Written by Anele Griessel, Occupational Therapist Anele Griessel is an expert occupational therapist, well known for sensory preferences, overwhelm, and how simple adjustments in daily activities can nurture the sensory system, reduce overwhelm, and build resilience. She is the author of the Sensory Journal, published in 2020. Have you ever walked into a room and felt your whole-body brace before you even knew why? Or missed your name being called three times because you were so deep in your own head that the sound simply didn't land? Both of these are your nervous system doing its job of noticing, or in some cases, not noticing. Whether it notices too much, too little, or just enough shapes far more than your senses. It shapes whether your body decides the world around you is safe. What is sensory registration? Sensory registration is the very first step in how your brain processes the world. Before you can think about a sound, a touch, a smell, or a feeling in your stomach, your nervous system has to register that it happened at all. This is different from paying attention to something on purpose. Registration is automatic and happens below conscious awareness, at the level of the brainstem and midbrain, long before the thinking parts of your brain get involved. Occupational therapy pioneer Dr. A. Jean Ayres was among the first to describe registration as a distinct step in sensory processing, separate from how the brain later modulates or responds to that input. In simple terms, registration answers the question, "did something happen?" before the brain even gets to "what should I do about it?" When registration works well, you notice the important things, a change in tone of voice, a full bladder, a hot stove, without being overwhelmed by the unimportant ones, like the hum of the fridge or the tag in your shirt. How your brain decides what's safe or unsafe Once something is registered, your brain doesn't just file it away neutrally. It compares it. Research on the hippocampus, one of the brain's key memory and processing structures, describes it as functioning like a comparator. It takes new sensory information and checks it against what is already stored, what is familiar, expected, and safe, and what is new, unexpected, or potentially threatening. A 2001 study on the hippocampus describes this comparator process as central to how the brain selects and registers which incoming information deserves further attention and action. It means safety isn't something you decide with logic first. Your body decides in milliseconds, based on whether incoming sensory information matches what it already recognizes as safe. If it doesn't match, your nervous system doesn't wait for permission. It acts. When registration goes wrong: Over and underresponsive patterns Not everyone registers sensory input the same way, and this isn't a character flaw or a matter of willpower. It's neurology. Sensory overresponsiveness happens when the nervous system registers input too easily and too intensely. A light tap on the shoulder feels like a shove. A crowded room feels like an assault of noise, movement, and smell all at once. The threshold for "this is too much" is set very low, so ordinary daily input keeps triggering a stress response. Sensory underresponsivity is the opposite pattern. The threshold for noticing input is set so high that a lot of important information simply doesn't register. Someone might not notice they're hungry until they're lightheaded, not notice they're overheated until they feel unwell, or miss social cues that other people pick up easily. This is often mistaken for laziness or inattentiveness, when in fact the brain genuinely isn't receiving the signal in time. Research backs up just how much these patterns matter for wellbeing. A 2025 study in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy examined sensory processing patterns in healthy adults and found that both low registration and sensory sensitivity were significant predictors of depression, anxiety, and stress. In other words, how your nervous system notices the world isn't a minor quirk. It has a measurable relationship with your mental health. Fight, flight, and fawn: What happens when the brain flags "unsafe" When the brain's comparator system flags something as unfamiliar, too intense, or potentially threatening, it doesn't pause to think it over. It hands the situation to the body's survival circuitry, and one of a few automatic responses takes over. Fight shows up as irritability, snapping at people, clenched jaw, an urge to argue or control the situation. Flight shows up as restlessness, wanting to leave the room, avoidance, procrastination, or a racing mind that can't settle. Fawn shows up as people pleasing, over-apologizing, agreeing with things you don't actually agree with, and prioritizing everyone else's comfort over your own just to make the perceived threat go away. None of these are conscious choices in the moment. They happen when the nervous system's noticing system has already decided, correctly or not, that something is unsafe. This is why logic and willpower rarely calm someone down in the middle of a fight, flight, or fawn response. The body needs to be shown safety through the senses before the mind can catch up. Five ways to increase noticing and strengthen sensory registration The encouraging part is that registration is trainable. You can help your nervous system get better at noticing the right things, at the right intensity, so it has more accurate information to work with before it decides whether to sound the alarm. Practice a slow body scan, not a fast one: Set a timer for two minutes and move your attention slowly through your body: feet, legs, stomach, hands, shoulders, jaw. Don't try to relax anything. Just notice what's there. This trains the brain to register internal sensations before they build up to an overwhelming or missed level, improving registration accuracy over time. Add texture and temperature to your day on purpose: Under-responsive systems often benefit from intentionally rich sensory input: a cold glass of water first thing in the morning, textured food, a firm hug, walking barefoot on grass. These give the nervous system clear, strong signals to register, which helps close the gap between "something happened" and "I noticed it happened." Name what you notice out loud, even briefly: Saying "my shoulders are tight" or "that sound startled me" out loud, even to yourself, strengthens the neural pathway between registration and awareness. Over time, this makes it easier to catch sensory input earlier, before it has built into a full stress response. Use orienting to bring your senses into the present room: Pause and name five things you can see, four you can hear, three you can physically feel. This simple grounding exercise directly engages the sensory registration system and gives the brain fresh, accurate, present-moment information to compare against, rather than letting it run on outdated or incomplete input. Build in regular sensory check-ins, not just crisis check-ins: Most people only check in with their body once something already feels wrong. Instead, build small check-ins into transitions you already have, before a meeting, before eating, before bed. Ask simply, "What am I noticing right now?" This regular practice trains the nervous system to register input consistently, rather than only in moments of overload. Helping your nervous system feel safe again Sensory registration might sound like a small, technical piece of how the brain works, but it's the foundation everything else is built on. Before you can regulate an emotion, calm a fight, flight, or fawn response, or feel genuinely safe in your body, your nervous system first has to notice accurately. Strengthening that noticing isn't about trying harder. It's about practicing, gently and consistently, so your brain has better information to work with. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Anele Griessel Anele Griessel, Occupational Therapist Anele Griessel is a leading occupational therapist specialising in sensory integration and overwhelm. As the author of the Sensory Journal, Anele distills more than two decades of knowledge and experience into actionable steps to help reduce overwhelm, build resilience, and enable individuals to thrive personally, with others, at work, and at home. She is the owner of Estemoa-OT. Her mission: Joy is a choice.

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. Every youth-serving professional has had the moment: a teen says something sharp, dismissive, or alarming, and your reaction is out of your mouth before your brain has caught up. Afterward, you replay it and cringe because you know you could have handled it differently. You just didn't have the map on autopilot in that second. That gap between the moment something happens and the moment we respond is where most of the disconnection in youth work actually lives. It's not a knowledge gap. Most professionals already know, intellectually, that curiosity and connection work better than control. The gap happens when, in the heat of the moment, what you do gets out of order. PCOS is that map. Four moves, in sequence, that turn a reactive moment into a responsive one that brings connection. Pause Before anything else, a breath, a half-second of nothing, naming out loud that you need a pause. This is the move most professionals skip because it feels like doing nothing while everything in you wants to problem-solve, correct, or react immediately. But the pause is where reacting becomes responding. It's the difference between meeting a teen's dysregulation with your own dysregulation or meeting it with steadiness. Connect Before you address the behavior, the comment, the eye-roll, connect to the person underneath it. This can be as small as naming what you notice, "That sounded like it came from somewhere." Connection isn't agreement. It's letting the teen know you're still in the room with them, not just managing them. Connection always before correction. Open This is where curiosity replaces certainty. Instead of assuming you know why a teen did or said something, you open a door, "What would feel safe right now?" "That emotion feels big, can you tell me what is happening to you right now?" Many professionals think they're already doing this, but under time pressure, what often comes out are questions that are really statements in disguise. "Why would you say that?" isn't open. It's a verdict wearing a question mark. Secure The last move is what makes the first three stick. Secure the relationship, not just the moment. That might mean a follow-up check-in, a boundary named clearly and kindly, or simply closing the interaction in a way that leaves the door open rather than slamming it. Teens remember how an interaction ends more than how it started. Here's what makes PCOS different from other classroom-management or counseling frameworks. It isn't a script. It's a sequence you can run in three seconds or three minutes, in a hallway or a therapy office, with a group of six or a caseload of sixty. The moves stay the same. Only the pace changes. Most professionals already do pieces of this instinctively. PCOS just gives you the sequence so you can do it fully even on the hard days, the ones where a teen needs you to respond, not react, and you have exactly one chance to get it right. The sequence also does something else worth noticing. It protects you, not just the teen. Pausing before reacting reduces your own stress response in the moment. Connecting before correcting keeps you from escalating a situation you'll have to de-escalate later anyway. Securing the relationship at the end means you're not walking into your next interaction with that same teen still carrying tension from the last one. PCOS isn't only a tool for teens. It's a tool for the professional's own sustainability across a long day, a long caseload, a long career. PCOS is the foundation of Connection Compass, my coaching and workshop program for parents and professionals. If you want your team to run this framework together, or want it built into your own instincts, sign-ups for this round are now open until Sept 11, 2026. 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.

Finding the best renters insurance in 2026 means looking beyond the lowest premium and weighing coverage, claims experience, and customer satisfaction. This comparison breaks down five leading insurers to help renters find the right balance of affordability, protection, and service. Comparing renters insurers on price, coverage, and customer sentiment for 2026 Picking the best renters insurance comes down to price, coverage, and customer sentiment. Price is your quote, coverage dictates payout, and sentiment predicts claim experience. This comparison scores five insurers using NerdWallet rate analysis, NAIC complaint records, and J.D. Power satisfaction data. While the average rate hovers around $151 annually ($13 monthly), coverage quality and service are the real differentiators. Lemonade leads for those who want app-based, quick claims, while the remaining four insurers also offer distinct strengths. Summary: The best renters insurance companies at a glance Company Editor rating Our expert take Average monthly cost Lemonade 4.0/5 Fastest app-based claims About $10 (about $118 a year) Erie 4.7/5 Strong service, regional reach About $12 ($142 a year) Auto-Owners 4.5/5 Discount-friendly, agent-sold About $11 ($132 a year) Amica 5.0/5 Top service record - Travelers 4.6/5 Long-established, flexible add-ons About $13 ($155 a year) Rate figures reflect NerdWallet's renters insurance analysis. Your own quote will move with where you live and how much protection you buy. The best renters insurance companies for 2026 Each entry below carries an editor rating out of 5 stars plus a Consumer sentiment read grounded in the complaint and satisfaction records on file. 1. Lemonade Editor rating: 4.0/5 ★★★★☆ Average annual cost: About $118 a year, from $5 a month (NerdWallet analysis) Our expert take: Lemonade leads for renters who prioritize claims experience. Policies provide worldwide coverage for possessions, liability protection, and loss-of-use benefits for unexpected hotel or food costs during repairs. For high-value items, "Extra Coverage" offers $0 deductible protection for jewelry or cameras, applicable worldwide. Pricing is competitive, starting at $5 monthly, with an average of $118 annually. Bundling auto or pet policies saves up to 10%, with an extra 5% off for annual payments. As a Certified B Corp, Lemonade’s Giveback program has donated over $12 million since 2017 to causes like clean water and housing. Renters coverage is available in most states. The app allows for a ninety-second signup and instant AI-led claim approval. Pros: Buy in about ninety seconds and file in the app, where clean claims clear in seconds Extra Coverage with no deductible for scheduled valuables Low starting price at $5 a month, with up-to-10% bundle and up-to-5% annual-pay discounts Giveback ties the policy to a nonprofit you select at signup Cons: A number of states can't buy it yet Built around the app, so renters hoping to talk to an agent across a desk won't get that here 2. Erie Editor rating: 4.7/5 ★★★★½ Average annual cost: $142 a year (NerdWallet analysis) Complaint level: Low Our expert take: Erie earns strong marks for coverage and service across a compact footprint. It posted a low complaint rate and finished above the pack among the home insurers J.D. Power scored for 2025, a rare double for a mid-size carrier. Renters who want a human relationship will find one here, since Erie sells through independent agents who quote and service the policy in person. Average premiums run about $142 per year, within a few dollars of the national number. Pros: Above-average J.D. Power 2025 satisfaction and few regulator complaints Coverage and service quality that punch above the price Cons: No online quotes or online claim filing, so you work through an agent for everything Erie sells in a narrow set of states, so many renters can't buy it 3. Auto-owners Editor rating: 4.5/5 ★★★★½ Average annual cost: $132 a year (aggregated data) Our expert take: Auto-Owners rewards renters who want deep discounts and a local agent to assemble them. Renters Plus, its optional add-on bundle, covers spoiled groceries after a power outage plus water backup of sewers or drains, and you can upgrade belongings to replacement cost. Wherever you go, the policy's property and liability protection goes too. One caveat on the numbers: the 4.5 stars and the $132 average trace back to pooled rate data instead of a dedicated review, so weigh them with that in mind. Pros: Renters Plus add-ons for water backup and food spoilage, plus a replacement-cost upgrade Wide discount menu, including multi-policy savings and protective-device discounts Cons: Sells through agents alone, with no way to quote or buy on the web Limited availability, and the numbers here come from pooled data rather than a dedicated review 4. Amica Editor rating: 5.0/5 ★★★★★ Complaint level: Very low Our expert take: Amica sets the service bar in this group. It draws far fewer complaints than regulators expect for its size, and a live person answers by phone or chat when something goes wrong. Choose the replacement-cost option and a payout buys new items rather than depreciated ones. Loyal customers can bank as much as $500 in credit against an Amica home policy down the road, a useful perk if buying is in your plans. Pros: Far fewer complaints than expected for its size As much as $500 credited against a later Amica home policy Cons: Alaska and Hawaii sit outside its footprint You need a custom quote to compare price, since the company shares no average rate 5. Travelers Editor rating: 4.6/5 ★★★★½ Average annual cost: $155 a year (NerdWallet analysis) Complaint level: Low Our expert take: Travelers pairs long-standing financial strength with a policy you can shape. Discounts run deep, and coverage can stretch to improvements you've made to the rental, a detail many insurers skip. Regulators log fewer complaints about Travelers than a company this large would suggest, and the website makes filing a claim clear. Expect premiums around $155 annually, a touch past the national figure. Pros: Broad discount menu and coverage for renter-funded upgrades Below-expected complaint volume and a clear claims website Cons: Posts below-average satisfaction in the 2025 edition of the J.D. Power home study Costs more than the typical policy at $155 a year How we rated these renters insurers These editor ratings draw on published data rather than opinion. We leaned on NerdWallet's renters insurance rate analysis and NAIC complaint records, plus the 2025 J.D. Power home insurance satisfaction study, where a carrier appears. One honesty note applies: the Auto-Owners figures trace back to pooled data, so give them extra scrutiny. The best renters insurance company for you in 2026 The best insurance company for renters insurance depends on which of the three factors you weigh hardest. Amica leads on service reputation. For most renters who want low cost and a claim they can file and settle from a phone, Lemonade takes the top spot. Pricing starts at $5 monthly, and its AI can green-light a clean claim in seconds, and the Giveback program comes on top. Get quotes at the same coverage level from two or three names here, and pick the policy you'd trust on the worst day of your lease. Choosing a renters insurer How do I choose the best renters insurance company? Rank price, coverage, and service by priority. If price leads, compare quotes and look for bundle discounts. If service matters, check regulator complaint rates and J.D. Power scores. For app-based claims, consider carriers like Lemonade for fast setup and instant approval. Always match the policy to your risk and confirm availability in your state. Do bundling discounts lower a renters premium? Often, yes. Many insurers discount renters policies when you bundle with auto insurance, and some offer savings for annual payments. Savings vary, so treat advertised discounts as estimates. Compare the bundled total against buying policies separately, as a bundle isn't always the cheapest option overall. What affects the price of renters insurance? Your ZIP code is a major factor due to local theft and weather risk. Coverage limits also matter: higher limits raise the premium, while higher deductibles lower it. Some states allow insurers to use your claims history or credit score. Add-ons, like scheduled jewelry coverage, will also increase your overall cost.

Linda Ellard’s nursing career has been shaped by a simple pattern: learn what is in front of you, ask deeper questions, and use that knowledge to improve the next decision. Since beginning her nursing career in Tulsa in 2009, Ellard has moved through several demanding areas of healthcare. She has worked in burn care, hospital medicine, infectious disease, chronic pain management, addiction treatment, and wound care. Each step expanded what she could bring to the next role. Today, as an APRN-CNS, Ellard’s career reflects the value of broad clinical experience paired with focused expertise. Her path also shows how patience, curiosity, and timely action can turn everyday lessons into lasting professional principles. How did Linda Ellard begin her nursing career? Ellard grew up in Michigan and studied at Wayne State University and a community college before continuing her nursing education in Tulsa. She earned both her BSN and MSN from the University of Oklahoma in Tulsa. Her professional nursing career began in Tulsa in 2009. One of her formative roles was working as a burn nurse for roughly three years. Burn care became an important part of her clinical development because it introduced her to complex wounds and the challenges surrounding infection. Ellard enjoyed wound care, but she wanted to understand what was happening beneath the surface. She became increasingly interested in the organisms involved in infections, how the infectious process worked, and how treatment decisions addressed the underlying problem. That curiosity helped point her toward infectious disease. How burn nursing led to infectious disease Ellard advanced to APRN practice by 2017. Instead of moving immediately into a narrow specialty, she began her advanced practice career as a hospitalist. That experience gave her a much broader view of medicine. Working with patients ranging from general medical cases to acute situations helped Ellard strengthen her clinical knowledge. It also placed her in regular contact with specialists from different areas. That exposure became a major part of her development. “I had little to no experience in some areas, but I overcame that with patience and determination,” Ellard said. The hospitalist role reinforced the idea that strong healthcare depends on knowing both what you can manage and when another clinician needs to become involved. By 2019, Ellard had moved into infectious disease practice. She has since worked with five different infectious disease attending providers, gaining exposure to different perspectives and approaches. What does Linda Ellard specialize in? Ellard’s work has expanded beyond one area of medicine. Since 2019, she has worked in infectious disease as well as chronic pain management and addiction treatment. From 2024 to 2026, she also worked in wound care, returning professionally to an area that had interested her since her burn nursing years. The combination gives her a wide clinical perspective. Infectious disease requires an understanding of organisms and treatment. Wound care requires close observation and ongoing assessment. Chronic pain and addiction treatment bring their own complex clinical needs. Across those settings, Ellard identifies two qualities as especially important. “Patience and compassion for patients,” she said. For Ellard, those qualities are not substitutes for clinical judgment. They support it. Listening carefully, following changes, communicating with colleagues, and knowing when to seek additional expertise can all affect what happens next. The clinical lesson that changed her approach One experience had a lasting impact on how Ellard thinks about responsibility and follow-up. While on call one night, she asked to be contacted when a patient’s laboratory results became available. The expected call did not come. By the following day, the patient required surgery. Ellard took the experience seriously. “I learned to never delay care again and consult other specialists while waiting for lab results,” she said. The lesson was practical rather than abstract. Waiting for one piece of information should not prevent a clinician from considering other appropriate steps when a situation may require attention. That experience helped shape the way Ellard approaches communication, follow-up, and specialist involvement today. How Linda Ellard approaches professional growth Ellard does not describe professional growth as one dramatic breakthrough. Her approach is much more structured. “I try to plan out my goals in a realistic manner, then try to achieve each goal individually,” she said. Education has remained part of that process. Ellard made the dean’s honor roll during much of her college career. In 2019, she also began a Doctor of Nursing Practice program at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. She has not completed the degree and has approximately a year and a half remaining. Her existing career, however, already reflects years of advanced clinical development. She also sees feedback as an important tool. “Feedback from peers and setting my own standards” help her continue improving, she said, along with “staying determined to achieve my goals.” That willingness to learn from other professionals is especially relevant in healthcare, where complex cases often require collaboration. What has Linda Ellard learned from her career? Ellard’s career has moved from broad nursing experience toward advanced practice and specialized clinical work. Yet the ideas guiding that progression remain straightforward. Be patient. Stay curious. Ask for input. Follow through. Do not delay necessary action. She also places value on perspective. “Staying humble and grateful for what I already have and how far I have come since graduating college” helps keep her grounded, Ellard said. Her career shows that bringing big ideas to life does not always mean launching a company or inventing a new product. In healthcare, it can mean turning lessons into better habits, building expertise one role at a time, and applying what you learn when the next difficult decision arrives.

Gita Sankano grew up in the Bronx after being born in Harlem. Nobody in her family had attended college before her. That meant no roadmap, no inherited wisdom about applications or financial aid, and no playbook for navigating the academic world that lay ahead. From the Bronx to Big Law: Charting a course no one else had taken She enrolled at CUNY John Jay College, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science and later a Master's degree in Public Administration. While in graduate school, Sankano worked as an auditor at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority headquarters on Wall Street. The combination of public administration coursework and hands-on exposure to large municipal systems gave her a view into how cities function, where resources flow, and how policy decisions shape daily life for millions of people. Law school came next. Sankano attended the University of Maryland School of Law, graduating cum laude in the top 20 percent of her class. She served as Associate Symposium Editor for the Business & Technology Law Journal and Staff Editor for The Authority National Affordable Housing Law Digest. She won first place in the Paul Cardish Writing Competition and received the Dean's Fellow scholarship for academic performance. Building expertise in housing finance and complex transactions After law school, Sankano clerked for the Honorable Michael W. Reed at the Court of Special Appeals in Maryland. The clerkship offered an inside look at appellate reasoning and judicial decision-making, skills that would prove useful in the transactional work that followed. She then joined a large law firm, where she spent about five years counseling mortgage banking clients on the origination, sale, and servicing of loan transactions sold to secondary market investors. Much of her work centered on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac programs, representing lenders in Fannie Mae's Delegated Underwriting and Servicing product line and Freddie Mac's Capital Markets Execution program. Sankano also coordinated closings across the United States for lenders financing multifamily housing projects and healthcare facilities under various FHA insurance programs. These included Sections 220, 221(d)(4), 223(a)(7), 223(f), 232, and 241(a) of the National Housing Act. Many of the deals involved complex layered structures: Low Income Housing Tax Credits, Historic Tax Credits, taxable and tax-exempt bonds, secondary financing from state and local sources, bridge loans, Section 8 contracts, Section 202 and Section 236 Use Agreements, and mezzanine financing. The work required precision. Each financing layer came with its own compliance requirements, regulatory constraints, and stakeholder expectations. Missing a detail or miscalculating a timing requirement could unravel months of negotiation. Shifting focus to public service and community impact Today, Sankano represents the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development in complex affordable housing finance transactions. She works on deals involving multi-layered financing, Low Income Housing Tax Credits, tax-exempt bonds, subordinate soft debt, and property acquisitions and dispositions. She also advises the agency on legal issues related to affordable housing policies, programs, and initiatives, and reviews and drafts legal documents for the range of affordable and community development programs the department administers. The shift from private practice to public service marked a change in perspective. Instead of representing lenders and private clients, Sankano now works on behalf of a city agency tasked with expanding housing options for residents who need them most. The technical skills remain the same. The mission is different. What believing in yourself actually means in practice Sankano has spoken about the role of belief in shaping outcomes. For her, it means understanding that you have control over your destiny, even when the path is not yet clear. Being the first in her family to attend college meant there was no template to follow. She found mentors who helped her navigate the process. Her mother has been a consistent influence. Sankano describes her as a hard-working woman who never gives up and keeps moving forward. That persistence, passed down, became part of how Sankano approached her own education and career. Success, in her view, is not only about individual achievement. It is about giving back to the community and sharing whatever knowledge you have with young people coming up behind you. Sankano was a keynote speaker at the Smiling Coast Women Conference, where she addressed themes of professional growth and resilience. Bringing big ideas to life through structure and persistence Sankano's career reflects a series of deliberate choices built on a foundation that was anything but assured. She moved from auditing municipal budgets to analyzing complex real estate transactions, from private firm work to public agency counsel. Each step required learning a new set of rules, building new relationships, and adapting to new expectations. The big idea she has brought to life is less about a single transaction or a headline deal and more about proving that someone without a family legacy in higher education or law can build that legacy themselves. She has done that through focus, mentorship, and a willingness to take on work that demands both technical skill and a broader sense of purpose.

Written by Taiye Aluko, Relationship Coach Taiye Aluko helps individuals and couples find purpose in life and happiness in marriage. An excellent encourager, she is passionate about seeing people unlock their personal power and attain the best version of themselves. Lately, I have been sitting with a question I don't have a tidy answer for. What actually makes someone teachable? Not in the sense of being agreeable or easy to manage, but in the deeper sense of staying open enough to keep growing, especially in the relationships that matter most. I did not arrive at this question from a theory. I arrived at it by noticing how differently it feels to be near different kinds of people. Some conversations leave me tight. Not because the other person was loud or unkind. Some of them were gentle, even soft-spoken. But underneath the exchange was a subtle conviction that they already knew what they needed to know. Any new information felt like a threat to be managed rather than a gift to be received. I would leave those conversations carrying something heavier than I walked in with. Some conversations leave me loose. Someone hears something hard about themselves and says, "I hadn't thought of it that way." No defensiveness. No scrambling to explain why the observation was wrong. Just a pause, and then an opening. I leave those conversations lighter, almost like I have exhaled something I did not know I was holding. I keep coming back to that contrast. Tightness on one side. Relief on the other. I am wondering if that contrast is really what teachability comes down to. As a marriage counsellor, I see this contrast play out in almost every session, though rarely in the clean way I just described. More often, both people are bracing. They walk in already defending, already anticipating what is about to be said about them, both shoulders up before a word is spoken. In those cases, counselling is not about identifying who is right. It is about slowly showing each of them what it might feel like to lower the armour first and letting them discover that the room does not fall apart when they do. It is not about intelligence Here is what surprised me most as I sat with this. The people who struggle most with being teachable are often not the ones who know the least. They are often the ones who have been right before. Competence can quietly become armour. When you have solved problems, built a career, held a marriage together for years, it becomes tempting to trust your own conclusions more than the moment in front of you. So the tightness is not always loud arrogance. More often it looks like silent confidence. A nod that says, "I hear you," while nothing you say is actually being let in. That version is harder to spot in ourselves, because it does not feel like pride. It feels like confidence. It feels like having already done the work. But confidence without curiosity calcifies into something rigid. Rigid things do not bend. They break. I think of the couples I have worked with over the years where one spouse says some version of, "I have been doing this longer than you. I know how this works." Sometimes that is even true. But the moment expertise stops making room for new information, it stops serving the relationship and starts protecting an image. The person is no longer in the room with their spouse. They are defending a version of themselves they built a long time ago. Curiosity is a daily choice I used to think of curiosity as something people either had or didn't. A personality trait, like being outgoing or careful with money. I no longer believe that. Curiosity is closer to a decision made each day anew, sometimes each hour. It is the choice to ask, even when I already have an answer, "What am I not seeing here?" In marriage, this shows up in small, ordinary moments. My spouse says something that stings, and I have a choice at that moment. I can explain why it should not have stung. Or I can get curious about why it did. One of those closes the conversation. The other opens it. After more than two decades of marriage, I have learned that remaining curious about the person I married is its own form of respect. People do not stay still. Neither do I. The moment I decide I already know someone completely is the moment I stop actually seeing them. I have watched this play out with couples who have been together thirty or forty years, long enough that you would think all the surprises had run out. Yet the ones who are still discovering each other, still asking, "Who are you becoming?" are almost always the ones who describe their marriage as alive rather than settled. Curiosity, it turns out, does not run out with time. It only runs out when we stop offering it. The fear underneath the armour If tightness is not really about arrogance, then what is it about? I have come to believe it is almost always about fear. Not fear of the other person, but concern about what being wrong might mean about us. Somewhere along the way, many of us absorbed the idea that not knowing was dangerous. That admitting a gap in our knowledge made us smaller, or less capable, or less safe in the eyes of the people we needed to keep loving us. So we built a kind of certainty that had less to do with actually being right and more to do with never being caught not knowing. I say this with compassion, because I recognise it in myself. There have been seasons in my own marriage where being corrected felt like being diminished, and I met that feeling with defensiveness instead of curiosity. It took time, and no small amount of humility, to realise that the fear underneath my tightness wasn't really about the disagreement in front of me. It was about an old story I was carrying, one that said if I am wrong about this, I might be wrong about more than I can bear to look at. Naming that fear does not make it disappear. But it does make it easier to recognise in the moment, and recognising it is often the first step toward loosening its grip. Where the tightness comes from I do not think unteachability starts as arrogance. I think it starts as protection. Somewhere along the way, we learned that being wrong was dangerous. That not knowing made us small, or unworthy, or vulnerable in ways we could not afford. So we built a kind of armour. Certainty became safety. For a while, that armour works. But past a certain point, it stops protecting and starts isolating. The very thing meant to keep us safe becomes what keeps people at a distance. Tight shoulders. Guarded conversations. A slow loneliness that certainty was never supposed to bring. Relief, by contrast, costs something up front. It asks us to lower the armour before we know how the other person will respond. But what I have noticed, both in my own marriage and in the couples I sit with, is that relief tends to be contagious. When one person softens enough to say, "Tell me more," the other person's shoulders come down too. What teachability is not I will be careful here, because I don't want to leave the impression that being teachable means agreeing with everything, accepting every criticism as truth, or losing your sense of self to stay open. That is not teachability. That is closer to self-erasure, and it carries its own kind of damage. A teachable person can still say, "I hear you, and I do not agree." What makes them teachable is not that they bend to every opinion. It is that they remain willing to sit with the possibility that they might not have the full picture, even while holding their own ground. Teachability and conviction are not opposites. The healthiest people I know hold both at once, a settled sense of who they are alongside a genuine willingness to keep learning who they might become. The question worth sitting with I am not going to end this with a list of ways to become more teachable. That would be its own kind of lecture, and lectures rarely change anyone. Instead, I want to leave you with the question I keep asking myself. Where, right now, am I bracing instead of breathing? What would happen if, just once, I let the breath out before I had all the answers? Teachability, I am learning, is not a trait you either have or lack. It is a posture you keep choosing, moment to moment, especially in the relationships that matter most. Every time you choose it, something in the room, and in you, gets to loosen. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Taiye Aluko Taiye Aluko, Relationship Coach Taiye Aluko is your guide to personal and professional transformation. With over two decades of counselling experience, she understands that our personal and professional lives are deeply intertwined. Taiye helps individuals navigate these interconnected spheres, empowering them to achieve clarity, fulfillment, and lasting success.

Written by Claudia Cubbage, Headteacher and Career Change Coach Claudia Cubbage is known for her work in leadership and career development, particularly within education. She is the founder of RenewEd Ltd and is currently developing the RenewEd book series, drawing on over 25 years of school leadership experience. The Headteacher Compass offers a practical way to examine whether leadership can remain effective over time. Its four connected dimensions, Balance, Clarity, Impact and Renewal, move the conversation from sustaining schools to sustaining the people who lead them. Schools invest enormous amounts of time discussing sustainability. These conversations matter because schools are expected to achieve more than ever before while responding to increasingly complex challenges. Yet, for all the conversations about sustainable schools, we rarely stop to ask whether the people expected to sustain them are themselves being sustained. Over time, I found myself wondering whether we had been asking the wrong question. After ten years as a secondary headteacher, I had seen schools facing remarkably similar circumstances produce very different outcomes. Some continued to improve despite significant challenges. Others, with equally committed staff and carefully considered plans, gradually lost momentum. It wasn’t always obvious why. It wasn’t until I stepped back that I realised the difference rarely lay within the systems themselves. It lay within the capacity of the people leading them. That observation has stayed with me ever since. Today, through my work as a headteacher coach, executive coach and leadership coach, I continue to see the same pattern emerge across schools of every phase and in every context. The schools that remain steady over time are not necessarily those with the fewest challenges. They are often those led by headteachers who have retained the capacity to think clearly, make proportionate decisions and sustain themselves through complexity. This framework builds on my earlier Brainz article, Why sustainable schools depend on sustained headteachers, but asks a different question, what conditions allow a headteacher to retain the capacity to lead well? That distinction also matters because burnout is an organisational responsibility, not a personal failure, and sustainable leadership cannot be reduced to individual resilience. That led me to a different question. Not, "How do we build sustainable schools?" But rather, "What makes leadership itself sustainable?" Looking beyond systems We analyse attendance patterns, behaviour trends, staff wellbeing, curriculum sequencing, safeguarding culture and pupil outcomes with increasing precision. Those conversations are essential. However, they all have one thing in common. They assume there will always be leadership capacity available to hold everything together. That assumption deserves greater attention because leadership capacity is not limitless. Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025 reports that 86% of senior leaders feel stressed and 81% say they have too much to do and not enough time. Those figures do not prove that every leader is depleted, but they make it unsafe to treat leadership capacity as an unlimited organisational resource. Every day, headteachers carry an extraordinary level of cognitive responsibility. Many of these responsibilities cannot simply be delegated. They remain with the headteacher because, ultimately, accountability remains with the headteacher too. Leadership rarely becomes unsustainable because of one particularly difficult week. Most headteachers do not suddenly lose confidence in their leadership. They gradually lose the space to think as clearly as they once did. Without recognising it, strategic conversations become operational conversations. Long-term planning becomes immediate problem-solving. The quality of leadership gradually changes because the conditions in which leaders are expected to think have changed. This is not a capability issue. It is a capacity issue. The pattern I kept seeing Looking back across my own headship and now through my work coaching school leaders from different contexts, phases and trusts, I have become increasingly convinced that sustainable leadership depends on something that receives surprisingly little attention, protected thinking space. The greatest gift leaders can give themselves is not more hours in the day, but moments to think before they are required to act. Although every coaching conversation was different, the themes were remarkably consistent. Some leaders were trying to regain balance after prolonged periods of sustained pressure. Others were seeking greater clarity because the role’s complexity had begun to cloud their thinking. Some were questioning where they could have the greatest impact rather than simply working harder. Others were trying to rediscover the sense of purpose and energy they once brought to leadership. The circumstances varied. The underlying themes did not. Those observations eventually became the foundation of what I now call the Headteacher Compass. Not another accountability framework. Not another school improvement model. Not another leadership initiative. Instead, it became a practical way of thinking about what enables headteachers to remain effective, intentional and sustainable throughout one of the most demanding professional roles in public service. The Compass is built around four interconnected dimensions. I chose the word Compass deliberately. A map assumes certainty, a compass assumes uncertainty. It helps us keep our bearings while deciding the best way forward. The four dimensions are Balance, Clarity, Impact and Renewal. Individually, each matters. Together, they create the conditions in which sustainable leadership becomes possible. Balance is about more than workload When people hear the word “balance,” they often think about reducing their hours or achieving a better work-life balance. Leadership has always required commitment, and I do not believe sustainable leadership is achieved simply by asking leaders to work less. Instead, balance is about maintaining equilibrium while leading through complexity. It is knowing when to step into operational detail and when to remain focused on strategic direction. It is recognising that every problem deserves attention, but not every problem requires an immediate reaction. Schools naturally take their emotional cues from leadership. When leaders become reactive, organisations often become reactive. When leaders remain calm, proportionate and intentional, that approach gradually shapes the wider culture. Balance, therefore, becomes far more than a personal well-being issue. It becomes a leadership responsibility. Clarity begins with creating space to think If balance provides stability, clarity provides direction. Headteachers rarely struggle because they lack ideas. More often than not, they are trying to think strategically while being pulled relentlessly towards operational demands. This is why protected thinking space has become such a central part of my coaching practice. Not because leaders need more time, as every headteacher would like more time, but because they need something more valuable, permission to step back from constant operational thinking long enough to regain perspective. Impact is measured long before outcomes improve Schools quite rightly measure impact through attendance, behaviour, attainment, destinations and inspection outcomes. These indicators matter. They tell us whether our decisions are making a difference. However, they all have one thing in common. They are measures of organisational performance, not measures of leadership itself. One of the hardest disciplines in headship is recognising which decisions genuinely require the headteacher’s attention and which are better strengthened through the leadership of others. Yet sustainable leadership is not about solving every problem personally. It is about creating the conditions in which others can solve problems confidently themselves. That requires trust and clarity of vision. Perhaps one of the most significant transitions in headship is moving from being the person who provides answers to becoming the person who develops others’ capacity to find their own. That shift changes everything. Schools become less dependent on a single individual. Leadership becomes distributed with purpose rather than by necessity. This is where impact becomes sustainable, not because the headteacher is doing more, but because the organisation is becoming stronger. That distinction matters. The most effective leaders are rarely remembered for solving every problem themselves. They are remembered for creating schools where good decisions continued to be made, even when they were not in the room. For me, that is one of the clearest indicators of sustainable leadership. It is measured not by how indispensable the headteacher becomes, but by how capable the organisation becomes because of their leadership. Renewal is not about recovery Of the four dimensions of the Headteacher Compass, renewal is probably the one most easily misunderstood. Recovery restores what has already been lost. Renewal protects what matters before it is lost. Renewal is intentional. It is the deliberate process of protecting leadership capacity before it erodes. This is why renewal deserves far more attention than it often receives, because many school leaders become exceptionally skilled at continuing despite increasing pressure. People need space to reconnect with themselves before they can make good decisions about what comes next. That is why renewal should not happen only after exhaustion. It should become part of leadership itself. Just as schools regularly review improvement priorities, leaders also need opportunities to reflect on their own direction, energy and purpose. Not because they are struggling, but because they are leading. Perhaps this is where headteacher coaching makes its greatest contribution, not because coaching provides the answers, but because it creates the conditions for leaders to step back from the relentless pace of the role and ask questions they rarely have time to consider. What makes leadership sustainable? When I first began thinking about sustainable schools, I assumed the answer lay in better systems. Years later, I no longer believe sustainability begins there. Systems, structures, strategy and culture all matter, but they all depend upon something that receives far less attention, the capacity of the person expected to bring those systems to life. That is why I developed the Headteacher Compass, not as another leadership model or another accountability framework, but as a practical way of helping school leaders reflect on the four conditions that, in my experience, underpin sustainable leadership. Balance helps leaders remain steady through complexity. Clarity enables them to think intentionally rather than reactively. Impact helps them focus energy where only the headteacher can make the greatest difference. Renewal protects leadership capacity before it erodes. These four dimensions are deeply connected. When they are intentionally nurtured, leaders are better able to navigate complexity without losing perspective, purpose or effectiveness. The Headteacher Compass is not intended to provide another checklist or leadership initiative. It is an invitation to pause, reflect and think. Sustainable leadership is not created by working harder. Nor is it created by simply becoming more resilient. It is created when leaders deliberately invest in the conditions that enable them to lead well over time. That is why I believe sustainable schools begin with sustainable headteachers. It is also why the Headteacher Compass sits at the heart of my work as a headteacher coach, school leadership coach and founder of RenewEd Ltd, and why it became the foundation of my book, RenewEd Leadership: How Coaching Transforms Headteachers and Schools. Before we ask how to sustain our schools, we should first ask how we sustain the people entrusted to lead them. Sustainable leadership is not simply good for headteachers. It is fundamental to the future of every school they lead. To explore how the Headteacher Compass could support your leadership, book a confidential coaching conversation with RenewEd Ltd. Visit here to find out more. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Claudia Cubbage Claudia Cubbage, Headteacher and Career Change Coach Claudia Cubbage is a UK-based career change coach and headteacher coach specializing in sustainable leadership and purposeful transitions. After a decade as a headteacher and 30 years in education, including 25 years in senior leadership roles, she brings deep, practical insight into the realities of leadership. She supports headteachers and school leaders to lead effectively while balancing the demands of complex roles, alongside professionals from outside education navigating career change. She is the founder of RenewEd Ltd and the creator of the Compass framework, which underpins RenewEd Leadership coaching. Her work focuses on helping people lead and work in ways that are sustainable, values-led, and confidence-building.

Written by Char Scheuermann, Irlen Diagnostician Char was first introduced to Irlen Syndrome when her niece was diagnosed in 2015. As Irlen Syndrome is hereditary, two more nieces and a nephew were also diagnosed. Her second child, Daniel, was diagnosed in 2021, and her oldest, Anton, in 2022. That's when she decided to pursue becoming an Irlen Screener and later a Diagnostician. Someone repeatedly stops reading, loses their place, becomes distracted, and struggles to complete visually demanding tasks. Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may seem like an obvious explanation. But what if the task itself is visually uncomfortable? Difficulty concentrating, avoiding reading, losing one's place, and becoming distracted during visually demanding tasks can be associated with ADHD. But similar behaviors may also occur when someone is experiencing visual processing difficulties associated with Irlen Syndrome. Understanding where these symptoms overlap may help us ask a better question, not simply, “Why aren't you paying attention?” but, “What is making it difficult for you to pay attention?” When attention difficulties may have another contributor ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by persistent patterns of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interfere with functioning or development. Irlen Syndrome is different. It involves difficulty processing certain visual information and can be associated with symptoms such as light sensitivity, visual fatigue, headaches, discomfort when reading, difficulty maintaining one's place on a page, and perceptual distortions of print. Someone can have 20/20 vision and still experience these symptoms because eyesight and visual processing are not the same thing. This is where ADHD and Irlen Syndrome can sometimes look surprisingly similar. Consider someone who reads for several minutes and then looks away, becomes restless, or abandons the task. Are they having difficulty sustaining attention? Or is looking at the page becoming increasingly uncomfortable? From the outside, the behavior can look similar even when the factors contributing to it are different. Where ADHD and Irlen symptoms may overlap Potential areas of overlap include difficulty sustaining attention while reading, losing one's place, rereading, avoiding visually demanding work, fatigue during school or work tasks, distractibility, and difficulty completing assignments or other visually intensive tasks. The visual environment may provide additional clues. Some individuals with Irlen Syndrome report greater difficulty under fluorescent or bright lighting, when looking at high-contrast black print on white paper, while using screens, or when surrounded by visually busy patterns. If processing that visual information is uncomfortable, maintaining concentration may require additional effort. This does not mean someone experiencing these symptoms has Irlen Syndrome instead of ADHD. A person may have ADHD, Irlen Syndrome, both, or neither. The important point is that similar behaviors do not necessarily have the same underlying explanation. What does the research tell us? A 2023 study provides an interesting look at this relationship. Researchers studied 59 adults between the ages of 18 and 50 who had been diagnosed with ADHD and also experienced visual stress. Thirty-nine participants received individualized spectral filters, while 20 participants received no intervention for their visual processing difficulties. Researchers measured attention using a computerized continuous performance test and evaluated ADHD symptoms over time. The study found statistically significant differences in overall attention outcomes between the intervention and control groups. The researchers concluded that spectral filters may warrant consideration as an adjunctive intervention for individuals experiencing perceptually based attention difficulties associated with both ADHD and visual stress. The findings raise an important question, for some people who struggle with attention, how much additional effort is being required to process uncomfortable visual information? Additional research involving larger populations would be valuable, but the study provides an important foundation for further investigation into the relationship between visual processing, visual stress, and attention. Look at when attention becomes difficult One of the most useful things individuals, parents, educators, and professionals can do is pay attention to patterns. Does concentration become worse while reading but improve during conversation? Does reading cause headaches, eye strain, or unusual fatigue? Does the person frequently lose their place? Do words or lines appear to move, blur, or crowd together? Are bright lights, fluorescent lighting, or screens particularly uncomfortable? Does concentration improve when lighting or other aspects of the visual environment change? These questions do not diagnose ADHD or Irlen Syndrome. They simply help us look more closely at what may be happening when someone appears unable to concentrate. ADHD and Irlen Syndrome can coexist Understanding visual stress does not mean dismissing an ADHD diagnosis. Someone can have ADHD and also have difficulty processing visual information. Addressing one does not make the other less real. This is why looking beyond a diagnostic label can be so valuable. When a person struggles with attention primarily during reading, screen use, or other visually demanding activities, especially when headaches, light sensitivity, or visual distortions are also present, it may be worth investigating whether visual processing is contributing to the difficulty. Ask a different question When someone cannot concentrate, our first reaction is often focused on the behavior, "Why aren't you paying attention?" Perhaps we should ask, "What is making it difficult for you to pay attention right now?" For some people, ADHD may be the primary answer. For others, additional factors may be contributing. For some, the visual environment itself may be an important part of the picture. Two people can display the same behavior for very different reasons. Understanding those reasons can help us better understand what kind of support they may need. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from Char Scheuermann Char Scheuermann, Irlen Diagnostician Char Scheuermann is an Independent Irlen Diagnostician serving clients throughout the Northeastern United States. Driven by both professional expertise and personal experience, she is passionate about raising awareness of Irlen Syndrome and helping individuals find answers to challenges that are often overlooked or misunderstood. As an educator and advocate, Char is committed to making Irlen services accessible and convenient by providing mobile assessments, including Irlen Screenings, Diagnostic Testing, and Filter Check appointments in clients' homes. Her mission is to deliver exceptional care, personalized support, and life-changing solutions that improve comfort, confidence, and quality of life for those affected by Irlen Syndrome.

Pablo Colella is a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant, founder of Disconnected Bodies, and host of the Disconnected Bodies Podcast. For more than twenty years, he has worked with museums, heritage organisations, local authorities and cultural leaders across the UK, helping them better understand audiences through behavioural research, programme evaluation and place-based cultural strategy. He is the developer of Sandbox™, a behavioural audience intelligence methodology, and the author of independent research exploring cultural strategy, participation and public value. Through his writing, Pablo challenges conventional thinking about audience engagement and explores how behavioural psychology can help shape the future of culture. Pablo Colella, Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant What drew you to audience psychology, and what made you see it as something the cultural sector needed? It kept coming up in the research. Organisations could tell you who walked through the door, age, postcode, ethnicity, ticket type, but not why one person came back and another never did. Demographic data sorts people into boxes. It doesn't tell you what's going on in their heads. I got interested in what's underneath those categories. Confidence, trust, relevance, relationships, whether a place feels like it's "for someone like me." That's where Disconnected Bodies and Sandbox™ came from. I'm not against demographic data, it has its uses. The problem is when we ask it to answer questions it wasn't built to answer. Understanding audiences means going past describing people and getting into what's actually driving their decisions. That felt like a gap in the sector, and unfortunately, it still does. What does being a Cultural Audience Psychology Consultant involve that people outside the profession might not expect? People assume it's mostly surveys, statistics, marketing. That's part of it, but it's a broader job than that. A lot of what I do is trying to understand what's behind people's behaviour, then helping an organisation work out what to do about it. Some days that's sitting with a community watching how people actually engage. Other days it's going through data trying to work out what it's really saying, or sitting in on a difficult conversation. Other days it's helping an organisation rethink its strategy or how it evaluates things. There's more detective work in it than people expect too. A client will come to me convinced they've got an audience problem, and the evidence points somewhere else entirely, trust, confidence, accessibility, the offer itself, or an internal decision nobody's really looked at. I end up somewhere between researcher, strategist, evaluator, critical friend. The point is never just another report. After more than 20 years of audience research, what have you learned about why people engage with culture or choose not to? There's rarely one reason as it's usually some combination of motivation, circumstance, relationships and perception. Two people who look almost the same on paper can behave completely differently. People from very different backgrounds can end up with pretty much the same motivations or barriers. Confidence, trust, familiarity, relevance, social relationships matter more than people think. Whether something feels like it's "for you" can matter as much as the price or what's on. I've also got more careful about assuming that if someone doesn't attend, they're not interested. That's not necessarily true. There can be a gap between caring about something and actually being able to act on it, and that gap is practical, psychological, social, all sorts. So I think of participation as a journey rather than a single event. Awareness, first contact, coming back, feeling like you belong, maybe eventually taking a more active role. Knowing where someone is in that tells you a lot more than just whether they turned up once. What can psychology reveal about an audience that demographics and attendance data simply cannot? Demographics tell you who's there, attendance data tells you what happened, but psychology starts to explain why. Knowing someone's young doesn't tell you whether they feel confident in an unfamiliar space, whether they trust the organisation, whether the programme feels relevant to them, or what would get them to come back. It also explains things that otherwise look like contradictions, people from very different backgrounds behaving the same way because they share a motivation, or a demographic group that looks the same on paper but is actually made up of quite different people underneath. That's the distinction I make between audience data and audience intelligence. Data describes a pattern whereas audience intelligence is trying to understand it well enough to actually make a decision from it. I'm not trying to replace demographics with psychology, I just think we need to stop treating demographic categories like they explain behaviour, because on their own they don't. Where do you think cultural organisations still misunderstand the people they are trying to reach? One is assuming participation and interest are the same thing. If people aren't attending, the assumption is often that they're not interested. That needs testing before anyone believes it. Consultation's another. Most organisations genuinely want to listen, but consultation often happens after the important decisions are already made. So people take part, but they don't actually get to influence much. Organisations also tend to know a lot about the audiences they already have, and much less about the people who aren't showing up at all. Sometimes what looks like an audience problem is actually an organisational one, they understand what people need, they just don't have the structures or resources to do anything about it. So it's less "how do we reach these people" and more "what are we actually learning about them, and are we willing to change because of it." Your 2026 research examined cultural strategies across UK local authorities, so what separates a strategy that creates real public value from one that remains largely aspirational? The UK Local Authority Cultural Strategy Review 2026 looked at all 382 principal authorities. One of the clearest findings was the gap between having a strategy and having the organisational capability to actually deliver it. A good strategy needs more than good intentions. It needs a real understanding of communities and audiences, priorities that mean something, sensible governance, delivery structures, the right capability, and a way of adapting as things change. Public value comes down to whether the strategy changes what an organisation actually does. If the priorities in the document don't touch decisions, resources, partnerships or delivery, it's just a document. To me a strategy that's working creates an actual relationship between evidence, priorities, decisions, delivery and learning. It should help people make better choices, not just describe the choices they'd like to make. The real test is what's different because this strategy exists? When an organisation wants to engage a community it has struggled to reach, where should it begin? I'd hold off on designing an outreach programme straight away, which is usually the first instinct. First I'd want to know what the organisation actually knows about the community, versus what's assumption. What are the real motivations, barriers, levels of trust, and the circumstances people are already engaging with culture in, if they are at all. Then I'd look at the organisation itself. What's it doing, even without meaning to, that makes it harder to take part? Could be language, cost, accessibility, confidence, how they communicate, the venue, the programme, whether people feel represented there. Then I'd talk to people, including people who aren't currently taking part, using more than one method rather than a single consultation. I'd want to know what the organisation can actually change, because there's not much point asking a community for their views if nothing can shift as a result. So it's less "how do we get them through the door" and more "what would meaningful participation look like to them, and what needs to change to make that possible." On a personal level, has spending two decades studying people's motivations and behaviour changed the way you understand people in your own life? Yes. It's made me more curious and less certain about people. One thing you learn studying behaviour is that what someone does isn't always a clean reflection of what they actually want. There's often more going on underneath than the decision on the surface. It's made me more aware of the difference between noticing something and explaining it. I might see someone make a choice, and I try not to jump straight to deciding why. I've also got more comfortable with contradiction. People aren't always consistent, someone can say they want one thing and do something else in a different situation without being dishonest about it. Context matters. The biggest change has probably been getting interested in the question "what am I missing?" Studying audiences has reinforced that I don't have to understand someone's behaviour right away. Sometimes it's better to just stay curious. What is the most important shift you would like to see in how cultural leaders think about their audiences over the next decade? I'd like to see a shift from audience information to audience intelligence. Organisations have more data than ever, but more data doesn't automatically mean more understanding. I'd like leaders to get comfortable questioning their own assumptions, looking properly at behaviour, listening to people who aren't already taking part, and being willing to notice when the evidence doesn't match what they expected. I'd also like evaluation to sit closer to actual decision-making. We shouldn't be evaluating just because a funding body wants a report. We should be evaluating because we want to know what happened, why, and what should change because of it. The strongest cultural organisations won't be those that think they've got their audiences figured out. They'll be the ones willing to say "we might be wrong here, let's find out", and then actually change when they find out that they were. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Pablo Colella

Written by Engy Neville, Conscious Leadership Mentor and Emotional Intelligence Expert Engy Neville is a Conscious Leadership Mentor and Emotional Intelligence Expert who blends 30 years of corporate brand management, leadership and brand strategy with NLP, subconscious work, and energy healing to help people recognize the patterns shaping how they live and lead—and consciously choose what comes next. Who were you before you learned who you were supposed to be? Before the expectations, before the conditioning, before the experiences that taught you which parts of yourself were safe to reveal and which ones were better kept hidden. One of my greatest joys in working with people from different backgrounds, cultures, careers, and life experiences is helping them remember who they are beneath all of it. Because I think we have misunderstood something about personal growth. We often talk about transformation as though becoming who we are meant to be requires abandoning who we have been. Shed the old identity. Release the old version of yourself. Leave behind everything that no longer serves you. But I don't believe our former selves are meant to be discarded. I believe they are meant to be integrated. You don't have to throw away who you've been Every version of you knew something. Even the version who made choices you wouldn't make today. Even the version who stayed too long, played too small, worked too hard, said yes when she meant no, or allowed fear to make decisions for her. That version of you was responding to what she knew, what she believed, and what she had experienced at the time. When we treat our former identities as something to throw away, we risk throwing away the wisdom they earned with them. I understand the friction that can come with this idea, particularly when we are talking about painful or traumatic experiences. I have felt that friction myself. Finding wisdom in an experience does not mean the experience needed to happen. It does not excuse harm, minimize pain, or require us to feel grateful for what hurt us. It simply means the experience doesn't get to own the rest of our story. There can come a point when we are able to put down some of the pain while keeping what we learned from surviving it. I don't throw the past away. I may no longer carry its pain in the same way, but I carry its wisdom. It has taught me how I responded, what I believed, what I tolerated, what I feared, and how those things shaped my choices. Perhaps most importantly, it has helped me decide what I want instead. When invisibility felt safer For a long time, visibility made me deeply uncomfortable. Being seen made me feel self-conscious. Visibility meant vulnerability, and vulnerability, somewhere along the way, had become associated with criticism. So, without consciously realizing what I was doing, I learned how to remain just invisible enough. I could be competent, work hard, contribute, and lead. But fully taking up space? Putting my name forward? Allowing myself to be seen without shrinking, editing, or protecting myself first? That was different. I shied away from opportunities. I diminished my presence in certain rooms. Whether I was writing, working, or sitting in a boardroom, there were moments when I wasn't allowing myself to occupy the full space I was capable of occupying. Consciously, this made absolutely no sense to me. Why would I sabotage opportunities I wanted? Why wouldn't I put my name in the hat? Why would someone who wanted to grow simultaneously make choices that kept her from being fully seen? Those questions changed when I stopped asking, "What's wrong with me?" and started asking a different question, "When did being visible stop feeling safe?" That question led somewhere entirely different. The pattern usually makes sense once you find its origin I began looking backward, not to live there, but to understand. Where had I been visible and experienced criticism? Where had being seen made me feel exposed? What experiences had taught me that standing out could have consequences? Slowly, I could see the roadmap. What looked like self-sabotage wasn't random. My subconscious wasn't conspiring against me. It was using information from previous experiences to protect me from something it had learned to perceive as dangerous. My invisibility had served a purpose. That doesn't mean I needed to continue choosing it and this is where I believe real transformation happens. Awareness gives us the ability to separate what once protected us from what is still necessary. I could acknowledge why I had learned to hide without continuing to hide. I could appreciate the intelligence of the pattern without allowing the pattern to run my life. I could keep the wisdom and release the limitation. Your limiting beliefs were trying to do something for you We often talk about limiting beliefs as though they're unwanted clutter in our minds that simply needs to be cleared away. But I think there is more to understand. A belief usually formed for a reason. At some point, it explained something, protected something, helped us belong, helped us avoid pain, or helped us navigate an environment with the emotional resources we had available at the time. The question isn't only, "How do I get rid of this belief?" It's also, "What was this belief trying to do for me? What did it teach me? Is that protection still necessary? What do I choose to believe now?" That is a very different relationship with growth. You're no longer at war with who you used to be. You're learning from her. Becoming isn't always about becoming This is why so much of my work today isn't really about helping someone become someone new. It's helping them recognize the person who has been there all along, underneath the adaptations. Underneath the people-pleasing. Underneath the perfectionism. Underneath the need to prove. Underneath the fear of being seen. Underneath the identities created in response to families, workplaces, cultures, relationships, successes, disappointments, and everything else life has handed us. Because beneath those layers is something incredibly powerful, choice. When you can see the pattern, you don't have to unconsciously obey it. When you understand the belief, you can decide whether you still believe it. When you understand why a former version of yourself behaved the way she did, you can meet her with understanding rather than judgment. Then you can decide what comes next. That, to me, is sovereignty. Not erasing your past. Not becoming someone completely unrecognizable. Not declaring war on every previous version of yourself in the name of growth. It's being able to look at everything that has shaped you and say, "I understand why I became this way. I honor what it taught me. I get to choose who I am from here." Maybe the question isn't, "Who do I need to become?" Maybe it's, "Who am I beneath everything I learned I needed to be?" Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Engy Neville Engy Neville, Conscious Leadership Mentor and Emotional Intelligence Expert Engy Neville is a Conscious Leadership Mentor and Emotional Intelligence Expert who spent 30 years in corporate brand management and leadership before bringing that experience into the transformational work she leads today. Blending emotional intelligence, NLP, subconscious work, and quantum energy healing, she helps people uncover the patterns and beliefs shaping how they live, lead, and see themselves. Her work bridges the practical and the intuitive, helping people move beyond intellectual self-awareness into meaningful, embodied change. Through Embracing Zen with Engy, she teaches a simple but powerful philosophy, when you understand what has been unconsciously driving you, you gain the freedom to consciously choose who you become.

Written by Carla Madeleine Kupe, Executive Leadership Advisor Carla Madeleine is an attorney, executive leader, and advisor who guides executives in integrating unexamined inner aspects so their leadership becomes examined rather than reactive. Her work bridges authority, authenticity, and inner transformation, particularly during moments of personal and organizational transition. You are about to walk into a difficult conversation. You just received an email that makes your stomach tighten. A board member questions your decision. Your team is looking to you for clarity, but you are not sure what the right answer is. What do most leaders do next? They gather more information. They rehearse. They push through. Very few do something much simpler: return to themselves. Why returning to yourself is a leadership practice Many of us were taught that strong leadership means staying composed, moving quickly, solving problems, and carrying the weight for everyone else. Over time, those expectations quietly condition us to look everywhere except inward. We become experts at reading the room while losing touch with ourselves. When pressure rises, we scan for the perfect answer, anticipate everyone else's reactions, and mistake urgency for effectiveness. Yet the greatest impact on our leadership is often not the challenge in front of us. It is the distance that has formed between us and ourselves. By the time we enter the difficult meeting or make the high-stakes decision, many of us have already abandoned our own center. We disconnect from our bodies. We override our intuition. We silence what we know to be true in order to appear competent, avoid conflict, or protect relationships. The meeting does not disconnect us from ourselves. It simply reveals that the disconnection happened long before we walked into the room. Returning to yourself, then, is not self-care in the conventional sense. It is a leadership discipline. It is the practice of becoming internally available to one’s own wisdom and knowing before attempting to be externally effective. Leadership is less about always having the right answer than about bringing an undivided presence into uncertainty. Every leadership threshold asks the same question Every meaningful transition in leadership asks the same question: Can you stay connected to yourself while everything around you is changing? Too often, the answer is “no.” We adapt. We accommodate. We perform. We become so focused on being the leader everyone else needs that we forget to remain connected to the person who is leading. That is why leadership begins with a series of intentional returns, not because you only need to do them once, but because every new challenge invites you back to yourself. These are not abstract ideas or wellness rituals. They are a practical discipline that helps leaders make clearer decisions, communicate with greater integrity, and remain grounded under pressure. Three intentional returns 1. The first return: Return to your body. Most leaders leave themselves physically before they leave themselves mentally. Notice your jaw, shoulders, breathing, and heartbeat. Reflection questions that can support you include: Where am I holding tension? What emotion is asking to be acknowledged? What is my body telling me that my mind is trying to outrun? Micro practice to try: Take three slow breaths. Lengthen your exhale. Do not solve anything yet. 2. The second return: Return to what is true. Once you have settled into your body, reconnect with reality before reacting to the story your mind is telling. Ask yourself: What am I assuming? What do I actually know? What fear is speaking the loudest? What value do I refuse to compromise here? This is the shift from reacting to discerning. It is where assumptions give way to clarity, fear gives way to actuality, and you become better able to respond to what is actually happening, not just to the story you have constructed about it. 3. The third return: Return to your choice. Leadership rarely requires perfect certainty. It asks for aligned decisions. Reflection questions that may be helpful include: What action reflects who I want to be? What conversation have I been avoiding? If I trusted myself, what would I do next? Leadership does not require perfection. It requires returning to yourself often enough that your decisions come from presence rather than reaction. Here are some prompts that can support you throughout the day: Have I noticed my breathing today? Can I name what I'm feeling without judging it? Do I know what's actually true, or am I reacting to a story my mind is telling? Am I about to speak from fear or from integrity? What does my body need before I ask it to carry this conversation? If I trusted myself completely, what would change about how I enter this room? Every challenging conversation, every high-stakes decision, and every moment of uncertainty offers the same invitation: return to yourself first. Then lead. Leadership is not only about influencing others. It is about remaining connected to yourself while doing so. This is the practice at the heart of Holding Authority, my leadership development lab for leaders navigating the conditions that tend to reveal us most: urgency, conflict, ambiguity, loss, transition, success, and visibility. It is a space to examine not simply what you do as a leader, but who you become while doing it, and to practice returning to yourself in the moments when doing so is hardest. If something in this article felt familiar, you can learn more about Holding Authority and express interest here. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Carla Madeleine Kupe Carla Madeleine Kupe, Executive Leadership Advisor Carla Madeleine is an attorney, executive leader, and trusted advisor who works with leaders navigating power, responsibility, and transition. With a background in law, executive leadership, and organizational change, she helps individuals identify and integrate unexamined inner patterns that quietly shape decision-making, authority, and trust, particularly during periods of uncertainty, contraction, and reimagination. Carla writes at the intersection of leadership, inner work, and change, offering grounded insight for those shaping the future.

Written by Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. We live in a time that might be described as a shift from a society of two to a society of too. At first glance, the difference appears to be little more than a linguistic coincidence, a single added letter. Yet within that small difference lies one of the central psychological dramas of contemporary life. Two implies relationship: myself and the Other, ego and unconscious, individual and community, the known and the unknown. It is the tension between two positions from which something genuinely new can emerge. Too, by contrast, signifies excess. Too much information, too much stimulation, too many identities, too many opinions, too many images, too many possibilities. In the society of too, content is not lacking; space is. Contacts are abundant; encounters are rare. Information proliferates, yet transformation becomes increasingly elusive. The paradox of contemporary life is that we have never been more connected and yet perhaps never more distant from one another. Our technologies promise unlimited communication while simultaneously creating new forms of isolation. Algorithms offer endless opportunities for connection, yet they often trap us within increasingly narrow circles of affirmation. Rather than encountering something genuinely different, we repeatedly encounter reflections of ourselves. What disappears is not relationship itself but its liminal dimension, the possibility that the Other might change us. In classical Jungian psychology, transformation never arises from complete identification with oneself. It emerges through encounter with something the ego does not control. The shadow, the anima or animus, a dream image, an unexpected affect, or a symbol from the depths of the psyche all arrive as forms of otherness within the self.[12] More recent post-Jungian thinkers have expanded this idea, suggesting that otherness is not confined to the unconscious but permeates the world itself. James Hillman spoke of the soul of the world, while contemporary authors such as Susan Rowland, Stanton Marlan, Lucy Huskinson, and Fanny Brewster have emphasized that transformation occurs not only through introspection but through encounters with what remains irreducibly other: nature, culture, history, technology, the body, and other people. Seen from this perspective, ours is a culture that simultaneously longs for liminality and fears it. Victor Turner (1969) described liminality as a threshold state, a space in which the old identity no longer functions while the new one has not yet arrived. It is a condition of uncertainty, disorientation, ambiguity, and possibility. Yet contemporary culture has become increasingly intolerant of such states. In a world organized around optimization, productivity, and perpetual availability, uncertainty is treated as a malfunction. We are expected to know immediately who we are, what we think, where we stand, and to which group we belong. Ambiguity is experienced not as a fertile condition but as a threat. Perhaps the dynamic can be expressed through a simple formula, "When two becomes too frightening, it is emptied out. When that emptiness becomes unbearable, it is filled with too. When too fills everything, we can no longer see two." This formula captures something essential about contemporary subjectivity. Genuine encounters with otherness are unsettling. The Other may challenge our identity, expose our projections, or confront us with aspects of ourselves we would rather avoid. Faced with that discomfort, we retreat. Yet the space left behind does not remain empty for long. It becomes filled with stimulation: information, entertainment, political certainty, consumer goods, endless scrolling, new projects, and new identities. Thus emerges a culture of excess. But excess does not solve the problem; it merely conceals it. Byung-Chul Han (2017) has argued that ours is no longer primarily a society of prohibition but a society of positivity and abundance. Everything is available, accessible, and seemingly possible. Yet this limitless openness produces a peculiar exhaustion. When there are no boundaries, there is no form. When there is no resistance, there is no transformation. When there is no encounter with genuine otherness, development itself begins to stagnate. From a post-Jungian perspective, one might even suggest that contemporary culture is developing what could be called a liminality complex. Jung described complexes as relatively autonomous psychic systems that shape perception, affect, and behaviour.[13] A liminality complex would not simply be a fear of change; rather, it would involve a simultaneous fascination with and avoidance of transformation. We desire change while resisting the process through which change occurs. We want a new version of ourselves without the confusion that precedes it. We want creativity without uncertainty, spiritual growth without disorientation, and meaning without the loss of previous certainties. Wolfgang Giegerich has repeatedly argued that psychological development does not occur through the accumulation of experiences but through the death of particular forms of consciousness. Yet contemporary culture displays a profound fear of psychological death. We continually generate new content in order to avoid confronting emptiness. But emptiness is not the enemy of transformation; it is one of its prerequisites. Just as a symbol emerges from the tension between opposites, new meaning emerges only when old meaning loses its authority. This brings us back to the question of the Other. Emmanuel Levinas famously argued that the Other always exceeds our understanding. The Other cannot be reduced to our concepts, categories, or expectations. Their alterity remains fundamentally irreducible. Yet contemporary culture increasingly transforms the Other into a projection. We encounter labels rather than persons, political identities rather than human beings, profiles rather than presences. The living complexity of the Other is replaced by representations that can be more easily managed and controlled. Jean Baudrillard anticipated this development when he described a world in which simulations begin to replace reality itself. Today, that process has become deeply embedded in everyday life. Community becomes audience. Friendship becomes networking. Love becomes compatibility. Wisdom becomes information. Presence becomes availability. Each substitution removes some aspect of the liminal uncertainty inherent in genuine relationship. They offer contact without the risk of transformation. Yet psychological growth depends precisely upon what these substitutions eliminate. Jung understood the symbol as something that emerges when opposing forces remain in tension long enough for a third possibility to appear. Transformation, therefore, requires a capacity to endure uncertainty. It requires staying in the space between. It requires resisting the urge to resolve ambiguity prematurely. Recent post-Jungian scholarship has deepened this insight. Susan Rowland argues that creativity emerges through encounters with radical alterity rather than through the repetition of the familiar. Fanny Brewster explores how cultural and racial differences function as psychological thresholds that cannot be overcome through denial but only through dialogue. Lucy Huskinson writes of imagination as a meeting place between different layers of reality. Across these diverse perspectives, a common theme emerges: transformation is not achieved by eliminating difference but by learning to inhabit it. Perhaps this leads us to a deeper formula of individuation, "We do not become One by eliminating Two. We become One when we recognize that Two is already part of One." This may be one of the central paradoxes of Jungian psychology. Individuation does not mean returning to homogeneity. It does not mean resolving all tensions or erasing all differences. It means developing a psychic capacity large enough to contain difference without destroying it. The Self is not a unity that abolishes multiplicity; it is a unity capable of holding multiplicity. The contemporary problem, then, is not an excess of difference but a diminishing capacity to symbolically engage with difference. As a result, we oscillate between two extremes. On one side lies the emptiness of the isolated ego, fearful of encounter. On the other lies the noise of the society of too, where emptiness is covered over by endless stimulation. In both cases, the space of transformation disappears. The task of contemporary psychology may therefore be neither to eliminate liminality nor to master it, but to learn once again how to contain it. Not to control the threshold, but to create conditions in which the threshold can be inhabited. Analysis, art, ritual, friendship, community, and genuine dialogue remain among the few spaces where it is still possible to remain long enough between the old and the new for something unexpected to emerge. For what is truly new never arises from excess. It emerges from encounter. It emerges between myself and the Other, between certainty and uncertainty, between what is dying and what has not yet found a name. In a world of too, perhaps one of the most important tasks of individuation is to recover the reality of two. Perhaps the next step is even more difficult: to recognize that behind both too and two lies one, not a static unity, but a living wholeness that continuously emerges through relationship, tension, difference, and encounter. The Self, in this sense, is not found beyond liminality; it is discovered through our willingness to remain within it. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dragana Favre Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, EMDR, and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslav roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold. References: [1] Baudrillard, J. (1994). Simulacra and simulation (S. F. Glaser, Trans.). University of Michigan Press. (Original work published 1981) [2] Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Polity Press. [3] Brewster, F. (2022). The racial complex: A Jungian perspective on culture and race. Routledge. [4] Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books. [5] Giegerich, W. (2005). The soul's logical life: Towards a rigorous notion of psychology. Peter Lang. [6] Giegerich, W. (2013). Working with dreams: Initiation into the soul's speaking about itself. Routledge. [7] Han, B.-C. (2017). The expulsion of the other: Society, perception and communication today (W. Hoban, Trans.). Polity Press. [8] Hillman, J. (1975). Re-visioning psychology. Harper & Row. [9] Hillman, J. (1996). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world (Rev. ed.). Spring Publications. [10] Huskinson, L. (2020). Dreaming the myth onwards: New directions in Jungian therapy and thought. Routledge. [11] Jung, C. G. (1966). Two essays on analytical psychology (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., CW 7). Princeton University Press. [12] Jung, C. G. (1968). The archetypes and the collective unconscious (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; 2nd ed., CW 9i). Princeton University Press. [13] Jung, C. G. (1969). A review of the complex theory. In The structure and dynamics of the psyche (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., CW 8, pp. 92–104). Princeton University Press. [14] Levinas, E. (1969). Totality and infinity: An essay on exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne University Press. [15] Marlan, S. (2018). How and why we still read Jung: Personal and professional reflections. Routledge. [16] Rowland, S. (2021). Jungian arts-based research and the nuclear enchantment of new materialism. Routledge. [17] Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Aldine Publishing. [18] Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books.