It begins young.

The fear of showing our emotions to others.

My 9 year old was crying his eyes out this morning. Deep sobs that shook his little frame.

But what was most heartbreaking to watch was not the tears but the attempts at composure…

Listen to my conversation with Michelle Grant, founder of The Great Full, where we explore the role of courage in leading change, how it connects to confidence and some practical tips on how to build your own courage.

The topics we cover include: What motivated me to set up Courage Lab; the role of courage in the transformation towards a more sustainable world; artificial harmony and avoiding difficult conversations; my take on armoured vs. daring leadership; courage-building practices you can engage with…

It’s day one of the school holidays. I’m already feeling at a loss for what to do to fill the time. I am feeling a lethargy and a listlessness that has stopped me from making fun plans […]

The intense sense of dread and grief we felt in 2020 has been replaced by a more subtle but chronic feeling. A feeling that has caught many of us off-guard…

Move towards the fire. This has become one of my mantras as a mediator and facilitator. 

In the courageous conversations that I facilitate, I support people to move towards the things they are most fearful of. The things that feel most risky, most vulnerable, perhaps explosive. The things that they are avoiding, wanting to run a mile from.

I had my own little lesson in vulnerability this week…

I am often called in as a mediator because of ‘ineffective and unproductive behaviour’ (to put it mildly).

Organisations often address problems at a behaviour level, perhaps because it feels more comfortable to do this. We often have policies and procedures to deal with ‘problem behaviour’. But these behaviours are symptoms. They can only be meaningfully and sustainably addressed through uncovering the root causes. Problem behaviours stem from difficult feelings that have not been acknowledged…

"I wish they could realise that I am a human being not a function."

This longing, expressed to me by a leader in a recent team mediation, is at the heart of so many conflicts.

A deep desire to be seen, heard, understood, considered.

But it is usually hidden under layer upon layer of accusations (they treat me badly, they don't respect me, they don't care how I feel)…

Most of the conflicts I mediate have escalated due to distance. The parties have been fearful of speaking to each other because of layer upon layer of assumptions they have made about the other. So they have stayed in their trenches, firing emails, whatsapp messages and formal complaints at each other. And this firing from a distance provokes counter-fire or avoidance, which confirms their worst fears and suspicions and causes them to dig deeper into their trenches…

Many of the teams and individuals I am working with at the moment have a similar dilemma. On the surface they are in a fairly healthy place, but there is a big, unacknowledged elephant in the room.

Some of the elephants I’ve seen include unresolved tension between two team members that plays out in team meetings, financial threats to an organisation that make the future feel uncertain…

There is a little-known term, coined by psychotherapist Andrea Nair, to describe what happens when children get home from school after a day of trying to maintain a certain level of energy, mental motivation, emotional containment and physical restraint… They experience ‘after school restraint collapse’. At home, they are able to release their pent up emotions and express themselves without fear of judgement or consequences.

I think we need an equivalent term for adults…

There is a lot of tension in the air at the moment. One week into lockdown #2 and there are signs of pent up anger, anxiety, loss, loneliness all around. Aggressive driving, argumentative social media exchanges, impatient interactions in shops, family blow-ups.

If you are lucky enough not to be experiencing overt conflict at work, it is likely that there are conflicts brewing under the surface…

In a recent, very tough, team mediation, the tool that really unlocked change was Nonviolent Communication (NVC), a tool for compassionate, assertive communication. NVC is mostly taught as a tool for communicating a difficult message. And with good reason - it is a powerful tool for centred speaking. But its hidden power is in helping us to listen with compassion.

The senior team in question was stuck in a cycle of mistrust that felt never-ending, because everything they were hearing from each other confirmed their judgements and fears…

My son turned 7 last week. When I picked him up from school he described his day… Isaac: ‘Everyone sang happy birthday to me. It was nice but a bit embarrassing.’ Me: ‘So you felt embarrassed but still liked it?’ Isaac: ‘No - I mean I mostly liked it but was a little bit embarrassed too.’

It may seem a minor thing to celebrate, but I'd just spent time with a senior team, teaching them to notice and name their emotions. Their inability to do this has kept them stuck in a perpetual, unconscious cycle of mistrust, reacting to each other without really understanding why. So to be corrected by my son for emphasising the wrong emotion felt reassuring…

Just before lockdown, Dr Rachel Morris interviewed me for her brilliant 'You are not a frog' podcast about how to manage difficult conversations that arise during change, crisis and conflict. The recording is now live and our conversation is even more relevant today, as leaders navigate perpetual uncertainty and as teams figure out how to work together in our changed world…

Listen to my podcast interview with Dr Carlos Saba, co-founder of The Happy Startup School, to learn more about personality, playing to your strengths and working with difference, through the lens of the brilliant Lumina Spark psychometric. I recently coached Carlos around his Lumina portrait; in this podcast he shares insights it gave him into some of his own self-limiting beliefs as well as the paradoxes and ‘hidden treasures’ in his personality…

My 3 year old loves flowers. Yesterday I gave her some that I had found on the ground. She was so delighted - repeatedly and lovingly arranging them, smelling them, gazing at them. And then I inadvertently said something that provoked an outburst of anger and she started hysterically ripping them to shreds in protest. It was a tragi-comic moment, seeing her do something so pointless and destructive that hurt no one but herself…

The cycle of mistrust is a tragic, but common, dynamic in workplace relationships. I see it play out in most, if not all, of the workplace conflicts I mediate. It often starts with small misinterpretations but can quickly spiral out of control. How can we break the cycle? Here are some strategies I use during mediation or conflict coaching sessions, along with a story from a recent mediation…

Fear of conflict - one of Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team. ‘Artificial harmony’ is a sign of this dysfunction. Teams develop a fear of conflict when trust is absent. Conversely, leaders who model and encourage vulnerability build a trusting environment which makes constructive conflict possible…

I was reminded recently of the power of deep listening and empathy to enable us to process our feelings. I have felt very ‘full’. Full of emotion, thoughts, ideas, hopes, worries, preoccupations, stresses, pressures, doubts, judgements (of self and others). It had been a volatile week in terms of my moods and my children’s. My six year old had started back at school . It was only after dropping him off (and my daughter at nursery) that the exhaustion caught up on me. I realised how much I have been carrying around over the last three months...

I’ve been reflecting a lot on leadership - political and business - during this pandemic. Brian Eno’s Rethink Essay on the future of leadership (on BBC Radio) compares the ‘macho, media-savvy, authoritarian’ leadership style that the countries who have suffered worst from Covid share, with the cooperative style demonstrated by (female) leaders in Germany, New Zealand and Taiwan, countries which have had much better results…

A few weeks into lockdown, I started to realise that one of the things I was finding hard was that I had no team to help through the Covid-19 crisis. […] This longing to help people was painful at first as I felt powerless. Stuck at home, self employed, team-less. It was as if my wings had been clipped. And on top of that, my planned team facilitation and mediation projects were put on hold due to Covid-19…