Written by Rosie Hewat, Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People Rosie Hewat is a Board and Executive Advisor and the Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People, a leadership and organisational advisory platform. She works with founders, boards, and senior leaders navigating complexity, scale, and high-stakes decision-making across global and regulated environments. There is a strange contradiction at the heart of many organisations. Someone becomes exceptionally good at their job. They develop years of specialist knowledge. They become the person colleagues approach when something difficult needs solving. They understand the nuances, exceptions, and problems that are not written in the manual. Then, eventually, we tell them that if they want more money, greater status, or another promotion, they need to start managing people. The excellent engineer becomes an engineering manager. The outstanding salesperson becomes a sales manager. The brilliant technical specialist acquires a team. The experienced practitioner gradually spends less time practising and more time conducting one-to-one meetings, approving leave, completing performance reviews, resolving conflicts, and managing other people’s careers. We call this progression. But sometimes, what the organisation has actually done is remove an excellent specialist from the work they were exceptional at and create a reluctant manager in their place. As organisations reconsider how work should be structured for the next decade, I think we also need to reconsider one of our oldest assumptions about careers: Why does progression so often require people management? Being excellent at your job does not mean you will be excellent at managing people This is not simply anecdotal. Research by Alan Benson, Danielle Li, and Kelly Shue examined promotion decisions across 214 firms and found evidence consistent with what is commonly called the Peter Principle: organisations frequently prioritised performance in an employee’s existing role when making promotion decisions, despite other characteristics being better predictors of managerial performance. The finding matters because the capabilities are different. Being an exceptional salesperson requires one set of capabilities. Managing ten salespeople requires another. Writing exceptional software is different from managing software engineers. Designing brilliant products is different from managing the performance, development, and careers of a product team. We should therefore stop treating people management as the inevitable next level of proficiency in another profession. People management is a different profession! That distinction matters. Someone can manage a product, programme, technical discipline, system, or complex body of work without becoming responsible for another person’s performance, development, and career. We have allowed the word manager to become unnecessarily synonymous with people manager, when they are not the same thing. I have seen this repeatedly during my own career. I have worked with people who were promoted into managerial positions despite having very little desire to manage people. They were technically excellent. They were willing to help colleagues. They would happily mentor someone more junior, share knowledge, or show another person how something should be done. But they did not want responsibility for another person’s career. Those are not the same thing. When the organisation subsequently complained that the individual was not a particularly good manager, the conversation often became, “Perhaps they need management training.” Sometimes they did. But training cannot manufacture desire. You can teach someone how to conduct a performance conversation. You can explain employment processes, delegation, coaching techniques, and feedback models. What training cannot necessarily do is make someone want the responsibility that comes with managing other human beings. Willingness matters. People management asks somebody to take responsibility not only for their own performance, but for the working experience, development, and, at times, difficult moments in somebody else’s career. That responsibility should never be assigned simply because nobody else was available to take it. Mentorship is not management I think this distinction is frequently overlooked. A senior specialist can be an extraordinary mentor without becoming somebody’s line manager. They can teach. They can challenge. They can review work. They can share twenty years of hard-earned knowledge. They can help a younger colleague understand why the textbook answer will not work in a particular situation. They can set technical standards and provide intellectual leadership. None of this requires them to approve someone’s annual leave, manage an absence, conduct a disciplinary conversation, or decide whether that individual deserves a promotion. Yet our career structures frequently bundle all of those responsibilities together. People management carries a significant emotional load that job descriptions rarely acknowledge. People do not stop being human when they arrive at work. Sometimes they tell their manager about bereavement, financial problems, relationship breakdowns, health concerns, or difficulties at home. A good manager has to know how to listen without becoming a therapist, how to support without overstepping, when to involve HR, and when an employee simply needs somebody to hear them. Then there are the difficult conversations. Underperformance does not become emotionally effortless because somebody attended management training. Neither does telling someone they are not receiving the promotion they wanted, addressing problematic behaviour, managing conflict between colleagues, or explaining decisions you know somebody will find upsetting. Managers can finish those conversations emotionally exhausted and then have to walk into their next meeting as though nothing happened. That is work. Organisations need to recognise it as such. The hidden problem of the accidental manager The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) describes people promoted into management without formal management or leadership training as “accidental managers.” Its research reports that 82% of managers entering management positions have received no formal management and leadership training. CMI also found that employees who rated their manager as ineffective were considerably more likely to say they intended to leave their organisation. Training therefore matters enormously. But I would go one step further. Before asking whether someone has been trained to manage, organisations should ask whether they actually want to manage. There are arguably two different problems: the untrained manager and the unwilling manager. Training can help solve the first. It cannot automatically solve the second. That distinction is something we encounter in our own management development work at Rosie’s People. Before delivering management training, we assess the people who are actually being asked to manage. Sometimes that process reveals a training need. But sometimes it reveals something more fundamental: the person never particularly wanted to become a people manager in the first place. They may have accepted the role because it was presented as the next stage of progression, because the salary increase depended on taking responsibility for a team, or simply because somebody needed to manage the function and they were the obvious person available. In those circumstances, immediately prescribing management training risks treating the symptom rather than examining the appointment itself. The consequences matter far beyond the individual manager. Gallup has estimated that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. That should make management selection a strategic decision rather than the automatic reward for technical performance. That means assessment should come before appointment, and appointment should come before training. Organisations should assess not only whether someone could manage people, but whether they understand what people management involves and genuinely want the responsibility. Capability can be developed. Motivation should not simply be assumed. We have confused progression with hierarchy In my previous article on the Capability Centred Organisation, I argued that organisations need to become less obsessed with jobs and headcount and more deliberate about the capabilities they need to build, retain, and deploy. The Expertise Penalty is one of the clearest examples of why that shift matters. If an organisation genuinely values capability, it makes little sense to tell someone, "You are exceptionally valuable because of the expertise you have accumulated. Therefore, the only way we will allow you to progress is by spending considerably less time using it." Yet that is essentially how many career structures operate. The higher someone climbs, the more people they acquire. Headcount becomes a proxy for seniority. The person managing 50 people appears more senior than the person whose expertise influences the work of 500. But organisational value does not work that neatly. Some people lead through people. Others lead through expertise. Some lead through intellectual authority, standards, systems, innovation, or professional judgment. Leadership and people management overlap, but they are not synonymous. The specialist track cannot be a consolation prize Dual career paths are not new. Technology, engineering, science, and research organisations have experimented with specialist and managerial pathways for decades. But creating a few new titles does not solve the underlying problem. A specialist pathway only becomes a genuine alternative when progression brings meaningful increases in pay, status, influence, and decision-making authority. Otherwise, employees quickly learn which hierarchy actually matters. If the managerial track leads to executive compensation, strategic meetings, and organisational influence while the specialist track leads to increasingly impressive job titles but limited authority, there are not really two tracks. There is one career ladder and one waiting room. We therefore need to rethink what seniority means. A Principal Engineer, Senior Scientist, Chief Architect, or equivalent domain expert should be capable of reaching levels of compensation and organisational influence comparable with a senior manager where the value they create justifies it. That does not mean the roles are identical. It means one form of contribution should not automatically be considered more valuable simply because it contains direct reports. There are contemporary examples of this becoming more concrete. Princeton University recently documented a research software engineering career framework spanning Associate through Principal levels, alongside team lead and management routes, recognising that technical mastery, leadership, and people management do not have to be the same career. The terminology will vary between organisations. The principle should not. People management is also more work There is another part of this conversation organisations sometimes avoid. If you add responsibility for people to somebody’s existing role, you have added another job. Managing even a small team creates work: one-to-one meetings, performance and development conversations, absence, recruitment, conflict, salary and promotion decisions, administration, and escalation. Alongside those visible responsibilities sits the less visible emotional labour that accompanies responsibility for other people. Technology can remove some administrative burden, but it cannot remove accountability. Yet organisations sometimes add two, three, or five direct reports to somebody’s role and treat the change almost as though they have simply amended their job title. Perhaps there is a small salary adjustment. Perhaps there isn’t. But responsibility has fundamentally changed. Reward should reflect that change. People management should not be treated as a minor addition to an existing role simply because the individual continues to retain their technical responsibilities. If an organisation wants someone to carry accountability for other people’s performance, development, and working experience, that additional responsibility should be recognised in workload, expectations, and reward. This is particularly important where someone is expected to remain a full-time practitioner while simultaneously becoming a people manager. We should stop pretending those responsibilities occupy no time. If someone is expected to manage people properly, organisations need to create capacity for them to do it properly. Expertise should be allowed to become leadership This does not mean senior specialists should work in isolation. Quite the opposite. I would expect senior specialists to have increasing responsibility for the capability around them. But that responsibility can take different forms. They might mentor early career employees. They might establish professional standards. They might own a technical architecture. They might lead complex projects. They might review high-risk decisions. They might teach. They might represent the organisation externally. They might develop intellectual property or institutional knowledge. They might have authority over a particular professional domain without having administrative responsibility for every person working within it. This also connects directly to another argument I made in What Happens When AI Removes the Work That Teaches Us How to Work? In that article, I explored the risk of removing the developmental experiences through which junior employees acquire judgment. If we are serious about addressing that Apprenticing Gap, senior experts become even more important. But we don’t necessarily need to turn every expert into a line manager to access their knowledge. In fact, forcing them to spend large portions of their time on administration and performance management may reduce the time available for exactly the mentoring and knowledge transfer organisations increasingly need. The answer is not less responsibility for senior specialists. It is different responsibility. Alternative routes into work require alternative routes through work Governments, education systems, and employers are increasingly debating alternative routes into employment: apprenticeships, technical education, vocational pathways, and skills-based hiring. But it is not enough to create alternative routes into work. We also need credible alternative routes through work. Imagine encouraging a young person to become an exceptional engineer, scientist, cybersecurity specialist, designer, or technician. They spend 15 years mastering that discipline. Then, eventually, the organisation tells them, “You’ve become so good at this that we’d now like you to stop doing most of it and manage the people who do.” There is something structurally odd about that. Career progression should allow mastery to compound rather than eventually penalising it. Select people managers before you train them Management development should therefore begin earlier than the training room. In our work at Rosie’s People, we encourage organisations to look at management selection as part of organisational design rather than simply learning and development. Before appointing someone to people management, I would want to understand three things: Do they want to manage people? Do they demonstrate the behaviours and judgement required to do it well? And does the organisation have the capacity to support and develop them once they take responsibility for others? That assessment may identify someone who is enthusiastic but inexperienced, an excellent candidate for management development. It may identify someone who is unsure and needs greater exposure before deciding. Sometimes it will identify an exceptional specialist who simply does not want to manage people. That should not be interpreted as a lack of ambition. The organisational answer should not always be to persuade the third person into management. Sometimes the better answer is to build them a credible route to progress without it. Six questions organisations should ask For CEOs, CHROs, COOs, and people leaders reviewing career architecture, I would start with six questions: Can our best specialists reach senior levels of compensation without becoming people managers? Do we assess whether someone genuinely wants to manage people before offering them a people management role? Do we assess managerial aptitude separately from technical performance? Can someone exercise meaningful organisational leadership without acquiring direct reports? Are our specialist career paths equal in influence as well as title? Are managers given the time, development, support, and reward required to manage people properly, or are we simply adding people management to an already full-time job? The answers will reveal whether an organisation genuinely values expertise or merely values it until the next management vacancy appears. Conclusion: Progression should increase contribution, not redirect it None of this is an argument against people management. Quite the opposite, it is an argument for taking people management more seriously. Good managers are extraordinarily valuable and can make a huge difference within an organisation. They create clarity. They develop people. They resolve ambiguity. They protect teams during difficult periods. They make hard decisions. They create environments in which other people can perform. That work deserves people who genuinely want to do it and organisations willing to invest in preparing and supporting them to do it well. At the same time, great specialists deserve careers that do not eventually punish them for wanting to remain specialists. Perhaps the future of career progression is therefore not a ladder at all. It is a choice between different forms of increasing contribution. One person may choose to lead people. Another may lead a discipline. Another may lead products, systems, research, or professional standards. All can be leadership. Because people management should not be the reward for being excellent at another profession. It should be treated as a profession in its own right. If capability really is becoming the organising principle of the modern enterprise, our career structures need to start reflecting it. Progression should increase a person’s contribution, not require them to abandon the capability that made them valuable in the first place in order to be rewarded, recognised, or compensated fairly. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Rosie Hewat Rosie Hewat, Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People Rosie Hewat is a Board and Executive Advisor and Founder & CEO of Rosie’s People, a leadership and organisational advisory platform. A former Group Chief People Officer and Non-Executive Director, she has supported leadership teams and boards operating in high-growth and regulated environments. Rosie is also a trustee and an Executive Contributor to Brainz Magazine, where she writes on leadership, governance, power, and organisational risk. Sources and further reading: National Bureau of Economic Research: Promotions and the Peter Principle – Benson, Li and Shue’s empirical study of promotion and subsequent managerial performance. Chartered Management Institute (CMI): Better Management Report – Research on accidental managers, management training and employee outcomes. Chartered Management Institute (CMI): Don't leave young workers' futures to accidental managers – CMI’s January 2026 discussion of management capability and development. Gallup: Managers Account for 70% of Variance in Employee Engagement – Research on the relationship between management and employee engagement. Princeton research: Designing and Implementing a Comprehensive Research Software Engineer Career Ladder – 2026 case study describing parallel technical, team-lead, and managerial progression pathways.

Written by Dr. Taylor Bryant, Forensic Psychology Consultant & Expert Dr. Taylor Bryant is a Forensic Psychology Consultant/Expert & Professor of forensics and criminology, specializing in the impacts of trauma on identity, delinquency, and interpersonal relationships. With extensive experience in trauma-focused treatment, Dr. Bryant provides clinical insight into behaviors, emotional functioning, and resilience. You meet someone new, and something in you quietly says no. You’re offered an opportunity that checks every box on paper, but your stomach tightens the moment you consider saying yes. You pull back from a friend who hasn’t done anything wrong, but you can’t explain why. Is it your intuition protecting you, or is it an old wound reacting to something that resembles danger? This is one of the trickiest questions in self-trust work because both intuition and trauma responses live in the same place: the body. They arrive before language and feel completely convincing. Learning to tell them apart isn’t about ignoring your gut. It often involves learning to listen to it more accurately and unlearning unhealthy messages from earlier years in your life. What intuition actually is Intuition is often described as a mystery, but it is more mechanical than that. Pattern recognition is involved as your brain synthesizes years of lived experience, subtle cues, and prior outcomes faster than your conscious mind can articulate. When you “just know” a decision is right or sense that someone isn’t trustworthy before they’ve shown you why, you’re not receiving a message from nowhere. You are running a very fast, very quiet calculation built from everything you’ve already lived through. Intuition tends to have a particular texture: Calm, not frantic. It doesn’t typically spike your heart rate. Clear. It points to something specific, even if you can’t fully explain it yet. Steady under scrutiny. The more you sit with it, the more it holds. It doesn’t need you to act right away. What a trauma response actually is A trauma response is your nervous system doing its main job: protecting you from danger. The complication is that it is often responding to the past, using present cues that merely resemble an old threat. Some of these cues include a tone of voice, a facial expression, or a specific kind of silence, even when the current situation isn’t actually dangerous. Trauma responses tend to feel different in the body: Urgent and activating. Through fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, something in you wants to respond immediately. Disproportionate. The intensity of the reaction does not match the size of the actual situation. Diffuse. Instead of pointing to one clear thing, like intuition, it can flood you with generalised panic, shame, or dread. Why they get confused Both intuition and trauma responses can arrive in the body before your thinking brain catches up. Both feel absolutely true in the moment, and both can be right some of the time. This can make it even harder to build a reliable filter. The cultural shorthand of “trust your gut” can be well-meaning but incomplete advice. It assumes that every gut feeling is intuition, when some of them are actually your nervous system replaying an old tape. Key differences: A quick comparison Intuition Trauma response Speed & intensity Calm, quiet knowing Sudden spike, alarm-like Specificity Points to something concrete Often broad, flooding Body sensation Grounded, settled Constricting, racing, braced Under pause Holds steady, doesn’t escalate May spike further or fade with safety cues Orientation About this situation Cues are from the past Questions to ask yourself in the moment When you notice a strong “no” or “yes” rising up, try asking: Is this about the present, or does it remind me of something specific from my past? Can I stay with this feeling without spiralling, or does it demand immediate action? What happens if I wait ten minutes, take a few breaths, or talk it through with someone I trust? Is my body tense and bracing, or calm and certain? None of these questions will give you a perfect answer every time, but together, they build a habit of pausing long enough to check rather than reflexively obeying or dismissing the feeling. Why this distinction matters Getting this wrong in either direction has real costs. If you mistake a trauma response for intuition, you can end up reinforcing avoidance by steering away from safe people, opportunities, or situations because they happen to echo an old threat. Over time, this can shrink your life in ways that have nothing to do with actual danger. If you mistake intuition for “just trauma,” you risk overriding a genuinely valid instinct by talking yourself out of the very signal that was trying to protect you. This is especially common for people who have done a lot of work on themselves and become, understandably, suspicious of their own reactions. The goal isn’t to trust yourself less. It is to become more precise about what you are trusting. Building the skill over time This kind of discernment isn’t something that happens instantaneously. It is a skill, and like any skill, it develops with practice. Through the following practices, you can build self-trust and become better able to discern the key differences: Body awareness. Notice physical sensations without immediately acting on them. Where do you feel the reaction? What does it actually feel like, specifically? Pattern tracking. Journaling about recurring triggers can reveal whether a certain “gut feeling” shows up around a particular type of person or situation. This can be a sign that it is connected to trauma. Somatic or trauma-informed therapy. Working with a therapist trained in nervous system regulation can help recalibrate responses that have been stuck on high alert. Testing before fully committing. Give yourself permission to sit with a feeling, take a pause, and gather more information before treating it as the final word. Closing thought Intuition and trauma responses are not opposites to be sorted into neat boxes. Rather, they are both parts of a nervous system trying to keep you safe using different information. The work isn’t in learning to silence your gut. The majority of the work is in learning its language well enough to know when it is speaking from wisdom and when it is speaking from an old wound that deserves care, not obedience. The next time a strong feeling rises, try pausing just long enough to ask: Is this about today, or is this a response triggered by my past? That single question can change everything about how you respond. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Taylor Bryant Dr. Taylor Bryant, Forensic Psychology Consultant & Expert Dr. Taylor Bryant is a professor, forensic psychology consultant, and trauma expert with extensive experience in trauma-focused treatment and behavioral health. Her work specializes in examining how trauma impacts self-worth, delinquency, emotional regulation, and interpersonal relationships, particularly among female sex offenders, adolescents, and families. Dr. Bryant has worked extensively with justice-involved youth and individuals navigating complex trauma, family conflict, and maladaptive behavioral patterns. Through her clinical, academic, and consulting work, she provides insight into the long-term psychological effects of trauma and the pathways toward healing and resilience.

Written by Dr. Lonna Gordon, The KNOBS LLC Dr. Lonna Gordon is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician and Enneagram-informed coach who believes every teen is navigating a threshold moment. She blends clinical expertise with the Enneagram to help young people and the adults who love them know their voice matters, and they're enough to become who they're meant to be. Youth-serving professionals rarely get the luxury of long, unhurried conversations. The most meaningful moments of connection happen in the margins: a hallway pass, a locker room, two minutes before a session or visit starts, the walk from the waiting room to the office. Here is the great news: connection doesn't need forty-five minutes. It needs intention! That's an important distinction, because "I don't have time to connect" is one of the most common things I hear from professionals who care deeply about the teens they work with. The truth is usually not a time problem; it's the feeling that you cannot have the depth you want in the time allotted. You are seeking to have that moment that the teen can reflect on even after you are apart. Most of us default to the same handful of interaction scripts, on autopilot, because they're fast and familiar. Swapping those defaults for slightly different ones costs no extra time. It just requires noticing the moment and choosing differently inside it. Here are five microconnections that fit inside 90 seconds, each pulled from my Pause, Connect, Open, Secure framework. 1. The name plus notice Use a teen's name, then name one specific thing you noticed, not generic praise, but something true and particular: "Hey Jordan, you were the first one back from break today." This specificity signals you're seeing the teen as an individual, not just as part of the group. 2. The one breath pause before redirecting Before you correct a behavior, take one breath. That single second changes your tone from command to invitation, and teens can hear the difference. 3. The "what's one word" check-in Instead of "how are you," which invites "fine," ask for one word. For example, at the beginning of a session, “What is one word that describes school today?” It's fast, low pressure, and often more honest because it asks for less. 4. The open door, not the open file Rather than referencing a teen's history, record, or last incident, meet them as they are today. "What's today like for you?" keeps the interaction current instead of retrospective. I love to start each visit by saying, “Tell me what is new and improved?” or “What is something that you are proud of that has happened between now and the last time I saw you?” 5. The clean close End every short interaction with something that doesn't hinge on compliance, not "make good choices," but "Glad I got to see you" or “Thanks for meeting with me.” Teens do not always hear adults express gratitude to them or suggest that the interactions they have with adults are a choice. These lines secure the relationship regardless of how the interaction went. None of these requires extra time in your day. They require swapping your default script for a slightly different one and doing it enough times that it becomes automatic. This is where most well-intentioned training falls short: it gives professionals concepts and explains neuroscience without giving real-world tools. A staff development day can teach the theory of connection beautifully and still leave every professional in the room without a single new behavior to try on Monday morning. Microconnections work because they're small enough to practice in real time, on a real caseload, without waiting for the "right" moment to try. There is no ideal moment, only the next ninety seconds you have. Try picking just one of the five this week. Not all five, just one. Use it in every short interaction you have one day, on purpose, until it stops feeling deliberate and starts feeling like you. That's the difference between knowing a technique and adopting it as your own. If you want these moves built into muscle memory for your whole team, this is exactly what team workshops through Connection Compass are designed to do. Individual coaching is also available for professionals who want their own default responses rebuilt from the ground up. Learn more here. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Dr. Lonna Gordon Dr. Lonna Gordon, The KNOBS LLC Dr. Lonna Gordon is a board-certified adolescent medicine physician with 15 years of clinical experience and leadership roles across academic institutions. She is also the founder of The KNOBS LLC, a coaching, speaking, and workshop practice for parents, teens, and the professionals who support them. Drawing on the Enneagram and her clinical background, she helps young people and the adults who love them navigate the threshold moments of growing up. She also hosts Tweens, Teens & Everything Between, a podcast exploring identity and connection during the teen years. Her mission is simple: to help every young person know their voice matters, their experience makes sense, and they are enough to become who they're meant to be.

Written by Julie Farnsworth, Trauma-Informed Grief Coach Julie Farnsworth has spent her life helping others to live better lives. After 30 years working as a social worker, she founded "One Free Soul Grief Journey, LLC" in honor of her sister, Erica, who lost her life to cancer at the age of 40. I want to talk about something that we have been led to believe, the idea that we need to have some kind of timeline for grief and loss. After this timeline is complete, we will simply carry on with our lives and head off into the proverbial sunset for the next phase, essentially “moving on and letting go.” I want to debunk this myth and challenge this “stage” of grief and loss once and for all. This myth has caused many of us to feel like there is something wrong with us if we cannot move on with our lives and let go of our loved ones. If we think about it on a deeper level, we can start to see the flaw in this logic. Why would we, or why should we, expect that, if we have loved someone and had a deep connection to them, we would actually want to let that go? I think it should really be just the opposite. What if we reframe this into something that sounds and feels like this, I loved this person dearly, and I lost them. I need to accept that they are gone, but I do not have to forget about them and move on with my life, acting as if they did not exist or the connection was not important enough to continue to “carry” the love forward. I can still have room in my heart to accept new love and new people, but I do not have to let go of my loved one, I just need to look at it as a changed connection with them. What might this new connection look like? It will be different for everyone, but it could include honoring shared traditions and the things that mattered to our loved one. A favorite song, experience, or place can remain alive in our hearts, memories, and minds. What we shared with them can continue to matter. We can also honor them on special days, such as birthdays and anniversaries. Their favorite foods and recipes can still be part of our lives, recreated and shared with others as we talk about them and the memories connected to them. This leads me to the next part of this new process and something that we can think more about. What if we honored our loved ones by carrying them and their love forward in ways that could also help others? This could look like making a donation in their name, planting flowers and vegetables in their honor to give to others, performing a random act of kindness, hosting a meal to share with others and serving all their favorite foods, starting a charity in their name, or writing about them. Think about the things that were important to them. Did they love children, animals, art, science, reading, writing, or nature? The possibilities start to present themselves when we find organizations that connect to the things they enjoyed or were passionate about. When we start to shift our focus to integrating the loss into our lives through continuing bonds, rather than forcing false closure, we can start to view it through a different lens. We realize that it has changed us in different ways, especially if our identities were closely tied to the person we lost. However, if we look at the ways these changes could lead us to something positive, we can experience a mindset shift. We start to see that we might have a newfound appreciation for things if we know how to tune into them. For example, after the loss of my sister, I started to realize that I was seeing a lot of birds and noticing different feathers on the ground. There was a recurring theme that started to present itself to me. By paying attention to nature and my surroundings, I began to feel a connection to her and a sense of peace in my heart. Discovering the joy of noticing these small things made me think about this positive shift. I began to intentionally pay closer attention to the things in my surroundings. My focus became one of gratitude for this new awareness and the realization that it was actually a gift. When we realize that our loss can put us in a position to receive some gifts, we can pay attention to new qualities that we now have, such as resilience and strength, or a newfound understanding and empathy for others who have also experienced loss. We might appreciate the people in our lives more than ever and treat ourselves with more care and compassion. We can see that life is fleeting, but this is a reminder to live our lives in ways that reflect the love of the person who left and to find joy in ways that honor them. Let us all strive to change the myth of “moving on and letting go” and instead think of it as moving forward by carrying their love with us into the future and making room for the newfound gifts and joys in our lives. You don’t have to carry the weight of your grief alone. Book a discovery call to learn more about my 12-week 1:1 signature healing journey. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Julie Farnsworth Julie Farnsworth, Trauma-Informed Grief Coach Julie Farnsworth is a Certified Trauma-Informed Grief Coach, Neuro-Change and Mind-Body Medicine Practitioner, Social Worker, and Mental Health Therapist. Since the age of 12, as a volunteer with the Red Cross, Julie has been called to help as many people as she can. She is the founder of "One Free Soul Grief Journey," which provides 1:1 healing journeys for anyone who needs help navigating the intricacies of grief and loss. Julie brings her years of experience walking alongside fellow grievers, as well as her own personal experience with grief and loss, to ignite her passion to help others to go from surviving to thriving.

Healing can be more than managing symptoms or improving how we function, it can be a return to the body, authenticity, and a deeper sense of self. In this interview, Selden explores the connection between nervous system healing, somatic intelligence, and intuition, sharing how greater safety in the body can create space for self trust, transformation, and new possibilities. Selden Beylouni, Somatic Practitioner & Intuitive Development Coach Your work brings together nervous system healing and intuitive development through the Somatic Intuitive Method. What inspired you to create this approach? The Somatic Intuitive Method really came from my own journey of trying to understand what had happened to me. I spent much of my life disconnected from my body, living with dissociation, chronic fatigue, and eventually an autoimmune diagnosis. For a long time, I was trying to fix the symptoms without fully understanding the patterns underneath them and where they came from. As I began healing my nervous system, something unexpected started happening. It was not just that I felt better physically. But yes, that was extremely important. I started to come back into myself. I could feel my body again, connect to the world around me, and slowly begin trusting what I felt. This was such an interesting process because until then, I really didn’t understand that I had not been embodied previously or what that even meant. With that came something else. My intuition became clearer. That made me realize that nervous system healing and intuitive development were not separate things. When we are living in survival, so much of our energy is directed toward protection. As we build safety, capacity, and connection to the body, we create more space to access our own inner knowing. The Somatic Intuitive Method was born from that realization. Healing is not just about functioning again. It is about remembering who we really are underneath survival. You describe symptoms as intelligent survival adaptations rather than dysfunctions. How does that perspective change the way people approach healing? This perspective changes almost everything because instead of asking, “What is wrong with me?” we can begin asking, “What happened to me, and why might my body be responding this way?” It shifts us out of fix it mode, “I am the problem,” and into a much deeper relationship with the body, “How is my body trying to protect me?” which is essential for healing anything. For much of my own life, I believed my body was failing me. I had chronic fatigue, dissociation, and eventually an autoimmune diagnosis, and I was constantly trying to figure out how to fix myself. But the deeper I went into nervous system work from a somatic perspective, the more I began to see that many of the things I was fighting against had actually developed for a reason. Our bodies adapt. They protect us. Sometimes that protection looks like anxiety, numbness, exhaustion, chronic tension, or shutting down. That does not mean symptoms should be accepted or that we should dismiss them. This is a deeper language. When we stop seeing the body as the enemy, we can become curious about what it may be communicating. For me, healing began when I stopped asking my body to behave differently and started learning how to listen to it. You often say intuition becomes clearer when the body feels safe. What has convinced you that biology and intuition are so closely connected? Honestly, my own experience convinced me first. For most of my life, I was so disconnected from my body that I did not realize how much I had stopped feeling. As I began healing, building safety, and slowly reconnecting to sensation, something unexpected happened. I did not just become more aware of my physical body. I began to trust what I felt again. We call the ability to sense and interpret signals from within the body interoception. As I began reconnecting with that internal sense, I slowly started trusting it. It became something of a compass, an instinctual way of receiving information that is deeply primal to being human. My intuition sharpened immensely. I think we often separate biology and intuition, as if one belongs to science and the other belongs somewhere outside of us, or somewhere decidedly woo woo. But we receive information through the body constantly. We sense changes in our internal state, and we may also pick up on subtle cues in people, environments, patterns, danger, and connection before we can consciously explain them. When survival is constantly driving the system, it can become difficult to know the difference between fear, trauma, instinct, and intuition. As we build safety and capacity, we may have more space for discernment within all of that information. For me, intuition is not separate from the body. It is something I learned to hear more clearly as my protective parts softened and I became present enough to listen. Why do you think so many people stay stuck even after years of therapy, coaching, or personal development? I think many people are still working primarily with the mind, and that can only take us so far. Understanding something and experiencing something are not always the same thing. Cognitive processes often do not integrate lower than the head, and our whole body is affected by stress and trauma. You can know exactly why you behave a certain way. You can understand your childhood, recognize your patterns, read every self-help book, drink a million green smoothies, and still find yourself doing the same things when your nervous system is under stress. That was certainly true for me. I could explain myself before I could actually feel myself. Somatic work offers another way in. Through deep listening, sensing, expression, and working with the body's responses, we can begin creating new experiences rather than simply understanding old ones. If slowing down, resting, expressing anger, receiving support, or simply being present does not feel safe to the nervous system, insight alone often does not change that response. This is why I focus on building safety through small, titrated experiences. We do not always need another breakthrough. Sometimes we need to slowly create something new that the body can recognize, hold, and integrate. Healing is becoming a fast-growing industry with countless methods and promises. What do you believe is still widely misunderstood about lasting transformation? I think one of the things we misunderstand about transformation is the idea that it ever truly ends. We often approach healing with a destination in mind. When my symptoms are gone, I’ll be better. When my blood work improves, I’ll finally feel well. When I make more money, find the right relationship, or quit my job, then I’ll be happy. We spend a ton of money and time outsourcing our power to empty promises about healing. But healing is within you. It always has been. Transformation does not end when we get well or reach a goal. There is always another layer of becoming. Healing may begin with wanting relief from suffering, but if we stay with the process, it can become something much larger. It can fundamentally change how we experience ourselves, our bodies, our relationships, and the world around us. I believe we are capable of far more than we currently understand about human potential. We are only beginning to understand what becomes possible when so much of our energy is no longer being used simply to survive. Perhaps that is the most honest thing I can say about lasting transformation. We may not fully understand it yet. We don't know what we don't know. Maybe transformation is simply our willingness to keep discovering what lies beyond who we once believed ourselves to be. For someone living in survival mode, what is one simple practice that can begin restoring a sense of safety in the body? Start noticing yourself and your body in daily life and function. Before trying to fix or change your nervous system, become curious about what it is already doing. Notice your patterns, movements, tensions, bracing, and behaviors. If you are always on the go, slow your physical body down long enough to notice it. What are your hands doing? Your shoulders? Your neck? Can you recognize the constant performance? If you are shut down, exhausted, or burned out, get curious about what came before it. What were you asking of your body in the days, months, or even years before it finally said, “Enough”? Can you allow yourself to be tired without immediately adding shame or guilt? We all have our own unique mixture of nervous system states playing out through our bodies and behaviors. The first step is simply asking, “What can I notice? What can I safely be with? What feels like too much? What does my body need right now? How long have I been overriding these needs?” Awareness is where the relationship with yourself begins. Your upcoming book introduces the idea of Somatic Intelligence. How can people start recognizing this intelligence in their everyday lives? I think Somatic Intelligence begins with recognizing that your body is already communicating with you all day long. You may notice that you speed up around certain people. That you become exhausted after saying yes when you wanted to say no. Maybe your stomach tightens before your mind has figured out why. Maybe you feel yourself disappear during certain conversations, or suddenly become very busy when stillness arrives. These are not always problems to fix. They are information. Somatic Intelligence starts by understanding how important these conversations are with your body. What is happening in me right now? Where did I go? What changed? What feels different when I am with this person or in this environment? That is the beginning, but this intelligence grows into somatic intuition. That is spiritual and deep and profoundly changes how we do everything, realigning us to purpose. The goal is to develop a relationship with yourself. To start to build safety in a body that may have never known it. The kind of somatic and extraordinary intelligence I write about grows only from this place. Over time, these small observations help us recognize our patterns, build discernment, and begin to feel the difference between a reaction driven by survival and the deeper intelligence that becomes available when we are present enough to truly feel ourselves, and then develop the inner trust to follow that call. You often describe healing as a return to authenticity rather than self-improvement. How has that philosophy changed the way you live? Healing is a process of peeling back the layers of protection, the parts of us that stepped forward when survival became the priority. Many of these patterns were formed very early in life, perhaps even through generations before us. They are old, but they are not the enemy. They have been doing their job. The problem is that protective parts often respond to the present as though the past is still happening. Healing is slowly creating enough safety for those parts to recognize that they do not always have to be in charge. They can step back. When they do, something deeper has room to emerge. For me, that is where authenticity begins, and it does not end there. With greater safety comes much more space for creativity, intuition, trust, purpose, and possibilities we may not have been able to access while survival was running the show. Healing is about creating enough safety for more of who we are underneath survival and protection, and more of what we are capable of, to step forward. If readers could leave this interview with one new understanding about their body and its capacity to heal, what would you hope it would be? There was a time after my lupus diagnosis when I wondered if I would ever get better. Then, as I did, I wondered if my emotional patterns could change too. They did. Later, I wondered if I was capable of calling in an aligned partnership. Now that has happened, and I realize I have been wondering all along. What else might be possible? The amazing thing is, once we recognize how powerful our bodies are and that they are self healing, that self healing only speeds up and gets more efficient in response to that realization. That is the beautiful thing about healing. We may begin with a specific goal, but transformation does not end when we reach it. Along the way, a new language develops between the body and psyche, making space for so much more self healing and depth in self-trust, intuition, authenticity, and possibilities beyond what we once believed were available to us. We do not even know yet how deep this goes. I personally cannot wait to find out. Our bodies are far more sacred than we’ve given them credit for. They are the place where life is experienced, challenges are met, capacities are discovered, and perhaps, we become more than we ever imagined possible. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Selden Beylouni

Written by Thomas Patrick McNulty, CEO of Success Stories, Inc. Tom McNulty, M.S., is a healthcare consultant with a vast array of experiences in behavioral health, neurology, healthcare hospitality, and health talk podcasting, "MindSet with Tom McNulty, M.S." He is a professional photographer, screenwriter, and public speaker. Lives lost to suicide, overdoses, mass shootings, human trafficking, eating disorders, and trauma are rising despite several questionable government reports seeking to minimize the nation’s growing mental illness and addiction problems. The flawed belief is that these painful realities happen to someone else's family, in someone else's neighborhood, in some other community, or in some other country. It is happening everywhere. We all know someone who has died because help was denied. Frontline people such as campus security, urgent care facilities, spiritual leaders, teachers and professors, ambulance personnel, law enforcement, caregivers, primary care physicians, military officers, parents, human resources directors, emergency room staff, and friends do not fully understand what to do when someone is in a life-threatening episode. Behind the statistics are parents who don't know how to help their children. Families are watching someone they love disappear into addiction. Teenagers are fighting depression in silence. People with serious mental illness are cycling through emergency rooms, hospitals, shelters, and jails. Our prisons are housing more mentally ill individuals than psychiatric hospitals and addiction programs. Spouses who become caregivers do not know the warning signs. Children who grow up wondering whether Mom or Dad will survive another night live in fear of impending danger. While “breaking news” may cover celebrity deaths from suicide and drug or alcohol overdoses, practically nothing with a behavioral health reference is mentioned after mass shootings leave communities in a state of unresolved trauma. Add human trafficking (Epstein was not alone), high school and college hazing, gambling with drugs laced with fentanyl, incest, workplace bullying, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) trauma and burnout, the impact of racism, military suicides, internet sites, teens gambling online, and seniors aged 65 and older dying from drug and alcohol mixtures. It’s no longer impactful to claim that stigma is the problem. To do nothing is to put children born today at severe risk of an ongoing fear of impending danger. As we know, America has more guns than people. How many mass shooters were discovered to have had serious mental illness, but treatment was ignored or failed the individual? Sometimes, there is no next morning. But trauma, we now know, takes years off our lives. Face the facts that it’s serious, and we need a solution The newest federal data show the size of the crisis with uncomfortable clarity. In 2025, an estimated 54.6 million American adults, 20.6% of the adult population, experienced a mental illness during the previous year. Of those, 18.2 million adults, 6.9%, experienced serious mental illness, a category involving conditions that substantially interfere with major life activities. That means roughly one out of every five American adults was living with a mental illness during 2025. But the crisis does not stop at adulthood. Do you have children? Among America's adolescents ages 12 to 17, 3.7 million experienced a major depressive episode in 2025, 15.1% of the nation's teenagers. About 2.7 million experienced an episode with severe impairment. Approximately 4.6 million adolescents, 18.0%, had moderate or severe symptoms of generalized anxiety during the two weeks preceding the 2025 survey. Addiction is another front in the same war In 2025, 44.6 million Americans aged 12 and older, 15.3% of the population, met the criteria for a substance use disorder during the previous year. Among those known to authorities and providers: 26.0 million had a drug use disorder. 25.7 million had an alcohol use disorder. 19.3 million had a marijuana use disorder. 4.5 million had a central nervous system stimulant use disorder. 4.0 million had an opioid use disorder. 7.1 million had both an alcohol use disorder and a drug use disorder. The numbers overlap because a person can have more than one drug use disorder. The opioid number is particularly sobering. Fentanyl adds to the sudden death rate. It only takes the equivalent of a pencil tip of fentanyl to cause an overdose. Approximately 4 million Americans had a reported opioid use disorder in 2025. Many users are not known or recorded as users, even those saved by Narcan. Addiction does not exist in a vacuum. It’s rampant at every socioeconomic level of life, from Wall Street to those living in poverty. In 2025, 33.9% of adults with any mental illness, 18.5 million people, also had a substance use disorder. This is one of the most important facts in the entire behavioral health story. You cannot fully address addiction while ignoring mental health, and you cannot fully address serious mental illness while ignoring addiction. This is just one of the blatant failures of the treatment systems and insurance payers. They are diseases that often intersect but are not treated with a holistic assessment and treatment plan. The treatment gap is one of the greatest horrors Perhaps the most disturbing part of the statistics isn't how many Americans are suffering. It is how many are suffering without treatment. Why? Poor assessment and referral procedures and a lack of appropriate and timely access. Among adults with mental illness in 2025, 54.6 million were affected. Yet only 27.8 million, 50.9%, received mental health treatment. That means approximately 26.9 million adults with a mental illness did not receive mental health treatment. For substance use, the gap is even more stark. Among people aged 12 and older who needed drug or alcohol use treatment in 2025, only 16.0%, 7.6 million people, received treatment. That means roughly 84% did not. The treatment gap was particularly severe among young adults, only 9.6% of 18-to 25-year-olds who needed substance use treatment received it. Think about what that means. Millions of Americans are experiencing a condition serious enough to meet the criteria for treatment, and most are not receiving it. Why? The most tragic number: The people who die The behavioral health crisis ultimately becomes a mortality crisis, but these are lives that could have been saved. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provisional mortality report estimates that 48,789 Americans died by suicide in 2025. Suicide was the nation's 11th leading cause of death that year. That is approximately 134 deaths every day. More than 4,000 every month. Every one represents a person whose absence permanently changes other people's lives. The mother who never gets another phone call. The father who never gets to see another birthday. The child who grows up without a parent or sibling. The friend who keeps asking, What could I have done? The coworker whose empty chair becomes a permanent reminder. Suicide is therefore not simply a statistic about an individual. Family and friends are traumatized for life. It is a trauma ripple that moves through families, workplaces, schools, and entire communities and lingers for years. The overdose numbers might be falling, but the crisis is still enormous There is, importantly, some good news. Or is there? America's overdose death rate has been falling in a few states. Typically, overdose rates do not include alcohol, and there’s a category that comes from many coroners’ offices, “Suspected but not confirmed.” This category includes the driver who crashes off a road or into a wall at a very high speed. Was it suicide or an accident? Intoxication? Too often, it’s reported as an accident. The CDC estimates that approximately 69,973 people died from drug overdoses in 2025, down nearly 14% from an estimated 81,313 deaths in 2024. For perspective, there were 58,200 U.S. military personnel killed in the entire Vietnam War. That CDC-reported decline represents thousands of lives saved or deaths families never reported. It should be examined in more detail, but it should never be confused with victory. More than 70,000 Americans still died from drug overdoses in one year. That is approximately 192 people every day. Eight people every hour. Roughly one American every five minutes. The story has continued into 2026. The latest CDC provisional national data, covering the 12 months ending February 2026, predict 68,641 drug overdose deaths, a further 12.1% decline from the preceding 12-month period. That is encouraging to some. That number represents a rolling 12-month period from March 2025 through February 2026. The honest conclusion is therefore simple, we do not yet have the final national first-half 2026 mortality numbers or a totally accurate account of deaths. But the damage extends far beyond death Death is only the most visible measure. There are millions of people who survive an overdose but are left with medical complications, neurological injuries, trauma, disability, or another trip to the emergency department. There are families financially devastated by addiction. There are children living with the unpredictability of a parent's substance use. There are marriages destroyed. There are jobs lost. There are businesses dealing with absenteeism, impaired performance, and employee behavioral health problems. These costs stretch into the billions of dollars every year. There are police officers repeatedly responding to the same behavioral health emergencies. There are emergency departments functioning as the nation's de facto mental health safety net. There are hospitals treating the consequences of conditions that often should have been identified and addressed much earlier in primary care, but do mentally ill and addicted individuals have regular checkups? There are communities trying to manage homelessness, public disorder, addiction, and serious mental illness without enough resources to address the underlying causes. This is why behavioral health cannot be viewed solely as a medical specialty. It is a community issue. It is an education issue. It is a public safety issue. It is an economic issue. It is a family issue. It is a workforce issue. Ultimately, it is a human issue. A solution-based answer exists: The Episodes Project The Episodes Project is a three-component, interactive learning program utilizing customized interactive theater. It contains a full-length feature film, a community training program (Spotlight on the Community) for frontliners, and a 50-episode streaming series to keep the momentum going. It is supported by a detailed website with archived shows, trainings, skills and tools, and resources. Professional actors, with behavioral health therapist facilitators, take the audience, frontliners, into their own world and coach them using more effective ways of handling a troubled citizen and saving lives. To learn more about The Episodes Project, contact the author of this article here. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Thomas Patrick McNulty Thomas Patrick McNulty, CEO of Success Stories, Inc. Tom McNulty, M.S., developed his interest in psychology and the brain in high school while attending college at the same time. His interests grew, and he received his master's degree. After graduation, he worked in a psychiatric hospital as a family therapist, and then he was offered a management position to work with troubled adolescents. Tom took his passion to the airwaves and hosted a weekly health talk radio program for 18 years. He is the founding partner of HHPartners (healthcare hospitality consulting) and co-creator of The Episodes Project (behavioral health). His mission: "Creating Enduring Impact". Primary sources: SAMHSA: 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The newest national survey of mental health, substance use, addiction, and treatment. CDC/NCHS: Mortality in the United States: Provisional Data, 2025. Provisional national mortality data, including the 2025 suicide count. CDC: Provisional Drug Overdose Data. Current national overdose estimates and methodology.* CDC: 2026 Statistical Release Schedule. Shows when national provisional overdose data covering June 2026 are scheduled to become available. The Episodes Project 2026: Behavioral Health. A three-component, solution- and data-driven global program designed to “Create Enduring Impact.” * The overdose report covering January–June 2026 is not scheduled to be released until November 2026.

Written by Barbara Suigo, HR Consultant, Author & Independent Researcher in Organisational Behaviour Barbara Suigo is an Italian-French author, HR consultant, and independent researcher specialising in power dynamics and organisational behaviour. She is the author of five books and explores topics including charisma, organisational psychology, and the abuse of power in the workplace through articles, podcasts, and books. How far can a company’s power over the people who work within it actually go? When we talk about organizational abuse, our thoughts almost automatically turn to toxic leadership, intimidation, retaliation, workplace bullying, or all those environments in which fear gradually becomes part of the corporate culture. These dynamics can have very serious consequences for people’s lives, but there are historical cases in which the relationship between corporate power and the individual crossed a far more extreme threshold. One of them is the Ford Argentina case. In December 2018, more than forty years after the beginning of Argentina’s military dictatorship, two former Ford Motor Argentina executives, Pedro Müller and Héctor Francisco Sibilla, were convicted of crimes against humanity for their contribution to the repression of workers at the General Pacheco plant. Yet the case is not only about the responsibility of two men who were already very old by the time they stood trial. It raises a broader and, in some ways, even more disturbing question, "What happens when an organization stops being simply a place where economic power is exercised and becomes part of a system of repression?" This article is adapted from my forthcoming book, Charismatic Psychopaths: Manipulation, Fascination and Corporate Power, in which I explore the darker side of leadership, organizational power, and the systems that can enable abuse. A factory inside a dictatorship On March 24, 1976, a military coup overthrew the Argentine government and marked the beginning of one of the most violent periods in the country’s recent history. During the dictatorship, thousands of people were abducted, tortured, killed, or forcibly disappeared, and the workplace also became one of the arenas in which repression was carried out. At Ford’s General Pacheco plant, twenty-four workers were abducted and tortured, many of them were union representatives or employees involved in organizing workers inside the factory. This detail matters because these were not people chosen at random. They were visible workers, capable of representing others, negotiating, challenging decisions, and transforming a collection of individuals into a collective voice. In a democratic context, this function is part of the normal dynamics of working life. Under an authoritarian regime, however, that same role can be reinterpreted as a threat. When organizational knowledge becomes vulnerability This is precisely where the Ford case takes on a meaning that goes beyond its historical context. Every organization knows a great deal about the people who work within it, who occupies certain roles, who exerts influence, and who comes into conflict with management. Under ordinary circumstances, this information simply helps the organization function. But when political, legal, and ethical boundaries collapse, that same knowledge can become a source of vulnerability. According to evidence that emerged during the trial, some workers were held inside the plant itself before being transferred to police stations and detention centers, while some were beaten and tortured in the factory’s recreational area. At that point, General Pacheco was no longer simply a place of production, the space people entered every day to earn a living had also become a place of repression, and this transformation is perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of the entire case. The gray area between economic and political power Dictatorships are generally remembered through their most recognizable images, the military, the police, prisons, detention centers, the desaparecidos. But systems of repression do not operate only through institutions officially designed to exercise violence. They need information, people who know whom to identify, and structures capable of making certain individuals visible and placing them within networks of relationships, roles, and responsibilities. The Ford Argentina case therefore forces us to widen our perspective and look at the gray area where economic power meets political power. Pedro Müller was the plant’s production manager, while Héctor Sibilla was head of security. Outside their historical context, these roles appear entirely ordinary, and perhaps this is precisely what makes the case so unsettling. Organizational power does not necessarily express itself through dramatic gestures or spectacular orders, very often, it operates through hierarchies, information, and procedures. In other words, the most dangerous side of power is not always the one that shouts. Sometimes it retains the perfectly orderly appearance of a procedure and continues to operate within an apparently normal environment, even while that normality is already producing irreversible consequences. When dissent becomes a threat The Ford case also allows us to observe another crucial shift in the dynamics of power, the transformation of dissent into danger. A union representative is not simply an employee, because that person represents other workers. The role involves bringing forward demands, negotiating, and, when necessary, making conflict visible. As long as an organization accepts this function, conflict remains part of normal working life. But when those in power begin to interpret any form of opposition as a threat that must be neutralized, the nature of the relationship changes completely. In the Ford Argentina case, this process naturally reached an extreme level because we are not talking about blocked careers or organizational retaliation. We are talking about workers who were abducted and tortured during a military dictatorship. For this very reason, it would be wrong to equate this case with ordinary forms of toxic leadership. Its significance lies elsewhere, it represents an extreme case, and extreme cases often have the ability to make visible mechanisms that, under ordinary circumstances, may appear much more blurred. Obedience, role and responsibility One of those mechanisms concerns the relationship between obedience and personal responsibility. Companies normally function through hierarchies. People receive instructions, occupy roles, carry out decisions made by others, and operate within structures that may be much larger than themselves. Yet there is always a point at which organizational obedience meets individual responsibility. Being part of a structure does not automatically remove responsibility for one’s actions, and a professional role cannot become a suspension of individual conscience. This is also part of the deeper meaning of the judgment delivered in Argentina in December 2018. More than forty years after the events, the Argentine justice system determined that the executives involved could not be regarded simply as passive spectators of a terrible historical period but had contributed to the machinery of repression. The word “machinery” is particularly important because it describes very well how power can operate within an organization, not necessarily through a single omnipotent individual, but through different people occupying different positions who, by providing information, structures, or decisions, contribute to the functioning of something much larger than themselves. The weight of time Time is also a central element in this story. More than forty years passed between the abductions of 1976 and the 2018 judgment. In the meantime, the surviving workers grew old, while some died before they could see the legal process come to an end. Yet the consequences of violence did not remain confined to the moment in which it was inflicted. They entered people’s biographies, their families, their professional lives, and the fears that can continue to exist even when the system that created them seems to belong to history. This is one of the deepest characteristics of abuse of power, those who exercise it may regard it as an episode, while those who suffer it may carry its consequences for decades. Why this case still speaks to organizations today It would be entirely wrong to draw any equivalence between a contemporary company and a factory operating under a military dictatorship because the historical context is radically different. Nevertheless, the Ford Argentina case continues to raise questions that apply to any organization, who controls information about people, how that information is used, what happens when someone is labelled “problematic,” what happens when dissent stops being regarded as a legitimate part of organizational life and begins to be treated as a threat, and, above all, how far can a person obey a hierarchy before becoming responsible for what that hierarchy is doing? Organizations possess enormous power because they organize resources, information, roles, and opportunities, and this is precisely why organizational power needs limits, legal limits, of course, but also cultural, professional, and moral ones. The Ford Argentina case represents one of the most extreme examples of what can happen when those limits disappear. An organization does not possess an autonomous conscience. It is the people occupying its roles who make decisions, use information, obey, resist, or choose not to see and simply carry on as if nothing were happening. It is through individual decisions, often apparently small and embedded in the normal functioning of a structure, that the boundary between obedience and responsibility is ultimately defined. The Ford Argentina case stands as a warning of what can happen when that boundary is erased. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Barbara Suigo Barbara Suigo, HR Consultant, Author & Independent Researcher in Organisational Behaviour Barbara Suigo is an Italian-French author, HR consultant, and independent researcher specialising in power dynamics and organisational behaviour. She is the author of five books. Her work explores charisma, organisational psychology, manipulation, and the abuse of power in the workplace, making complex international research accessible through books, articles, interviews, and podcasts. Sources: Reuters. “Ex-Ford Argentina Executives Convicted in Torture Case.” December 11, 2018. The Guardian. “Argentina: Two Ex-Ford Executives Convicted in Torture Case.” December 11, 2018. Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. “Ford Lawsuit (re Argentina).” Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS). “Ford.” Case overview, December 19, 2017. Basualdo, Victoria, Tomás Ojea Quintana and Carolina Varsky. “The Cases of Ford and Mercedes Benz.” In The Economic Accomplices to the Argentine Dictatorship: Outstanding Debts. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Written by Dee Mani, Natural Health Consultant, Best-Selling Author & Founder, My Way CBD Dee Mani is a holistic healing advocate and founder of My Way CBD, who transformed her life after overcoming an aggressive breast cancer diagnosis using natural remedies. She is an author, entrepreneur, and speaker dedicated to empowering others through the healing potential of cannabis and holistic wellness practices. What if one of the greatest resources we have for human health has been growing around us all along? Long before pharmacies, prescription pads and laboratories existed, humans looked to the natural world for medicine. They learned which roots settled the stomach, which leaves soothed wounds, which flowers brought calm, which barks eased pain and which mushrooms could affect everything from energy and immunity to perception and consciousness. That knowledge wasn't born in a laboratory; it was built through generations of observation, experience and a relationship with nature that looked very different from the one most of us have today. Nobody called it alternative medicine, it was simply medicine. But somehow we became disconnected from that knowledge. Plants and traditional remedies were increasingly pushed to the edges and labelled herbal, complementary, alternative or unproven. For instance cannabis went from a plant with a long history of medicinal use to a prohibited drug, while psychedelics became associated with recreational drug culture rather than the healing and ceremonial traditions that had existed long before prohibition. Perhaps most strangely of all, generations of traditional knowledge began to count for very little unless somebody could explain why something worked in terms the modern medical world was prepared to accept. I find that particularly difficult to ignore because I didn't come to this from the outside – I came from the pharmaceutical world. I spent five years in pharmaceutical training before eventually walking away because I had become increasingly uncomfortable with what I saw as the commercialisation of illness and the culture surrounding the industry. I had no idea then just how far that decision would take me, or how profoundly my view of health and medicine would change after my breast cancer diagnosis in 2017. This article isn't about pretending that every plant cures everything or that every traditional remedy should be used without question. It's about looking at what plant medicine actually is, how humans have used it for thousands of years, why so much of that knowledge became marginalised and what these medicines can offer us today – from the everyday herbs sitting in our kitchens to cannabis, medicinal mushrooms, psychedelics and some of the most powerful ceremonial medicines on Earth. Because plant medicine never went away, we simply stopped being taught to look at it. What do we actually mean by plant medicine? Plant medicine is an enormous subject, ranging from the herbs, roots and flowers we use for everyday health to cannabis, medicinal mushrooms and powerful psychoactive medicines such as psilocybin and ayahuasca. Some nourish us, some calm us, some support particular parts of the body, while others can profoundly affect our emotions, perception and consciousness. Mushrooms are technically fungi rather than plants, but they are very much part of this story too. What matters is that we don't need a chemistry degree to understand the basic principle. Nature contains an extraordinary variety of medicines that humans have learned to work with in very different ways. And once you begin to understand just how broad plant medicine really is, calling it simply “herbal remedies” suddenly seems rather inadequate. Nature was the original pharmacy One of the strangest things about the way we talk about natural medicine today is how easily we forget where so much of our medicinal knowledge actually came from. Nature was our original pharmacy. Willow and other salicylate-containing plants played a part in the story of aspirin. Morphine came from the opium poppy, quinine from cinchona bark, digoxin has its origins in foxglove, artemisinin came from Artemisia annua, and paclitaxel was discovered through the Pacific yew. I could give you example after example, but I'm not trying to give you a pharmaceutical history lesson. My point is almost the opposite: nature had the medicine first. As our ability to study plants developed, we learned how to identify individual compounds, isolate them, reproduce them and sometimes change them. However, along that journey, something shifted. Once a compound had been extracted, manufactured and turned into a pharmaceutical product, we were taught to recognise it as medicine, while the plant it originally came from could still be dismissed as herbal, alternative or lacking evidence. And then there is the money side, which I don't think we can ignore. You can't own a plant that has been growing naturally for thousands of years. You can't suddenly claim ownership of ginger, cannabis, turmeric or a mushroom that existed long before any pharmaceutical company did. But isolate something, alter it, create a particular formulation and turn it into a commercial product, and now there is something that can potentially be controlled, protected and sold for profit. For me, this is where our relationship with medicine really began to change. Plants and traditional remedies that people could grow, prepare and use themselves didn't fit particularly well into an increasingly commercial system built around manufactured products, patents and repeat customers. The irony is that the plants themselves never stopped being medicinal simply because our system changed the labels we put on them. And perhaps no plant demonstrates that contradiction better than cannabis. Cannabis: When medicine became marijuana Cannabis has been used as medicine for thousands of years and was once used within Western medicine too. Then prohibition changed everything. Cannabis became marijuana – a narcotic, a gateway drug, something associated with criminals and recreational users wanting to get high – while its long medicinal history became almost completely overshadowed by fear and stigma. My own relationship with cannabis became very personal in March 2017 when I was diagnosed with grade 3 triple-negative breast cancer. I had watched my sister go through chemotherapy and sadly lose her life, so I decided chemotherapy and radiotherapy were not the path I wanted to take. I had surgery, which I felt coerced into, but alongside that I completely changed the way I lived. Nutrition, supplements, meditation, detoxification and cannabis oil all became part of the protocol I chose for myself. I was told by my oncologist that if I refused chemotherapy I would be dead within a year. That was nine years ago. Cannabis oil was a major part of my personal protocol, and I continue to use cannabis as part of the lifestyle I believe has helped me remain well. I can't turn my individual experience into a clinical trial or claim somebody else will have the same outcome, but neither will I erase cannabis from my story simply because it doesn't fit neatly into conventional medicine. That experience led me to learn just how complex cannabis really is. The plant contains more than a hundred cannabinoids, with CBD and THC simply being the best known. THC produces the high; CBD doesn't. Hemp is part of the cannabis family but naturally contains very little THC. It's the source of the CBD we use in My Way CBD, whereas the cannabis oil I used during my cancer journey is a high-THC, whole-plant preparation. Both come from the cannabis family, but they're very different medicines. But what fascinated me most was discovering the endocannabinoid system (ECS). Every one of us has one, whether we've ever used cannabis or not, and our bodies naturally produce their own cannabinoids. The ECS helps regulate things such as sleep, mood, appetite, pain, stress and immune function. Learning that completely changed the way I looked at the plant and ultimately led me into the work I do today. Cannabis also taught me something I've carried into everything I've learned about plant medicine since: the whole plant matters. Its different cannabinoids and natural components can work together, known as the entourage effect. Sometimes the power isn't in one isolated compound, but in what nature created as a whole. And perhaps that's what makes cannabis such a perfect example of this entire article. A plant humans used medicinally for thousands of years became something generations were taught to fear, while all along our own bodies contained a system that helped explain our relationship with it. The plant medicines already around us When people hear the words plant medicine, they often imagine something exotic, but much of it is already sitting in our kitchens and cupboards. Ginger has been used for generations for nausea and digestion, turmeric for inflammation, garlic for cardiovascular and immune support, while chamomile, valerian and passionflower have long been associated with calming, relaxation and sleep. Then there are plants such as ashwagandha, traditionally used to help the body cope with stress; milk thistle and dandelion, commonly associated with liver and digestive support; moringa, an incredibly nourishing plant used as both food and medicine; and black seed, which has a long history of traditional use across the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Some we eat, some we drink as teas, some work beautifully as tinctures or oils, and others are more conveniently taken as supplements. What I love is how ordinary many of them are. We dig dandelions out of our gardens as weeds while herbalists have valued them for generations – I even put the flowers in my salads. We add ginger, turmeric and garlic to food without necessarily thinking about the fact that we're eating plants humans have worked with medicinally for centuries. Passionflower, or Passiflora, is particularly personal to me. When I lived in Spain, it was simply one of those natural remedies people knew about. I used it myself for its calming effects and remember using a Passiflora tincture when my children were teething. I wasn't thinking about studies or how it worked; it was simply a natural remedy I knew and trusted. And that's really the point. Plant medicine doesn't need to be complicated. You don't need to memorise hundreds of compounds or understand every mechanism. Start by learning about the plants, what generations before us used them for and how they can support the body. Once you do, you realise natural medicine isn't some strange world outside everyday life. It's been around us all along. And then there are the mushrooms Medicinal mushrooms are another enormous part of natural medicine, and despite suddenly appearing in supplements, coffees and health shops everywhere, they're certainly nothing new. Different cultures have used them for centuries, particularly across Asia, and different mushrooms have traditionally been valued for very different reasons. Lion's mane has become particularly popular for memory, concentration and brain health; reishi for immunity, stress and relaxation; chaga for immunity, inflammation and general wellbeing; and cordyceps for energy, stamina and physical performance. Shiitake and maitake also remind us that the line between food and medicine isn't always as clear as we've made it – sometimes medicinal mushrooms can simply be eaten. Turkey Tail is particularly interesting to me because I actually used to sell it through My Way until I had to remove it because of its regulatory status in Great Britain. It has a long history of traditional use, particularly across Asia, and is probably one of the best-known medicinal mushrooms for immune support. Yet under the UK's Novel Food rules, that history of use elsewhere isn't enough for it to be sold as a food in the UK without the required authorisation. Of course I complied and removed it from my site, but “not authorised” doesn't mean “found to be dangerous.” It simply means it hasn't met the particular regulatory requirements needed to be sold in Great Britain. It's a perfect example of where generations of traditional knowledge can collide with a modern regulatory system that doesn't necessarily recognise that history in the same way. And if Turkey Tail shows us how complicated the regulation of medicinal mushrooms can become, another mushroom takes us into completely different territory, psilocybin. Psilocybin: When a “drug” becomes medicine again Most people of my generation weren't taught about psilocybin as medicine. We were taught about magic mushrooms. Drugs, hallucinations, illegality, danger. What we rarely knew was that psychedelics had been the subject of psychiatric research decades earlier before the political and legal climate surrounding them changed dramatically during the 1960s and 1970s. Research became severely restricted, and for decades psychedelics were largely pushed outside mainstream medicine. Now the research is reopening. Psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in numerous mushroom species, is being studied in depression, addiction, end-of-life distress and other areas of mental health. And I think this is where plant medicine begins forcing us to ask much bigger questions about what healing actually means. A conventional antidepressant is generally taken repeatedly to alter symptoms over time. Psychedelic-assisted approaches are exploring something completely different: whether one or a small number of carefully supported experiences might change the way somebody relates to themselves, their memories, their behaviours or their pain. That fascinates me because mental health is not simply about brain chemistry. Human beings have histories. We have relationships, grief, childhoods, fears, beliefs and trauma. And trauma, in particular, can live far beyond the event that created it. Trauma, psychedelics, and going back to the root Trauma isn't simply a bad memory. Imagine stepping into the road and seeing a car speeding towards you. Your body reacts before you've had time to think – your heart races, adrenaline surges and you jump out of the way. That's fight or flight doing exactly what it was designed to do. The problem comes when the danger has gone but the body continues behaving as though it could return at any moment. An experience may have happened years ago, yet certain sounds, places, people or situations can bring that survival response straight back. The thinking mind knows the danger has passed, while the nervous system can behave as though it hasn't. Unresolved trauma can then show up throughout our lives – in our relationships, behaviours, addictions, anxiety, sleep and emotional reactions. And this is where psychedelics become particularly interesting. They don't erase trauma or offer a magical shortcut to healing. But they can temporarily change the way somebody experiences themselves, their memories and their emotions, potentially allowing them to approach things that might otherwise feel impossible to face. The experience itself isn't necessarily the healing; what happens afterwards matters too. But the possibility of getting underneath the suffering rather than continually suppressing its symptoms deserves serious attention. Because how many people are taking something for anxiety, depression, insomnia or addiction without anybody ever asking what happened to them in the first place? Plant ceremony: Something we almost forgot Traditional plant medicine hasn't always been about taking something and carrying on with your day. In many cultures, powerful medicines have been used ceremonially, with preparation, intention, music, prayer, community and time afterwards to process the experience. The medicine wasn't separated from everything surrounding it; the whole experience mattered. Human beings have always used rituals around important moments in life, and one tradition from Brazil particularly fascinates me. Within Santo Daime, where ayahuasca is used as a sacrament, it can form part of the wedding ceremony itself. The bride and groom drink the medicine, each offering it to the other, as they make their commitment to share their lives and build a family together. I find the idea behind that incredibly powerful. Imagine beginning a marriage having first been asked to truly look at yourself – your wounds, your patterns, your fears and everything you might otherwise unconsciously carry into the relationship you're about to build. That's what I find so beautiful about ceremony. The medicine isn't simply something you take. It's being used to mark one of the biggest transitions of your life with intention, reflection and a commitment to enter it consciously. Ayahuasca: Meeting Grandmother Aya Ayahuasca deserves far more than being described as simply another psychedelic. This Amazonian plant medicine has been used ceremonially for generations and is traditionally made by combining the Banisteriopsis caapi vine with a DMT-containing plant, commonly Psychotria viridis. But anyone who has worked with ayahuasca will understand why reducing it to its chemistry completely misses the point. She's often affectionately referred to as Grandmother Aya, and having sat with her eight times myself, I understand why. There is something very different about the way people describe their relationship with this medicine. Rather than simply feeling as though they've “taken something,” people can experience it as being shown, challenged, confronted or guided through parts of themselves they may have spent years avoiding. Ayahuasca can take you deeply inward. Memories can surface, emotions can pour out, patterns can suddenly make sense and experiences you thought you'd buried years ago can appear from a completely different perspective. It can also be incredibly physical. Nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea are common and, within many traditional settings, this purging is viewed as part of the experience rather than simply an unwanted side effect. And this is exactly why I would never talk about ayahuasca casually or suggest somebody simply finds a retreat and gives it a go. Who facilitates the ceremony matters enormously. A responsible facilitator should understand exactly what they're serving, screen participants beforehand, ask about physical and mental health and medications, know who shouldn't participate, provide adequate support throughout the ceremony and know what to do if something goes wrong. Certain medications and health conditions can create genuine risks. There has also been frightening press surrounding deaths associated with ayahuasca ceremonies. Those reports shouldn't simply be ignored, but they need context. Investigations have found cases involving other substances or plants, underlying health problems, accidents and inadequate supervision, while a comprehensive review by the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service found no forensic evidence establishing fatal poisoning from the traditional ayahuasca brew itself. That doesn't make ayahuasca risk-free. It makes choosing an experienced, responsible facilitator and a properly run ceremony even more important. And then there is my own relationship with Grandmother Aya. I've personally sat in eight ayahuasca ceremonies since 2019, using those experiences as part of my journey into unresolved childhood trauma. Does eight ayahuasca ceremonies make me some kind of spiritual guru? Absolutely not. But it does mean I'm talking from personal experience rather than something I've simply read about. For me, trauma became an important part of how I made sense of my breast cancer diagnosis. I came to believe I'd carried experiences and emotions subconsciously for decades, and ayahuasca gave me access to parts of myself I hadn't previously been able to reach. It helped me confront childhood experiences, recognise patterns that had followed me into adulthood and begin freeing myself from some of the emotional shackles I'd carried for years. No two ceremonies of mine have ever been the same. Ayahuasca can be beautiful, confronting, physical, emotional, confusing, spiritual, terrifying and profound – sometimes several of those things in the same night. And nobody should tell another person what the medicine is going to show them, because the moment they do, they've already planted an expectation. You don't go into ceremony knowing what Grandmother Aya will show you. And perhaps that's precisely why so many people describe the experience as meeting a teacher rather than simply taking a psychedelic. Cacao: Plant ceremony doesn’t have to mean psychedelics I've also experienced cacao ceremony, which sits at a much gentler end of this spectrum. Cacao isn't a psychedelic and doesn't send somebody into the kind of altered state associated with ayahuasca or psilocybin. The ceremonial element is different. People come together, they slow down. There may be meditation, music, breathwork, movement, conversation or reflection. The plant becomes part of creating intentional space. Cacao has deep roots in Mesoamerican cultures, although we should be careful not to pretend every modern Western cacao circle is a continuation of an ancient Indigenous ceremony. Traditions evolve, and modern practices often combine different influences. For me, its inclusion here demonstrates that plant medicine can involve our relationship with a plant as well as simply its active compounds. Peyote, San Pedro, and mescaline Mescaline occurs naturally in several cacti, most famously peyote and San Pedro, and can profoundly alter perception, emotion and consciousness. Peyote needs particular respect because its ceremonial use is deeply connected to Indigenous traditions, especially in North America, and the cactus grows extremely slowly. As Western interest in psychedelics increases, we cannot simply descend upon sacred medicines, commercialise them and ignore the communities that protected their use for generations. Plant medicine without respect for the people and ecosystems from which that medicine comes isn't much of a return to nature at all. Iboga: Extraordinary potential with serious risks Iboga, from the West Central African shrub Tabernanthe iboga, occupies another completely different space and has deep significance within Bwiti traditions. Its best-known psychoactive compound, ibogaine, has attracted attention particularly around addiction and opioid withdrawal. People have described extraordinarily intense, introspective experiences in which memories, behaviour and personal history become impossible to avoid. But iboga also demonstrates why "natural" should never become another word for harmless. Ibogaine can interfere with the heart's electrical activity and has been associated with dangerous arrhythmias and deaths. Anyone considering it needs proper medical screening and experienced support throughout the ceremony. Respecting plant medicine means respecting its power, including the parts that have the potential to harm us. DMT and the mystery of consciousness Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is one of the most fascinating substances found in nature. It occurs naturally in numerous plants, forms part of ayahuasca and, perhaps most remarkably, our own bodies naturally produce it too. DMT has long been linked with profound human experiences including birth, near-death experiences and the final moments before death. There are theories that our naturally produced DMT may play a role in these states, although exactly what happens remains a mystery. Then there's breathwork, where people can reach extraordinary altered states through breathing alone – experiencing visions, emotional release or something deeply spiritual. Again, DMT has been linked to these experiences, but there is still much we don't understand. And I'm comfortable with that. We don't have to understand every mystery before we're allowed to be fascinated by it. The fact that something capable of profoundly altering human consciousness exists in nature and is naturally produced within our own bodies is extraordinary enough. Plant medicine never left us After everything I've covered here, perhaps the biggest question is how we ever became convinced that nature was the alternative in the first place. Cannabis didn't stop being medicinal when governments prohibited it. Psilocybin mushrooms didn't stop affecting the human mind when they became illegal. Dandelion didn't stop being useful because we started calling it a weed. Nature didn't change, we did. The plants never stopped growing and the mushrooms never disappeared. Plant medicine never left us – we left it. And maybe it's time we found our way back home. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Dee Mani Dee Mani, Natural Health Consultant, Best-Selling Author & Founder, My Way CBD Dee Mani is a Natural Health Consultant, bestselling author and founder of the award-winning My Way CBD. With a professional background in pharmaceuticals and a personal journey that reshaped her approach to health following a breast cancer diagnosis in 2017, Dee is dedicated to educating and empowering others through nutrition, lifestyle and evidence-informed natural therapies.

Written by Anham Shaheen, Technology Entrepreneur & Digital Strategist Anham Shaheen is a Dubai-based technology entrepreneur and digital strategist specializing in scalable digital systems, AI, automation, and business transformation. As the founder of PixelWave and a certified Project Manager, she combines technology, strategy, and structured execution to drive measurable business growth. AI is impressive. Sometimes, honestly, it feels like watching a magician perform a trick. You know something is happening behind the scenes, but the result appears so quickly that it feels almost impossible. The problem starts when businesses begin believing in the magic instead of understanding the trick. AI is not magic. It is technology, data, analysis, structure and instructions. If the company behind it is a mess, AI is not going to arrive with a broom and clean everything up. Why does AI fail in some businesses? There is one principle I believe companies need to understand before discussing AI transformation: The output is only as good as the input. When I say input, I do not only mean what someone types into ChatGPT. Your input is your company. It is your data. Your employees. Your processes. Your hierarchy. Your responsibilities. Your management. Your software. Your documentation. Your accountability. It is how you operate internally and externally. If all of that is bad, why are we expecting AI to magically produce something brilliant from it? You cannot take a company from the Stone Age directly into the AI age. Transformation happens gradually. If processes are outdated, employees struggle with basic technology, nobody knows who is responsible for what, information is everywhere and management itself cannot clearly explain the workflow, adding AI may create more confusion rather than less. Before artificial intelligence comes organizational intelligence. AI is a tool, not your personal assistant I think this is where people sometimes mix humans and machines. AI can feel human because it communicates with us. It writes. It answers. It analyzes. It can even challenge an idea. But it is still a tool. Imagine Tool A has one job. For Tool A to perform that job, it should receive the information necessary for it. If we start feeding every tool everything about the company, from A to Z, without thinking about purpose, access or sensitivity, we create a completely different problem. Good AI implementation is not about giving every system access to everything. It is about knowing exactly what problem a tool is supposed to solve and giving it what it needs to solve that problem. This matters even more when company information, financial information, client information or other sensitive data is involved. AI governance cannot be an afterthought. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, through its AI Risk Management Framework, similarly emphasizes governance, clearly defined responsibilities, oversight, documentation and risk management throughout the use of AI systems. Are we using AI, or is AI using us? There is another side of AI transformation that I think we are discussing far less. Underusing AI is a problem. Overusing AI is also a problem. I know people today who would genuinely struggle to work if their preferred AI system went down for one day. Think about that. We have already experienced something similar with the internet. When the internet goes down in an office, suddenly everybody looks at each other as if work itself has been cancelled. AI dependency can become even more interesting because we are not only outsourcing tasks. Sometimes, we are outsourcing thinking. Let us take a very simple example. You need to answer an important email. Write your own draft first. Understand the problem. Decide what you actually think. Then use AI to refine it, improve it, challenge it or make it clearer. But if AI reads the email for you, understands the situation for you, analyzes the information for you, decides what the response should be and then writes the response for you, I have one question: Why exactly does the company still need you? That might sound harsh, but I think professionals need to ask themselves this. Your judgment, creativity, experience, personality and way of solving problems are part of your professional unique selling proposition. If you outsource all of them, eventually, you are outsourcing the very reason somebody hired you. AI should increase your capability. It should not erase your capability. Can AI replace jobs? Of course it can replace some work. I do not believe pretending otherwise helps anyone. Technology has always changed the kind of work humans need to perform. Think about photography. There was a time when taking good photographs required equipment, expertise and often a professional studio. Then digital cameras became accessible. Then almost everyone started carrying an increasingly powerful camera inside a phone. Photography did not disappear. But parts of the industry changed completely. AI will do the same to certain repetitive tasks. Work that previously took hours or sometimes days can already be completed much faster with the right tools. Businesses will save money because of that. Some jobs will change. Some repetitive functions will be reduced. New functions will appear. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. The same research also highlights the growing importance of continuous learning, upskilling and reskilling as technology changes work. So, my argument is not that businesses should avoid AI to protect the old way of working. Quite the opposite. Businesses that refuse to transform will eventually have a problem. But transformation and recklessness are not the same thing. Should people be trained before using AI at work? We train people before allowing them to drive a car. Why? Because a car is useful, powerful and, when used badly, capable of causing a lot of damage. Now imagine somebody announces a new machine that moves on four wheels and says, “Good news, everybody can use it. Just pay a monthly subscription.” There would be chaos. Just because you know how to ride a bicycle does not mean you suddenly know how to drive a car. I think corporate AI should be approached with a similar mentality. Before employees are expected to use AI professionally, they should understand what AI is, what it is not, how to question its output, what information they can safely provide, where human judgment is required and what they remain accountable for. For corporate environments, I would go further and include basic process and project management thinking in this education. Because knowing which button to press is not the same as understanding the process you are trying to improve. The World Economic Forum has reported strong growth in demand for AI literacy, while workplace research continues to emphasize both AI literacy and human skills. That combination matters. We need people who understand the technology without forgetting how to think without it. Why human oversight still matters AI will make mistakes. Humans make mistakes too. The answer is not to choose one and blindly trust it. For higher-level or higher-risk uses, I like thinking about AI governance almost like multifactor authentication. The first level is the working AI. It performs the task. The second level can be a controlled validation layer. This system works against the company’s approved guidelines, processes, knowledge and rules. I sometimes call this the “company Bible.” Its job is not simply to repeat the first answer. It helps check whether the result actually makes sense within the organization. Then comes the third level: the human. But this human cannot simply be anybody sitting nearby who clicks approve. For important decisions, the reviewer needs enough technical understanding, operational knowledge, project management discipline and human judgment to challenge the result independently. Otherwise, human oversight becomes theatre. If the human needs AI to tell them whether the AI was correct, who exactly is supervising whom? The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s guidance on AI risk management also recognizes that different AI applications require different levels of human oversight and that organizations should clearly define human responsibilities, proficiency requirements, training and governance around AI systems. Not every email needs three layers of approval. That would defeat the entire purpose of efficiency. The level of control should match the level of risk. An AI system summarizing an internal meeting is not the same as one interpreting financial information, influencing a legal decision or working with sensitive customer data. Use common sense. How should a traditional company actually introduce AI? If I walked into a traditional company tomorrow and was asked to make it AI-enabled, I would not start by buying AI tools. I would start by understanding the company. 1. Assess the current health of the business Analyze operations first. How does work actually move through the company? Where are the bottlenecks? Which processes are outdated? Which responsibilities are unclear? Then assess people too. This could involve team interviews, individual questionnaires, practical assessments or even simple quizzes, depending on the organization. Management should not be exempt. Everybody operates at a different level, so everybody should be assessed at the level relevant to their role. You need to know where you are before deciding how far you can go. 2. Fix the foundation If basic responsibilities, hierarchy, processes, accountability and technology use are unclear, work on those first. Then look at existing software and digital processes. A company that cannot properly use its current systems is probably not ready to put AI on top of them. Remember, we are climbing a mountain. We are not jumping from the ground to the top because we are impatient. 3. Start with the strongest people I would not give advanced AI implementation to everybody on day one. Start with selected employees who already demonstrate strong capabilities and train them properly. Let them become the first group to understand the systems, limitations and expected outcomes. Observe how they use AI. Then allow that knowledge to spread gradually through their teams. 4. Automate one clearly defined process Do not try to become an “AI company” overnight. Choose one process. Define what success actually means before implementation. Are we trying to save time? Reduce errors? Improve response times? Lower costs? Improve quality? If you do not know what success looks like, you cannot honestly say whether the AI implementation worked. 5. Run AI and the traditional process together This is one of the most important parts for me. During the first cycle, do not immediately throw away the traditional process. Run both. Complete the task traditionally and complete it with AI. Then compare the results. Is the AI accurate? Is it actually faster? What mistakes does it make? What situations confuse it? Where does a human still perform better? For the first few months, depending on the risk and complexity of the process, monitor it closely. You are testing without unnecessarily disrupting the business. 6. Validate before you scale Once you have enough evidence that the new process works reliably, move further towards AI with confidence. Automate another process. Measure again. Improve again. Then automate another. AI transformation should happen in phases. Assess. Prepare. Pilot. Test. Validate. Scale. Govern. That is much less exciting than announcing that your entire company has become AI-powered overnight. It is also much more likely to work. AI maturity cannot exceed organizational maturity This, for me, is the real point. AI can make a good company faster. It can make talented employees more capable. It can reduce repetitive work, analyze information quickly and create enormous efficiencies. But AI cannot magically give an organization the maturity it never built. If your processes are broken, fix them. If your employees lack digital skills, train them. If nobody is accountable, establish accountability. If your data is a mess, organize it. Then bring AI into an environment where it actually has a chance to perform. Because the output will always depend on the input. Sometimes, before asking which AI tool your company needs, the smarter question is much simpler: Is your company actually ready for AI? Start with your process, not the tool Before buying another AI subscription, choose one process inside your business and map how it works today. Identify who owns it, what information goes into it, where time is wasted, where mistakes happen and what a successful outcome should look like. Only then ask where AI belongs. If you are exploring how AI, automation and structured digital systems can improve your business, connect with me through my Brainz Executive Contributor profile and follow my upcoming articles on practical digital transformation. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Anham Shaheen Anham Shaheen, Technology Entrepreneur & Digital Strategist Anham Shaheen is a Dubai-based technology entrepreneur and digital strategist focused on transforming complex business challenges into structured, scalable digital solutions. She is the founder of PixelWave, where she works across digital strategy, technology, AI, automation, and performance-driven systems designed to improve efficiency and support measurable growth. A certified Project Manager, Anham brings a structured approach to connecting business strategy with practical technology implementation. Her work reflects a broader commitment to advancing technology-driven entrepreneurship in the region and encouraging greater female representation in technology and leadership.

Written by James Westphal, Actor & Public Speaking and Communication Coach James Westphal is an actor, coach, and creative development specialist with a degree and training from a leading drama school, professional stage and screen experience, and a Master’s in Psychology. His unique combination of acting craft, public speaking, communication techniques, and psychology helps people connect, lead, and speak with impact. There’s a version of our careers that we’re sold: the longer you do something, the better you get at the work, and therefore, you rise through the ranks. With this, the more difficult parts fall away, and one of these, speaking to a room, becomes easier because you have done it more and your knowledge has grown. The confidence, presence and impact you’ve longed for arrive with the long-awaited title. However, in reality, for a large proportion of the people I coach, the more senior they are, the more challenging they find communication. It brings more nuanced challenges, different expectations and, usually, more eyes. This article explores some of the reasons why it can feel like this and what can be done to ease the challenges faced. What changes on the way up Early in a career, at least historically, you are largely assessed on competence: Do you know the material? Can you do the work? Is your track record right? Communication issues at that stage are mostly thought of as knowledge and confidence problems. The more confident you become with the knowledge, the better you are able to get it across. Obviously, there are a few exceptions to this, but on the whole, communication comes second to the actual job and competence at hand. But, as we all know, the two are not independent of one another. They are completely intertwined, I’d argue, at every stage of every single job. But it’s usually not until you progress up the seniority ladder that it becomes very difficult to separate them. An aspect of seniority that is expected is being able to share your ideas and vision with clarity, confidence and ownership. But if this hasn’t been given time, training and practice, it is something that can compound in the wrong direction. And to make matters worse, none of that can be stated. You can’t open a board update by announcing that you have sound judgement or begin a town hall meeting by declaring that you are a great leader. They are characteristics and traits transmitted in real time through how you handle a challenge, how much space you take up, how you hold yourself physically and what your voice reflects. The result is a strange inversion. People arrive at the level where communication matters most with the skill set they’ve built over an extended period of time, but with the least technical ability and competence in how they communicate and speak in public. This, to me, is one of the oddest aspects of business. Three recurring habits of senior people Some of the patterns I see most often in the senior people I work with are: 1. Playing the executive In an attempt to show people they are deserving of the title and able to do the job, many people try to play what they think others want to see. Sometimes this can work if there is depth of understanding and the technical ability to modulate your vocal and physical presence. But a lot of the time, people are trying to impose what they think is needed while lacking foundational confidence in communication. They try to force out any sign of weakness or vulnerability. A sense of seriousness is imposed. God forbid, they aren’t able to answer a particular question. All of this leads to a buildup of unnecessary tension. In communication, tension is your biggest enemy. It restricts your vocal clarity. It limits your ability to breathe fully and release your diaphragm. It shows up in the body as rigidity and inflexibility and creates an invisible barrier, which can sometimes make people feel like they are speaking with someone through a glass screen. When we don’t breathe properly, we don’t feel properly. Think about it: if you are trying not to cry and someone asks you if you are okay, the last thing you want to do is take a deep breath because the feeling then has free rein. But by avoiding it, we block and harden ourselves. Showing feeling is never as bad as tensing to avoid feeling anything at all. This comes from a good place, though. Most senior people want to do a good job and prove to others that they have earned their place. This, however, means they are trying to control a lot of things, and this is one of the ways unnecessary tension shows up. It has been drilled into us that vulnerability is weakness in business. Whilst there can be an element of truth to that in some circumstances, this can lead people, especially within communication, to forget to be real. A real person gets things wrong, doesn’t always know the answer and still gets to connect with others on a human level. They can simultaneously be a work colleague and a leader. 2. Forgetting the joy At some point, the story of your best piece of work or your experience and journey to where you are may have become something that has been told many, many times. Maybe it is at reviews, to new joiners, at separate off-site meetings, to your partner over dinner or to a new team. Whatever the reason, by the time it is needed in a moment that matters, you can find that the story has been worn completely smooth. The result is often strong material with the tonal energy of a train announcement. It lacks the raw passion and energy it had when you first started out and were hungry to succeed. It is devoid of life. Familiarity has drained it, and whatever lit your fire at the start has dampened. The joy in the work, at some point along the way, has diminished. Actors encounter this problem during the long run of a show. There are a couple of ways we can look to actors to help with this all too familiar problem, and each takes a different approach. The first is more cerebral: reminding yourself of and reconnecting with what it is about the job, company, idea, talk, pitch or presentation that energises you. When we see other people feeling something real, we can’t help but find it interesting. That is why we are drawn to streaming hours and hours of television. We are compelled to watch other people feel and experience things, whether in fiction or nonfiction. Once you have reconnected with the joy, ask yourself, “What do I want the other person or people to think, feel or do?” When people feel, they are more likely to do. The second is more creative and imaginative. Let’s be honest, sometimes in senior positions, or any position for that matter, you might find that you have to talk about something you aren’t particularly passionate about or don’t actually love. Maybe it is more of a commercial means to an end. In this case, you can utilise something that we were all brilliant at when we were younger: imagination. Frame the thing you don’t care much about as if it were something you do. For example, the new policy you are trying to push because the stakeholders want it might be thought of as if it were the proposition of a great new holiday for your family. Now ask yourself how you would feel and communicate if it were that, and then apply some of this to your communication of the duller thing. 3. The echo chamber This one doesn’t apply to everyone because some senior people are intuitively very good at seeking feedback and constructive criticism. But one aspect of business I have noticed within the territory of seniority is that it can create a vacuum in which there are minimal feedback loops. You are usually the one who is looked to for feedback and criticism. But when you are at the top, there isn’t always a built-in structure through which you can receive the same. Or worse, you may think that you are above feedback. That is where the ego becomes the real enemy. The liberating thing about this, though, is that as soon as you realise this could be you and your situation, you can do something about it. There are many forms this can take, including a coach, a mentor, a fellow executive or a close friend. The through line, though, is trust and respect. You need someone you trust and respect to give you honest, constructive and unbiased feedback on your communication. If none of the above is appealing, one great, quick and easy alternative is something almost everyone in this world owns: a smartphone. Record yourself and watch it back. This will give you real-time, unbiased data to work with. This helps close something I call the perception gap. There is often a large distance between what a speaker intends and what a listener receives. You may feel like you are being inviting, but what is being signalled is disengagement. Or you may feel like you are bringing high energy and passion, but what is being signalled is frantic and nervous energy. Nobody can see themselves from the outside, so this distance can survive entire careers uncorrected. It widens with seniority because fewer and fewer people are willing to tell you about it. The game of translation I urge all my clients to think of communication as a game of translation. As mentioned above, what you feel might not always be how you come across. Instead of finding this frustrating, with time, awareness and feedback, you can start to treat it like a game. Who doesn’t love a game? Always ask yourself: What am I intending to do here, and how might I be coming across? There is a well-documented psychological effect at work here, known as the illusion of transparency. We consistently overestimate how visible our inner states are to the people watching us. Research by Gilovich and colleagues found that this holds particularly true in public speaking, where speakers judged their own nervousness to be far more obvious than observers actually rated it. What is useful about this is that it cuts both ways. The anxiety you are certain everyone can see is arriving much more faintly than you think. So are the warmth, conviction and interest. This is precisely why these feelings need translating rather than simply feeling. What can be done? Aside from the above, when it comes to communication at any level, there are three factors at play. If you can master each one, you will find that your level of communication and public speaking begins to match the level of your title. 1. Psychological Cognitive work matters, but thinking differently about a room you are already standing in has limited reach once adrenaline has arrived. Where it does its work is beforehand. Reframing is a useful tool. Changing the lens through which you view a situation can alter your feelings and behaviours surrounding it. The physical sensations of anxiety and readiness can be very similar, including a raised heart rate, heightened alertness and adrenaline. What differs is the label you attach, a process known as arousal reappraisal. Reading a state as your system preparing you rather than betraying you can change a great deal about what you do next. The other aspect is structure. Rambling tends to show up in high-stakes moments and undermines your logos, which is your logic and reasoning, and your ethos, which is the credibility you carry as a speaker. I use a framework I call OMF with clients: Objective, Message, Feeling, with the latter covering pathos. Objective is what you want these people to do as a result of the communicative situation at hand. Not “understand the update,” which is too loose to steer anything, but something specific enough to make decisions against. Specific over vague every time. Message is the single line you would want to remain in their heads a week later. It is almost a tagline of sorts. Feeling is what you want them to experience while you speak, and it is the element almost everyone skips. It is also not fixed. It travels across a talk: uneasy in one section, reassured in the next. You plan in that order, and you deliver in reverse. Feeling lands first, meaning second, and the action follows from both. Lead with what you want someone to feel in each section of your pitch, speech or presentation. 2. Physiological You cannot always reason your way out of an adrenaline response, but you can intervene in it directly, which is what makes this the fastest acting of the three. One useful tool is the physiological sigh: an inhale through the nose, a second shorter inhale on top to inflate the lungs further, and then a long, slow exhale through the mouth. Repeating this two or three times may help reduce physiological arousal. The mechanism is not mysterious. A longer exhale can support the body’s parasympathetic response, which acts like a brake. It can be done in a lift or corridor in less than a minute. This one isn’t particularly discreet, though. If you want something more subtle, you can check out my other articles. The second piece is breath as fuel rather than regulation. Voice is powered by the breath. Shallow breathing high in the chest can give you a thin sound, sentences that run out of support before they end, and a pitch that climbs and gets stuck. It can also keep your body in a heightened state of stress. Allowing the lower ribs to expand and the diaphragm to work freely gives you range, volume and the ability to land the end of a sentence rather than let it drift. This brings us back to tension. The same tension described earlier is what stops the breath from dropping in the first place. Everything in this layer is connected to everything in the first habit. All communication work is interconnected. 3. Physical This is the layer people are least aware of and the one that others catch on to the quickest, whether they are consciously aware of it or not. Start with the basics: weight through both feet or distributed evenly on the chair, shoulders released, and an open and aligned posture. The instinct under pressure is to protect the chest and close down by folding the arms, gripping a lectern or turning slightly away. Under pressure, people tense. Their shoulders lift, their stomach is braced, their weight may lean back, giving the impression of someone wanting to escape, and their breath becomes shallow. The correction is to send the weight downwards. This is a physical action that observers can also read as steadiness. Beyond that, this is where acting craft becomes directly useful. Rudolf Laban’s movement analysis examines physical expression through space, weight, time and flow. Once you have language for those elements, you have choices. This was built upon by Yat Malmgren to create a system of movement psychology and character analysis. Are you moving directly or indirectly? Is your energy strong or light? Sudden or sustained? Most people have one default setting they use for everything, which is why some senior speakers come across as relentless and others as weightless. The same words delivered with different qualities of weight and time carry entirely different meanings. Then there is the space around you. Actors may refer to this as the gestural sphere, the area your gestures occupy. Held tightly to the body, your gestures can make you look contained, and the room may read uncertainty. Opened out, they allow you to occupy the room. Occupying space can be a clear signal of authority, and it is trainable in a way that confidence is not. A good exercise is to experiment with different tempi while delivering a passage of text and record yourself. Watch it back to train your understanding and use of how you move through space, weight and time. You will reach a point where you intuitively begin to match what you do physically with how you want to come across. Final thoughts In my experience, people think that all of this is a natural talent that you are either born with or not. This isn’t the case. As with any skill, this work is trainable and can be improved. It takes time, practice and dedication, but it is worth it. Many people give so much time and dedication to reaching the level they want in business and work hard to ensure they acquire the knowledge and competence required to do the job at a technical level. It seems nonsensical that a similar amount of time isn’t given to communication and public speaking because these skills can elevate or undermine the work you have done up to this point. For some, it is not enough to read the tools in an article. If you would like to explore any of this practically, I work one-to-one and with groups on communication, presence and performance under pressure. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from James Westphal James Westphal, Actor & Public Speaking and Communication Coach James Westphal is an actor, coach, and creative development specialist who works with professional actors on their acting and audition technique and provides public speaking and communication coaching for individuals and groups across business, leadership, and public-facing roles. With his first-class degree and training from a leading drama school, ongoing stage and screen work, a Master’s in Psychology, and extensive teaching experience at top drama schools and conservatoires, James also coaches internationally for leading companies. Founder and CEO of James Westphal Creative Development, providing effective help and guidance for people who speak for a living, his mission is to empower people to connect, lead, and speak with impact.

Written by Nelson Barrios, Founder, Edukko | EdTech & Education Innovator Nelson Barrios is the Founder of Edukko, a Dubai-based EdTech platform delivering personalized tutoring, mentorship, and academic support across IB, GCSE, A-Level, American, and French curricula. A PGCE-qualified, multilingual practitioner trained by the UK Ministry of Education, he harnesses AI to transform learning worldwide. Millions of people open a language app every day, keep a streak going for weeks or months, and then quietly realize they still cannot hold a real conversation. If that sounds familiar, you are not failing at language learning. You are simply using a tool that may not be enough to get you where you actually want to go. This article looks at what the research says about apps versus human instruction, why so many committed learners get stuck, and what language coaching does differently. The streak that goes nowhere I have taught languages for fifteen years, French and Spanish mostly, though I speak five languages myself and have spent my whole life moving between them. In the last few years, I have had a version of the same conversation over and over again with parents, professionals, teenagers, and retirees. It goes something like this: I have been doing Duolingo every day for eight months. My streak is huge. But I still freeze the moment someone actually speaks to me. These are not lazy people. They are the opposite. They have shown up daily, built a habit most learners never manage, and genuinely tried. And yet they are stuck in the exact same place they were months ago, which is the ability to recognize words on a screen but not use them with a living human being in real time. This is not a criticism of anyone who uses an app. I want to be clear about that. Apps have done something genuinely valuable. They have made the idea of learning a language feel accessible and unintimidating to millions of people who would never have walked into a classroom. That matters. But somewhere along the way, a quiet myth took hold, the myth that an app alone could take you all the way to actually speaking a language. And that myth is leaving a lot of committed people frustrated and blaming themselves for a failure that was never theirs. “You are not bad at languages. You are using a tool that may stop exactly where the hard and interesting part begins.” What the research shows This is not just my opinion from the classroom. Recent research offers useful insight into where apps can be effective and where their limitations may become apparent. A study published in Studies in Second Language Acquisition through Cambridge University Press compared beginner French learners across three conditions: app use only, classroom instruction only, and a combination of the two. All three groups showed significant improvement across nearly all measures, with similar levels of progress overall. The combination group showed greater gains in one area of pragmatic competence involving the use of tu and vous. The study also noted that the effects of language apps on oral skills have received limited research attention, partly because many apps have traditionally focused more on receptive than productive skills. A separate systematic review of twenty studies on Duolingo found a similar pattern. The app was particularly effective at building foundational vocabulary and supporting beginner-level reading and listening. However, the review concluded that the lack of interactive, real-time communication restricts the platform’s ability to develop higher-order language skills. In plain terms, an app can teach you words. It may be less effective at teaching you to converse, think on your feet, read a room, or recover when you make a mistake in the middle of a sentence. Those skills develop through meaningful interaction and practice. Even language learning trends for 2026 point in a similar direction. Current teaching trends emphasize keeping the human element at the center, developing practical communication skills, and creating immersive and social learning experiences. The message is clear: technology can support language learning, but expertise, empathy, judgment, and genuine interaction remain essential. Why apps hit a wall It helps to understand why this happens because it is not necessarily a flaw in any particular app. It is a limitation built into the format itself. A language app is, by design, a closed system. It gives you a prompt, you give it one of a small number of expected answers, and it tells you if you were right. That loop is excellent for memorizing vocabulary and practising basic grammar patterns. But real conversation is the opposite of a closed system. It is open, unpredictable, and full of the very things an app cannot fully replicate. Someone interrupts you. They use a word you do not know. They ask a follow-up question you did not prepare for. They speak with an accent or too quickly, or they make a joke and you have to decide whether to laugh. Not all of that can be scripted, so it cannot be fully taught by a script. There is also the emotional side, which almost nobody talks about. One of the biggest barriers to speaking a new language is not vocabulary. It is fear. It is the fear of sounding stupid, making mistakes, or being judged. An app rarely asks you to be vulnerable, which feels comfortable but can also be part of the problem. You may never practise the one thing that actually holds you back, which is the courage to open your mouth and get it wrong in front of another human being. That courage is a skill, and like any skill, it develops through practice with real stakes and real support. “One of the biggest barriers to speaking a language is not vocabulary. It is fear. And overcoming that fear often requires real interaction and support.” What coaching does differently This is where language coaching is fundamentally different from both an app and, honestly, from a lot of traditional language teaching too. A language teacher, in the old sense, delivers content: grammar rules, vocabulary lists, and verb tables. That has value, but it is not necessarily the thing that gets someone speaking. A language coach does something else entirely. A coach starts with the person. Why do you actually want to learn this language? What is the situation you are dreading or dreaming about? Is it a conversation with your partner’s family, a move abroad, or a promotion that requires a second language? A coach builds everything around that real motivation because motivation connected to your actual life is the fuel that carries you through the hard parts. A coach also does the thing an app structurally cannot. They create a safe relationship in which you can be bad at something. That sounds small. It is everything. When you have a coach who genuinely believes in you, who is patient when you stumble, and who celebrates the messy first attempts rather than just correcting them, you slowly lose the fear. And when the fear goes, the language comes. I have watched this happen hundreds of times. The student who could not say a sentence in month one is, by month four, arguing with me playfully about which restaurant to imagine going to. An app alone may not produce that. It comes from a human relationship built on trust. Coaching is also responsive in real time in a way no algorithm can fully match. When I am working with someone and I see their face change, I know they have lost confidence, and I adjust immediately. When I hear the specific mistake they keep making, I do not give them a generic lesson. I build the next session around exactly that. This is the difference between personalized in the marketing sense, which is what apps mean when they say it, and personalized in the human sense, which is a real person paying complete attention to you and adapting to what they see. Using both well None of this means you should delete your language app. That would be the wrong lesson to take from all of this. A practical approach is to use each tool for what it is genuinely good at. Research shows that both language apps and classroom instruction can support beginner language development, while blended learning may offer additional benefits in certain areas. Use the app for what it does well: daily vocabulary practice, keeping the language warm in your mind between sessions, and building the foundational bricks. Then use a human coach for the things a human does best: turning those bricks into actual conversation, building your confidence, and pushing you into the unpredictable, real, slightly uncomfortable territory where fluency is born. Think of the app as the gym where you build the raw material and the coach as the person who teaches you to use your strength in the real world. One without the other may leave important gaps. Together, they can work effectively. Where Edukko comes in This is exactly the gap that our language coaching at Edukko was built to fill. I founded Edukko as an education platform, but language coaching sits close to my heart because it is where I started and because I see so many people stuck in precisely the place I have described. Our language coaching is not a set of prerecorded lessons or a rigid syllabus. It involves real sessions with real educators who are fluent, experienced, and trained to coach rather than just teach. We start by understanding why you want to learn the language and what is getting in your way. We build a plan around your actual goals. We meet you at your level, whether you have a huge app streak but cannot speak or you are starting completely from scratch. And we focus relentlessly on the thing that matters most, which is getting you speaking with confidence as early as possible in a supportive environment where making mistakes is not just allowed but expected. Whether you are an adult who has stalled after months on an app, a parent who wants your child to genuinely speak a language rather than just pass an exam, or a professional who needs a second language for a real opportunity, coaching can bridge the gap between studying a language and actually using it. “An app can help you learn a language. A coach teaches you to speak it. The difference is the entire point.” Start speaking sooner If you have been putting in the daily effort and still feel stuck, the missing piece may not be more vocabulary. It may be a real person who can take what you already know and turn it into confident, living conversation. That is what language coaching does, and it is what many stuck learners have never actually tried. To find out more about language coaching with Edukko in French, Spanish, and other languages for children, teenagers, and adults, visit edukko.ae or reach out through any of our channels. Bring your streak. We will help you finally use it. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Nelson Barrios Nelson Barrios, Founder, Edukko | EdTech & Education Innovator Nelson Barrios is a Dubai-based education entrepreneur, PGCE-qualified teacher trained by the UK Ministry of Education, and founder of Edukko, one of the UAE’s fastest-growing EdTech platforms. Having taught across Spain, the United States, and the United Kingdom, he launched Edukko in 2021 to help families navigate academic pressure with expert support. Today, a network of 700+ vetted Edukkators has delivered over 10,000 sessions across eight countries, supporting students across IB, GCSE, A-Level, American, and French curricula. Nelson writes on EdTech innovation, AI in learning, and how families can raise confident, future-ready students in a rapidly changing world.

Sydney, Australia – 2026 – Have you ever wondered what someone around you might be going through behind the smile you see? For Sam Lee, this question is deeply personal. Today, Sam is a multi-award-winning social skills coach, certified life coach and Neuro-Linguistic Programming practitioner, published author, speaker and founder of Connect with Confidence. But his journey to helping others was shaped by some of the darkest experiences of his life. From Hong Kong to Australia Sam moved from Hong Kong to Australia with his family when he was four years old. His parents wanted to create a better lifestyle and future for him and his brother in Sydney. Growing up, English was not Sam’s first language. He describes himself as a shy, nervous and introverted young person who struggled with confidence. Those characteristics made him vulnerable to bullying. One experience during university remains particularly vivid. While playing basketball and minding his own business, a young man approached him from behind and punched him in the head. The individual and his friends then directed racist comments towards him, including telling him to “go back to China.” “I was scared and shocked because this had never happened to me before,” Sam recalls. The bullying did not stop there. Sam also experienced cyberbullying and online trolling. Whenever he posted something on social media, negative comments and offensive messages could quickly follow. Over time, these experiences affected how he saw himself and how safe he felt expressing himself publicly. When pain gets bottled up For Sam, one of the greatest challenges was not simply experiencing hurtful comments or attacks. It was learning how to process the emotions that came with them. He describes himself as someone who was highly sensitive and emotionally affected by personal attacks, while also strongly disliking confrontation. Rather than expressing his feelings, he often bottled them up. That emotional suppression became increasingly difficult to manage. At the same time, some friendships became strained as his negativity and emotional struggles intensified. Then came another devastating experience. Sam had fallen in love with someone he had met through mutual friends. Eventually, the relationship ended, leaving him devastated. The combination of bullying, university pressures, social challenges and heartbreak became a major turning point in his mental health. Three hospitalisations Sam was eventually admitted to a mental health ward on three separate occasions while experiencing severe depression. His university studies were delayed. He became unemployed and spent significant periods of time at home, struggling to find motivation and direction. At his lowest point, Sam reached a moment where he felt that he could not continue living with the pain. Then something changed. He describes experiencing a powerful realisation that there had to be more to life. That moment became a turning point. Instead of continuing down the same path, Sam began making difficult changes. He eventually decided to leave university, despite being close to completing his degree. He distanced himself from relationships that he felt were toxic or unhealthy and began reconnecting with supportive people who encouraged him and lifted his spirits. Those decisions did not magically solve everything, but they became part of a new chapter. From sales to social skills coaching Sam eventually discovered that his background in sales gave him something he had once struggled with, an opportunity to communicate with people. Working as a real estate agent and in other sales roles challenged him to become more outgoing, develop stronger communication skills and build relationships with people from different backgrounds. He began to realise that the very skills he once struggled with could become his greatest strengths. Then, in 2017, another idea emerged. Sam felt intuitively that he should write a book about social skills. He originally thought it would take around a year. It took two and a half years. In 2019, he published “The Social Way,” a self-help book focused on improving social skills and helping people build meaningful friendships with people they genuinely resonate with. The book was more than a publication. For Sam, it was a message, a message to people who bully others about the consequences their actions can have, and a message to people who have experienced bullying, you do not have to face the world alone. Turning pain into purpose Sam's experience ultimately inspired him to pivot his career from real estate and sales into coaching. Today, through Connect with Confidence, he helps professionals, entrepreneurs and business owners develop confidence in their social skills, communication and relationships. He has trained more than 1,000 people, including executives, lawyers, accountants, teachers, banking professionals and information technology (IT) professionals. His work has also included collaboration with the New South Wales (NSW) Government, helping organisations improve workplace culture through ethical social skills and efforts to address workplace bullying. His message is simple, social skills should be used ethically, to connect, not manipulate, to build people up, not tear them down. A personal commitment to mental health Mental health advocacy remains deeply important to Sam. He supports organisations such as Beyond Blue and donates a portion of the profits from his coaching business towards supporting mental health initiatives. His commitment became even more personal when he lost a basketball friend to suicide. “When I heard the news, I was devastated,” Sam says. “He looked fine when I saw him. Sometimes you simply cannot know what someone is going through by looking at them.” That experience reinforced something Sam had already learned through his own journey. We cannot always see the battles that other people are fighting. Ask someone if they are okay In an increasingly connected digital world, Sam believes there is an important paradox. People have more ways than ever to communicate, yet many can still feel incredibly isolated. Cyberbullying, online negativity and social pressure can affect people deeply, particularly young people who are still developing their identity and sense of self. Sam encourages people to look beyond the surface. Ask a friend, a colleague, a family member or someone you haven't heard from in a while. Most importantly, genuinely listen to the answer. Sometimes a simple conversation can be the beginning of someone feeling less alone. A mission born from experience Sam's story has taken him from a shy young person struggling with confidence and bullying, through some of the darkest periods of his life, to becoming an advocate for connection and ethical social skills. He now sees his experiences not as something that defines him, but as something that helped shape his purpose. His mission and vision are simple, “To make the world a safer place to live in with ethical social skills, so the world can be a more connected place to live in.” For Sam, confidence is not about becoming the loudest person in the room. It is about having the courage to connect, surrounding yourself with people who genuinely support you and learning to communicate rather than suppressing what you feel. Sometimes, it is simply about having the courage to ask another person, “Are you okay?” About Sam Lee Sam Lee is a multi-award-winning social skills coach, certified life coach, Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) practitioner, published author, keynote speaker and founder of Connect with Confidence. He is the author of The Social Way and Connect with Confidence and has trained more than 1,000 professionals and business leaders in social skills, confidence and communication. His work focuses on helping people build stronger connections, communicate with confidence and develop ethical social skills that contribute to healthier personal and professional relationships. Mission is to make the world a safer place to live in with ethical social skills so the world can be a more connected place to live in.