Unharvested Lessons on Patience, Purpose, and Coaching
- Brainz Magazine
- Dec 5, 2025
- 7 min read
Stuart Shearing, Founder of The Resonant Leadership Program, combines coaching, neurobiology, and systems design to help male founders navigate post-investment pressure without burning out. Working with just six founders annually, he prioritises nervous-system regulation before business strategy, because calmer founders make better decisions.
I sat down to write something professional about my coaching approach. Instead, I’m going to tell you about digging clay and having tantrums in a Portuguese forest. Bear with me. A couple of summers ago, summer 2023, I had an amazing camping weekend in a secluded spot in the Dorset countryside. Good food, good friends, a campfire, surrounded by woodland on three sides and open fields on another, with a view over the Purbeck coast. Idyllic.
We got talking about how disconnected so many of us have become from nature and how magical it is to plug back in. I grew up in the country and now realize how uncomfortable I feel after only a short time in urban environments. It just doesn’t feel right for me. Aided by a healthy dose of mushrooms, I talked about this connection to nature and how we don’t need to disappear to Peru to “find ourselves”, often while contributing to the commercial exploitation of something sacred. As someone who lives in Portugal, I particularly feel this. I’ve been conscious of only contributing and not taking from a country I’ve chosen to call home, and that has welcomed me with open arms.
As we got deeper into the conversation, my friend told me about his own deep connection with nature. He runs foraging and survival weekends. His journey had taken him to Druidry, and he told me I was sounding very much like one. A couple of weeks later, he lent me a book on Druidry that he’d read twenty years earlier, and it struck a chord with me. Druidry is a philosophy or way of life that’s connected to and reverent of the natural world. It’s centered around the pursuit of wisdom, inspiration, and creativity, while valuing peace, honor, and hospitality.
At the time, I was relocating to Portugal and had found a property with woodland that was predominantly Cork Oaks. In Druidry, the oak is the mightiest tree across the UK and much of Europe, representing strength and wisdom. Its roots connect to our ancestors, its trunk to ourselves, and its branches to the higher plane of existence. The oak connects these disparate realms.
So, I landed in this new space, covered with trees that are not only sacred in ancient lore but part of Portugal’s national identity and one of their largest exports. And it is an amazing tree. Cork is renewable, it can be harvested every 8-12 years. They’re fire-resistant. In a country plagued by terrible fires, Cork Oaks stand as protectors. Eucalyptus trees, while beautiful, cause massive damage. They spread and intensify fires. The combination of removing eucalyptus and not harvesting Cork Oaks would be highly significant in this country.
The corks on my land won’t be harvested. Not because they can’t be, but because some things are more valuable left to do what they do naturally. They look so beautiful in their natural state.
Landing in this new home and area, I wanted to connect to the land and to the space. I was also thinking about what I would be personally capable of building, with my very limited experience and knowledge, that would help me and my community integrate into the environment and ourselves. The soil in the local area is rich in clay, so I decided that learning to build with cob would be ideal, a mix of clay soil, sand, straw, and water. A traditional material, used for hundreds of years.
I also wanted to connect myself and my ancestry with Portugal, and having found that the Celts were in this area, I decided upon a Celtic version of a Temazcal or Sweat Lodge. The Celts used sweat houses until the early twentieth century. They were typically built of stone, igloo-shaped, and a fire would be lit inside to heat the stone, then swept out, and a person would be sealed inside with peat for hours. The ritual element of the experience I was creating would be based on a Celtic celebration of the land and space, with reverence to our ancestors and to the higher realm. Essentially, a building made from the land, on the land, to celebrate our connection to the land, to our ancestors, and to our higher selves.
I’m no runner or cyclist, but I’ve done a few marathons and bike races on stubbornness and determination alone. What I love about them is the rhythm, the steady pace of feet hitting the ground, the turn of the crank synchronized with breath. It creates a meditative state that takes you somewhere else, a kind of peace that comes from repetition.
Turns out digging is the same. Mixing cob is the same. There’s a simplicity to it, a cadence. Shovel into earth, lift, turn, drop. Water to clay to sand to straw, round and round with your feet in the mix. Your mind goes quiet. The rhythm takes you somewhere else.
I dug every shovel full of soil myself. Mixed every batch of cob by hand. Not because I had to, I could have hired help, machinery. But because I needed the rhythm. Needed to get out of my head and into my body, into something that didn’t require thinking, performing, or being right.
That was back in January of this year, and I’m writing this in late November. After false starts, tears, and numerous tantrums, I could not be happier with the result.
I started with bamboo. Not actual bamboo, a native Portuguese plant that looks close enough. I spent days cutting it with a machete, my favorite tool, building a frame that I then wrapped in chicken wire. The plan was to spread cob over this. It was never going to work.
My friend, a builder, tried to tell me this gently. I got angry. Then I cried. Actually cried, standing there in front of my chicken-wire catastrophe. I was so emotionally invested that I couldn’t hear him, couldn’t process that weeks of work needed to be abandoned.
I had to walk away for weeks. When I came back, calmer, I tore it all down and started properly. I did listen. Eventually. But I had to get my nervous system to a place where I could actually receive the advice first.
Months later, I did it again. I became obsessed with using only materials from the land, cutting green timber, recycling everything, barely leaving the property. I was a hermit with a mission. I cobbled together a roof structure from totally inappropriate materials, planning a living roof that would have collapsed under its own weight.
Another friend visited from Italy. Also, a builder (I have now learned to stop inviting these nuisances!). A perfectionist. He couldn’t hide his anxiety about what he was seeing. I argued weakly, beat him at table tennis to restore my ego, then ignored the build entirely until he left.
Then I ripped out the roof, bought the proper materials, and finished it correctly.
I’ve spent most of my adult life supporting my family, dishing out advice to boards, co-workers, and clients. Somewhere in the process, I became too proud, too fragile, or too disconnected to be any good at actually taking it. I was playing a role and created a persona. I never quite believed it though, although you wouldn’t have known it. That’s a well-worn path, I think. One that resonates with many of us.
I have to make the mistakes myself. Even when experts are standing right there, telling me exactly what will happen. I think I know best. I’ve analyzed this pattern endlessly, trying to understand why I operate this way.
What I’ve learned, knowing your skills matters, but knowing your weaknesses matters more. Mine is that the misplaced ego has to touch the flame personally before it believes in heat. Understanding this about myself, really sitting with it, that’s the actual work. Shrugging off traits that come from ego rather than wisdom, from a place that no longer serves me.
The sweathouse sits in a circle of unharvested Cork Oaks now. They’ve been here for decades. They’re patient with the process and non-judgmental. I think.
I haven’t used it properly yet. I’m still learning what it’s for.
Ritual is a lost part of our ancestry, connection to nature, to community, to ourselves. I’m reading about ceremony, about the sacred circle of life, the four directions, about renewal, purification, healing, and rebirth. Writing the ritual, this space is waiting for.
I spent ten months building it. Now comes the harder part, learning how to be in it.
People ask me what I do. I work with founders who’ve forgotten how to listen. Who’ve been harvested too frequently, surrounded by “Eucalyptus Thinking”, fast growth that looks impressive but intensifies every fire. Who’ve lost connection to their roots, to why they started. Who confuse action with progress, who’ve built personas they can barely maintain, who give advice brilliantly but can’t receive it anymore.
I don’t tell them about the sweathouse unless they ask. But everything I learned building it, the patience, the listening, the difference between being busy and being purposeful, the rhythm that takes you out of your head and into your body, that’s what we work on.
I sat down to write something about my coaching approach. Turns out I had to build a mud hut in Portugal first to understand what that even was.
Thanks for staying with me through this.
Read more from Stuart Shearing
Stuart Shearing, Founder, The Resonant Leadership Program
Stuart Shearing is the founder of The Resonant Leadership Program, working with just six male founders annually through a twelve-month programme combining coaching, neurobiology, and systems design. His approach integrates nervous-system tracking, somatic practices, and strategic frameworks to help post-investment founders navigate board pressure, team dynamics, and scaling challenges without sacrificing their health or effectiveness. When founders are regulated rather than reactive, they make better decisions, build stronger teams, and create sustainable companies.
After 20+ years building businesses and experiencing his own burnout, Stuart now operates from rural Portugal, where he's built a Celtic sweat house used in private immersions with founders. For every founder Stuart works with, he mentors two young men (18-25) through The Foundation Programme—teaching them to manage stress and build resilience before crisis hits.
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