you cannot easily take anywhere else, I work privately with a small number of founders and CEOs, as an adviser and a thinking partner. [Book A Conversation Here] and we can explore whether it makes sense.

Some of what you are carrying right now you cannot take to your team, and you shouldn't have to take it to your family every single time either. If you are sitting on decisions you cannot easily take anywhere else, I work privately with a small number of founders and senior leaders as an adviser and a thinking partner. [Book A Conversation Here] and we can explore whether it makes sense.

Closing that gap is not about doing more. It is about being honest about the patterns running underneath, the ones you inherited, the ones you built to survive, before you can choose something different on purpose.

This week, name one place, just one, where it would actually be safe for you to say you have not got it figured out. Then go there and say it out loud before the week is out.

You don't have to have it all figured out. You don't. The question is whether you have somewhere safe enough to admit that, and whether the version of you that shows up there is the real one or the one you have been performing for everyone else too.

• Where in your life are you currently performing certainty you do not actually feel?
• If the people closest to you could see the version of you that shows up when nobody is watching, would they recognise you, or would they meet someone they have never actually been introduced to?
• What is it costing the people who love you most that you still have not found somewhere safe enough to admit you don't have it figured out?

See you next Monday.

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