Written by Juna Ting-Wei Chang, Forest Therapy Guide Juna Ting-Wei Chang is a forest therapy guide and founder of Shinrin-Yoku Taiwan, specialising in evidence-based forest therapy and Shinrin-yoku. She supports individuals and organisations in slowing down and gently returning their attention to themselves and the more-than-human world through nature. Life is speeding up, patience is wearing thin, and anxiety and anger are rising with it. Here is how relational forest therapy gives social-emotional learning something no classroom or screen can: a living partner that helps us find peace again. Watch how long a group of people can wait in line before someone reaches for a phone. Notice how quickly a small frustration turns into a sharp word. Whether we are eight or eighty, many of us are living at a speed our nervous systems were never designed for. The pace keeps climbing. Patience, the quiet skill of letting things take the time they take, is often the first casualty. What fills the gap is familiar: more anxiety, more anger, and less room to notice either. If we want to help people find peace again, we need to teach emotional skills, and we need to give those skills somewhere to grow. The missing ingredient: Nature deficit In his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, writer Richard Louv gave a name to something many parents and teachers had sensed: nature deficit disorder. He is careful to say it is not a medical diagnosis. It is a description of the human cost of growing apart from the natural world. He notes, for example, that by the 1990s the distance children were allowed to roam from home had shrunk to a ninth of what it was in 1970. Fewer hours among trees, soil, and weather mean fewer chances to practice the things that nature quietly teaches: waiting, noticing, adapting, and sitting with what we can’t control. Where social-emotional learning comes in Social-emotional learning (SEL) is the process of building the skills to understand our emotions, relate well to others, and make caring decisions. The most widely used framework, from the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL), names five competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. A landmark meta-analysis of 213 programs delivered in schools involving more than 270,000 students found that participants showed better social-emotional skills, attitudes, and behavior, along with a gain of 11 percentile points in academic achievement. A follow-up analysis of 82 programs and more than 97,000 students found those benefits still showing up anywhere from six months to 18 years later. But SEL is often taught the same way we teach everything else: indoors, seated, under bright lights, with worksheets. It is hard to learn how to slow down in an environment that keeps us speeding up. More than phytoncides and fresh air Ask most people why time in the forest helps, and they will mention clean air, tree compounds called phytoncides, gentle exercise, and quiet. Those benefits are real. But they all describe something the forest does to us, and they ask nothing of us in return. Relational Forest Therapy™ works differently. As guides with the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT), we hold a simple principle: the forest is the therapist, and guides open the door. The forest is not a backdrop or a resource. It is a partner in a relationship. That matters for SEL, because social-emotional learning is, at its heart, about relationships: with ourselves, with others, and with the choices we make. The forest offers one more relationship to practice in, and it is one with no judgment, no agenda, and no rush. 3 doors back to peace: Recognition, awareness, resilience Emotion recognition. You can’t work with a feeling you haven’t noticed. Out on the trail, the pace drops and the body’s signals get louder: a tight chest, a clenched jaw, a lightness in the shoulders. A guide might simply invite participants to notice where they feel the forest in their body and what their inner weather is today. Many people find that emotions described as weather (stormy, foggy, clearing) are easier to name and less frightening to admit. Awareness. Soft, effortless attention, the kind a moving canopy or running water draws from us, gives an overworked mind a rest. Research has found that a nature walk lasting 90 minutes reduces rumination, the looping, self-critical thinking that feeds anxiety and anger. With the loop quieter, there is space to observe a feeling rather than be swept away by it, and to notice the people beside us, too. Resilience. A forest is a lesson in resilience that needs no lecture. Fallen trees become nurseries for new growth. Seasons turn and nothing is permanently lost. When we are invited to sit in one place for a while and stay with a small restlessness or discomfort until it passes, we rehearse the exact skill that anger and anxiety challenge most: staying present without reacting. Mapping the walk to the 5 SEL competencies Self-awareness: An invitation to notice body sensations and name your inner weather. Self-management: Sitting still in one spot and letting restlessness rise and fall without acting on it. Social awareness: Listening in a sharing circle, hearing that others experienced the same forest differently. Relationship skills: Offering something back to the forest and to each other as a reciprocal gesture. Responsible decision making: Choosing how to move through the space with care for living things and for each other. How to embed it: A simple starting framework You don’t need a vast wilderness. A patch of trees on school grounds, a nearby park, or a quiet green corner can be enough. Here is a sequence I suggest for educators, counselors, and parents. Six steps for educators and facilitators: Cross a threshold. Pause at the edge of the space, set devices aside, and mark the shift from everyday mode to forest time. Offer invitations, not instructions. “You might notice” leaves room for every answer to be right. Slow the pace. Move at the speed of the slowest curiosity. Patience is practiced, not preached. Invite a sensory pause. Sit, look, listen, and let the setting do its quiet work. Share and name. Gather in a circle and let participants describe what they noticed and felt, building emotional vocabulary in their own words. Close with reciprocity. Thank the place in whatever way feels genuine, and return regularly across seasons. One honest note: much of the physiological research on forest bathing comes from adults, and studies of nature-based SEL with children are still growing. Forest therapy is a powerful complement to SEL, not a replacement for mental health care. Anyone struggling with persistent anxiety or anger deserves support from a qualified professional, and any outing with young people needs proper supervision and safety planning. Finding peace again We can’t slow the world down. But we can help one another learn to slow down inside it, to recognize what we feel, stay aware of it, and recover when life knocks us off balance. Social-emotional learning gives us the language. The forest gives us a practice ground. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Juna Ting-Wei Chang Juna Ting-Wei Chang, Forest Therapy Guide Juna Ting-Wei Chang is a forest therapy guide and founder of Shinrin-Yoku Taiwan, now part of Green Shower. She is the first Taiwanese guide certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT) and also holds the Taiwan Forest Therapist Certificate. With a background in languages, cross-cultural experience, and landscape and recreation management, Juna brings science, tradition, and lived experience together in a warm, grounded way. Her work supports individuals, organisations, and international groups in cultivating emotional resilience, presence, and sustainable wellbeing through nature-based practices. References: Bratman, G. N., Hamilton, J. P., Hahn, K. S., Daily, G. C., & Gross, J. J. (2015). Nature experience reduces rumination and subgenual prefrontal cortex activation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(28), 8567 to 8572. Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. (n.d.). What is the CASEL framework? Durlak, J. A., Weissberg, R. P., Dymnicki, A. B., Taylor, R. D., & Schellinger, K. B. (2011). The impact of enhancing students’ social and emotional learning: A meta-analysis of school-based universal interventions. Child Development, 82(1), 405 to 432. Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature deficit disorder. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Taylor, R. D., Oberle, E., Durlak, J. A., & Weissberg, R. P. (2017). Promoting positive youth development through school-based social and emotional learning interventions: A meta-analysis of follow-up effects. Child Development, 88(4), 1156 to 1171.

Written by Daniele Forni, Executive Coach & Tech Founder Daniele Forni is an executive coach for neurodivergent leaders and the founder of Squirrel Coach, based in Hong Kong. A former Director at HSBC with fifteen years in banking across Europe and Asia, he is a University of Cambridge alumnus and the author of books on leadership, neurodiversity, strategy, and meditation. Picture this. It is Friday afternoon, and the sun is slowly setting behind the building across the street. You are exhausted by the week, and human resources (HR) has just sent you ten emails with the curricula vitae (CVs) they have shortlisted for the position you advertised. You sigh and prepare yourself for an hour of boredom, trying to work out which of them are worth meeting in person. You stand up, raise your desk, and get ready to fight whatever stands between you and a well-deserved weekend. This scene is not invented. I lived it every year between January and April, when corporate (finally) opened the budget and allowed us to fill our slots for the year. For fifteen years in banking, I read a lot of CVs and sat on a lot of hiring panels. I noticed something that took me years to fully understand. After the interviews, nobody ever summarised a candidate by listing their competencies. Nobody said, "Strong communicator, good analytical skills, collaborative." They said, "Oh, he helped a startup bootstrap its business development," or "He teaches martial arts at the weekend." Or, in a real case of someone I then hired, "He looked for sunken treasure in shipwrecks." One highlight, and it always came from a single strength that made that person different from everyone else in the pile. The candidates who covered every base were rarely the ones we talked about. They were the ones we forgot. The trap Here is what most of us do when we write a CV. We ask artificial intelligence (AI) to read the job description, list every requirement, and make sure there is something on the page for each one, plus a generous helping of keywords for the applicant tracking system (ATS). Leadership: tick. Stakeholder management: tick. Analytical skills: tick. We try to be perfect for the job, and in doing so, we smooth out anything uneven, because uneven feels like a risk. We end up with a document on which nothing can be criticised and which will hopefully make it through the ominous HR filters. That is exactly the problem. A CV on which nothing can be criticised is a CV on which nothing stands out. It is well-rounded, and well-rounded is another word for average. I call it the well-rounded trap. It feels safe. However, it is the most expensive kind of safe there is, because it costs you the interview. Remember: getting through the filters is one thing, being picked for an interview is another. Why panels remember peaks There is a reason the brain works like this. In 1933, the German psychologist Hedwig von Restorff showed that when one item in a list is different from the rest, people remember it far better than the others. Psychologists still call it the isolation effect, or the von Restorff effect. A list of twelve similar words blurs, the one printed in red survives. Researchers at Harvard Business School found something similar about people and called it the red sneakers effect. In the right setting, someone who deliberately breaks the dress code, like a professor lecturing in red trainers, is judged as having higher status and more competence, not less. Wear red sneakers to a black-tie event, and not only will people remember you, but many will also assume you can afford to be different. A pile of CVs is a list. Most of them use the same words: results-driven, detail-oriented, team player, proven track record. No red words, no red sneakers. Yet the CV that survives the pile is the one with a single line printed in bold red. The time people spend on each CV makes it even worse. I like to think I gave every CV three to five minutes. Recruiters screening hundreds do not: a widely quoted eye-tracking study by the job site Ladders found they spent an average of around seven seconds on an initial scan. You can argue about the exact number, and people do. But the principle holds: the top third of the first page decides whether the rest gets read. In seven seconds, nobody can take in a well-rounded profile. They can only take in a peak. Two shapes of CV Picture two shapes. The first is a low, rounded hill: competent at everything, high at nothing. The second is a mountain range with one tall peak: uneven, with real valleys, and one strength that stands tall, towering over the landscape. Most of us are told, from school onwards, to build hills. Fix your weaknesses. Do not fail any class. Fill the gaps. This is the recipe for becoming average, or, to use the polite word, well-rounded. But careers are not built on the average height of the range. They are built on the peak, because the peak is what people remember and what they hire for. This matters even more if your mind does not come well-rounded in the first place. I am autistic and have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and my own CV never looked well-rounded either. Many of the neurodivergent leaders I coach have what researchers call a spiky profile: very high in some abilities, lower in others. For years, they were told to sand down the spikes. On a CV, that advice is backward. The valleys are real, but the CV does not need to hide them. It needs to lead with the peak: something that stops the reader. The red sneakers. A CV that could belong to anyone When I teach this in my masterclasses, I use a sample CV I made up for the purpose: Alex Morgan, a vice president in credit risk in Hong Kong. Alex is fictional, but every line on the page is the kind of line I have read a thousand times. The headline under the name says "Vice President, Risk and Finance". The summary reads: Results-driven finance professional with over 12 years of experience across risk management, financial planning and analysis, and business partnering in global banking. Strong analytical, leadership, and communication skills, with a proven track record of delivering high-quality work under tight deadlines. A collaborative team player who builds strong relationships with stakeholders at all levels. Read it again and ask yourself: what is Alex for? You cannot say. Every adjective is a claim, and none of them is evidence. That summary could belong to ten thousand people. But hidden in the Singapore role, in the fourth bullet of five, there is this: "Built a model in my own time that combined payment delays, covenant data and news flow to flag stressed clients, it identified two clients about six months before their downgrades, and the bank later adopted it across the region." That is the only line on the whole page that nobody else could have written. In the London role, there is an echo of it: Alex was "the person the team went to when a spreadsheet or report broke". Same strength, two roles, ten years apart. That is a spike, and it is buried. What hiring managers can take from this If you hire, the trap works on you too. When a pile of CVs all look competent, it is tempting to shortlist the ones with no gaps. That is how teams end up full of people who are fine at everything and remarkable at nothing! Next time you read a pile, try reading for the spike instead of the gaps. Ask of each CV: what is the one thing this person would be the best in the room at? If you cannot find it, the problem may be the CV, not the candidate. Some of the strongest people I have worked with had the most unusual CVs, because they let them show what they really stood for. The treasure hunter was one of them. Your ten minutes this week You do not need a coach or a new template to start. You need ten minutes and a pen. Write down three times someone came to you because you were the person for it. Name what the three have in common, in one sentence. Make that sentence the first line of your CV. If you want a head start on naming your peak, the free Spiky Profile assessment maps your cognitive strengths in about ten minutes and gives you one of four leadership archetypes to build on. A well-rounded CV asks a panel to remember everything about you. A spiky CV asks them to remember one thing. Only one of those works. So, what is the one line on your CV that nobody else could have written? How far down the page is it right now? For more insights on recognising your strengths and navigating leadership as a neurodivergent professional, check out The Misfit Executive newsletter and The Data Shaman Podcast. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Daniele Forni Daniele Forni, Executive Coach & Tech Founder Daniele Forni, known as "The Data Shaman," is not your average executive coach. He helps senior professionals leverage their unconventional traits into tangible ROI using rigorous science, AI tools, and strategic wit. As the founder of the Squirrel Coach platform, he champions the "Spiky Profile" concept: exceptional leaders are defined by their peaks. An alumnus of the University of Cambridge and a 6x author on leadership, neurodiversity, and meditation, Daniele previously spent 15 years driving technology and risk management as an Investment Banking Director across Europe and Asia.

I have lost count of how many times I have heard a capable professional say some version of "I'm just not a people person." It is usually said lightly, almost as a joke, and it is almost always treated as settled, as though it were a fixed trait handed to you at birth along with your height. I have never found that convincing, though it is worth separating two different claims here. Whether sociability is a fixed trait is a question the research below does not settle, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What that research does show is narrower and more useful: our judgements about how these conversations actually go are reliably wrong. So what people are often describing when they say that may be less a personality than an untrained skill, one that has been quietly decaying for years in an environment that offers almost no opportunity to practise it and no instrument to measure the loss. The advice we give about this is mostly useless Walk into any professional development session on communication and you will be handed information: frameworks for difficult conversations, scripts for handling objections, a template for cold outreach that someone's agency tested once. None of that material is wrong, it is simply the wrong category of thing. A first conversation with someone outside your existing network runs in real time, under uncertainty, with no opportunity to pause and consult the framework. It sits much closer to sight-reading music than to anything you can absorb from a slide deck. Skills of that type improve only through repetition under live conditions, and they fade once the repetitions stop. The fading is the part nobody notices, because nothing in working life measures it. A sales director who has not opened a conversation with someone outside her own network in three years has lost real capability. She owns no instrument that reports it. She just knows she dreads the conference. What the research actually found In 2014, Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder published nine experiments in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General involving more than 800 commuters, most of them on Chicago trains and buses. Participants were assigned to commute as usual, to sit in deliberate solitude, or to open a conversation with the person beside them. The people who opened a conversation reported the most positive commute. A separate group asked to predict the outcome beforehand had ranked that same condition as by far the least pleasant. Epley and Schroeder later replicated the work in the United Kingdom in partnership with the BBC, on public buses and trains, with comparable results, as Chicago Booth documents on its own research pages. Hold onto that gap between the forecast and the result. It is the whole problem in one finding. Then there is the work of Boothby, Cooney, Sandstrom and Clark, published in Psychological Science in 2018. Across five studies, they documented what they named the liking gap. In lab conversations between people who had just met, among dormitory residents getting acquainted, and in a personal development workshop, participants consistently underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them, and the gap persisted for months. Trained coders watching the recordings could see the liking being signalled perfectly clearly. The participants simply did not register it. So we walk in expecting it to go badly, it goes well, and we come out still believing it went badly. What that describes is not a personality trait but a measurement error, and measurement errors are the kind of thing you can correct. 4 conditions that turn practice into progress The research I return to most often here is Anders Ericsson's work on expert performance, developed with Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer and published in Psychological Review in 1993 (volume 100, issue 3, pages 363 to 406). Their argument was that hours logged predict skill poorly. Improvement depends on a particular kind of practice, and that kind of practice has identifiable conditions, four of which matter here. One caveat belongs here rather than in a footnote. A 2019 replication by Macnamara and Maitra did not reproduce the original violin finding at full strength, and reported a considerably smaller effect. The four conditions below still hold up as a description of what useful practice looks like, but the original paper's effect size does not. A defined goal for each attempt, rather than general exposure. Sustained attention while the attempt is happening. Feedback fast enough to attach to whatever produced it. Enough repetitions, with adjustment between them, for the adjustment to compound. Now hold those four up against what a working adult actually gets. Condition What working life offers What is missing Defined goal Networking events with a commercial target The commercial target distorts the very behaviour you are training Sustained attention Conversations held while scanning the room Attention is divided by design Fast feedback Politeness from colleagues and clients Hierarchy and self-interest filter the signal Enough repetitions A handful of first conversations per quarter Nowhere near the volume needed to adjust Volume is the one that breaks everything. A violinist working toward competence accumulates thousands of hours. A professional trying to get better at first conversations gets maybe forty real attempts in a year, and every one of them carries enough consequence to discourage any experiment at all. Between the low volume, the high stakes and the filtered feedback, you could not design a worse training environment on purpose. Where the repetitions are actually available now Something shifted in the last few years and professional development has not caught up with it. A large population now treats video conversation as an ordinary way to get to know someone outside their existing circle, rather than as a last resort when travel falls through. Platforms built around shared language and shared interests let a person choose who to talk with, one at a time, for a set length of time. A twenty-minute video chat with someone outside your professional circle carries no career cost, no shared history, and no obligation to continue. Measured against those four conditions, the format lines up reasonably well as somewhere to practise. Volume is effectively unlimited, and the stakes stay low enough that you can deliberately try something that might not work. Attention is undivided, because there is no room to scan. And a one-to-one format removes the group you would otherwise be performing for, which in my experience is the variable that most often gets in the way of a practice conversation. Feedback is the condition that still takes deliberate effort. The liking gap tells us exactly why, and it also tells us what to do about it. 7 steps I give people who want to work on this Set it up: Pick one objective per session. Not "get better at conversation." Something you can actually score, such as asking three follow-up questions before you offer an opinion, or letting two silences run without filling them. Decide your frequency and put it in the calendar. Three sessions a week for a month gives you around twelve repetitions, which is enough for a pattern to start becoming visible. Run it: Cap the session at twenty minutes. Camera conversations tire people faster than in-person ones do. Stopping while you both still have energy is what makes the next one happen. Start with a question, not a summary of yourself. Most people open by establishing credentials. It is the single most common way to make the first two minutes feel like an interview. Let the silences sit. This is the one that feels worst and pays best. Count to three before filling a pause and watch how often the other person fills it with something better than you had. Keep it honest: Afterwards, write down one observable fact, not a feeling. Did they ask a question back? Did the conversation run past the point either of you planned? Observable facts survive the liking gap in a way that "I think that went badly" does not, and you now know that verdict is probably wrong anyway. Review the log monthly, not daily. The improvement in a skill like this is invisible across three sessions and obvious across thirty. What this will not fix I want to be straight about the limits, because overselling this would be easy. This trains one component only, which is the opening and sustaining of a conversation with someone who carries no prior context about you. It will not train negotiation under pressure. It will not help with conflict involving a colleague who has standing to damage your career. It will not teach you to persuade a buyer who has a budget and a competing quote on the desk. Those are separate skills and they need their own repetitions in their own environments. What it does address is the forecasting error Epley and Schroeder documented, which the liking gap then compounds and preserves. Both findings point in the same direction. The barrier to starting a conversation is usually a bad prediction rather than a shortage of charm. Predictions improve with data, data requires attempts, and attempts are the one thing that has finally become available in volume. So the next time you catch yourself saying you are just not a people person, try treating it as a training log problem instead of a personality one. Mine currently runs at twelve sessions a month. What would yours look like if you actually kept one?

Written by David Bovis, Founder of Duxinaroe Ltd. David Bovis is a leadership strategist and founder of Duxinaroe Ltd., specialising in the neuroscience of decision-making, behaviour, and performance. Creator of the BTFA (Believe-Think-Feel-Act) framework, he works with senior leaders to address the neurological root causes of misalignment, disengagement, and failed change. Every organisation has a strategy. Most organisations also have a gap. It sits between what the strategy says and what actually happens when people arrive at work on Monday morning. Between the slide deck presented to the board and the decisions made on the shop floor, in the warehouse, at the customer interface, and in the meeting rooms where real priorities get negotiated under pressure. That gap has a name in most organisations. It is called an execution problem. After six articles exploring the neuroscience behind productivity, engagement, psychological safety, change management, leadership behaviour, and waste, I want to suggest that execution failure is not what most leaders think it is. It is not a planning problem, a communication problem, or a capability problem, though all three are frequently cited when the post-mortem is written. It is a neurological one. Until that is understood, strategies will continue to produce the same familiar arc: launch, initial momentum, gradual drift, relaunch. What strategy actually asks of the brain A strategy, in its essence, is a set of beliefs about the future expressed as a plan for the present. It says: we believe the market will move in this direction, that our competitive advantage lies here, that if we allocate resources in this way and develop these capabilities, the outcome will be this. That is an intellectual construct. It lives in documents, presentations, and the language of senior leadership teams who have spent considerable time and cognitive resource building it. Now consider what it asks of the organisation. It asks thousands of brains, operating at different levels of the hierarchy, with different histories, different pressures, different relationships with risk and reward, and different degrees of visibility into the reasoning behind the plan, to align their daily decisions and behaviours with an abstraction they were not part of creating. The assumption embedded in most strategy execution frameworks is that clear communication of the strategy, supported by aligned metrics and governance structures, is sufficient to produce that alignment. That assumption has been tested exhaustively across decades of organisational practice. The results are consistent. Between sixty and ninety percent of strategies, depending on which research you consult, fail at the point of execution. You may want to verify the precise figure against current sources, but the pattern itself is not in dispute. It is one of the most reliable findings in organisational research. The communication and governance frameworks remain. The gap persists. The part of the system that is not in the plan There is a component of every organisation that does not appear in a strategy document. It is not represented in the balanced scorecard, the OKR framework, or the deployment matrix. It does not show up in the risk register, and it is rarely discussed at board level unless something goes visibly wrong. It is the neurological state of the people the strategy depends on. Every person in an organisation is continuously processing their environment through the lens of survival. Not in any dramatic sense, but in the ordinary, biological sense that the brain is always asking: am I safe here? Is my status secure? Do I have enough agency over my work to feel competent? Can I predict what will happen next if I act in a particular way? These are not questions people consciously ask. They are questions the brain asks automatically, beneath the level of deliberate thought, and the answers shape everything that follows. How information is received. Whether risk feels manageable or threatening. Whether the direction being asked for feels like an opportunity or an imposition. When a strategy is deployed into an organisation where those neurological conditions are already strained, something predictable happens. The strategy is received not as a shared direction but as a source of additional uncertainty. More change. More demand. More potential for exposure if things go wrong. More risk to ‘me’. The brain does not evaluate that in strategic terms. It evaluates it in survival terms. When survival and strategy are in tension, survival wins … every time. Why the middle of the organisation is where strategies go to stall One observation that has stayed with me across four decades in manufacturing and change environments is this: strategies rarely fail at the top, and they rarely fail at the front line. They fail in the middle. Middle management is the point at which the language of strategy meets the reality of operations. It is where the ambitious targets set in the boardroom encounter the constraints that exist on the ground. Where the timeline agreed in the planning session meets the capacity available in the week. Where the aspiration for cultural change meets the habits, beliefs, and social dynamics of teams that have been operating in a particular way for years. Middle managers are asked to translate strategy downward and reality upward simultaneously. They are expected to hold the tension between what the organisation is committed to delivering and what the system can currently produce, while managing their own teams, their own performance expectations, and their own neurological response to the pressure from above. When that pressure becomes chronic, the brain responds as it is designed to. It prioritises what is immediate, certain, and controllable over what is long-term, ambiguous, and requires others to change. The quarterly number gets managed. The strategic initiative gets scheduled for next quarter. The cultural shift gets described in the right language in the right meeting and then quietly deprioritised when no one is watching. This is not cowardice or cynicism. It is neuroscience. Under sustained pressure, the prefrontal cortex, where long-term thinking, planning, and complex trade-off decisions live, becomes less available. The brain shortens its horizon. It does what it knows works for today. The strategy was never designed with that in mind. Alignment is not agreement One of the most common responses to execution failure is to invest in alignment. Better cascading of objectives. Clearer accountability frameworks. More regular review cycles. Tighter integration between team-level plans and organisational priorities. These are all reasonable responses to a visible problem. None of them address the neurological reality underneath it. Alignment, as most organisations practise it, means agreement in the room. Everyone nods. The objectives are signed off. The responsibilities are documented. People leave the meeting knowing what they are accountable for. What that process does not produce is belief. Belief, in the BTFA sense, is not intellectual assent to a proposition. It is the wiring that determines how a person actually interprets and responds to their environment when no one is watching. It is built from experience, not from presentations. It is shaped by what has happened in this organisation before. What happened the last time someone took a risk on a strategic initiative. What happened the last time results fell short. What happened to the person who raised an honest concern about a direction the senior team was committed to. If that experience says strategy is something that happens to people rather than something they contribute to, no amount of alignment activity will produce the behaviour the strategy requires. If the neurological conditions in which people are being asked to execute are ones of chronic threat rather than safety, the capacity for the kind of adaptive, discretionary, problem-solving behaviour that execution actually demands will be systematically suppressed, regardless of how well the plan has been communicated. What changes when you design for execution Treating execution as a neurological challenge rather than a communication or governance one does not mean abandoning plans, metrics, or accountability. It means adding something those tools cannot provide on their own. It means asking, before the strategy is deployed: what is the neurological baseline of the organisation this plan is being deployed into? Where is threat elevated? Where is agency low? Where are the prediction failures, the unspoken concerns, the beliefs about leadership and change that will quietly shape how this direction is received? It means designing the deployment in a way that brings people into the reasoning, not just the conclusions. The brain that has participated in understanding why a direction makes sense responds to that direction differently from the brain that has simply been informed of it. It means attending to the neurological conditions of middle management with the same seriousness applied to the strategic plan itself. Because middle managers are not simply a conduit for strategy. They are the human system through which strategy either becomes real or disappears into the gap. It means recognising that the beliefs leaders hold about their own people, about what motivates them, about how much they can be trusted, about how much they need to be told versus involved, shape the conditions in which execution either flourishes or stalls. Strategy is a belief made visible in a plan. Execution is what happens when that plan meets the accumulated beliefs of an entire organisation. Until those two things are understood as connected, the gap between them will remain exactly where it has always been. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from David Bovis David Bovis, Founder of Duxinaroe Ltd. David Bovis is a leadership strategist and founder of Duxinaroe Ltd., specializing in the neuroscience of belief, decision-making, and performance under pressure. He is the creator of the BTFA (Believe-Think-Feel-Act) framework, a practical model that helps leaders understand why change, culture, and strategy often fail despite good intent. David works globally with senior leaders to address the neurological root causes of misalignment, disengagement, and stalled performance. His work bridges neuroscience, leadership, and systems thinking to enable sustainable behavioural change where traditional approaches fall short.

Written by Kelly Wolf, Integrated Energy Medicine Practitioner Kelly Wolf is an acupuncturist, educator, animal communicator, clairvoyant, and Planetary Sound practitioner. She is passionate about bridging ancient wisdom and the unseen world with modern perspectives. She explores the transformative potential of sound, frequency, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and consciousness. In Part 1, we explored the physical effects of tuning forks and how sound and vibration interact with the nervous system. But what happens when we move beyond the physical body? Why can something as simple as a vibrating metal instrument sometimes accompany such profound emotional or spiritual experiences? In my work with planetary tuning forks, I have always been fascinated by the relationship between sound, consciousness, and what spiritual traditions describe as the energetic body. A tuning fork may produce only one fundamental frequency, yet the experience of receiving that vibration can be remarkably complex. Some people describe deep relaxation. Others report vivid imagery, unexpected emotions, a feeling of expansion, or a stronger connection to themselves. Could these experiences involve something more than physical vibration? I believe the question deserves exploration, especially when we examine the relationship between ancient energetic traditions and modern research into consciousness. The energetic body: An ancient understanding Long before modern instruments could measure sound waves, many traditional healing systems described human beings as more than physical structures. Traditional Chinese Medicine developed the concept of Qi moving through interconnected channels known as meridians. Yogic traditions described chakras as centres of subtle energy and consciousness. Other spiritual traditions developed their own understandings of life force, energetic balance, and the relationship between physical and spiritual existence. These systems do not use identical explanations, but they share an underlying theme: human experience involves more than the visible structures of the body. In my practice, I combine planetary tuning forks with acupuncture points, meridian theory, and chakra work. From a metaphysical perspective, the intention is to support energetic harmony and encourage the person to reconnect with their natural sense of balance. Science has not established the existence of chakras or meridians as measurable energy pathways in the way they are described spiritually. However, the subjective experiences associated with energetic practices remain worthy of investigation. Frequency matching: The language of resonance One of the most fascinating concepts in sound healing is resonance. In physics, resonance occurs when a system responds strongly to stimulation near one of its natural frequencies. A familiar example is one tuning fork causing another similarly tuned fork to vibrate through acoustic coupling under suitable conditions. The physical phenomenon is real and measurable. In metaphysical practice, resonance takes on a broader meaning. We may describe a person as resonating with love, fear, compassion, grief, or joy. When I work with planetary tuning forks, I think of the frequencies as tools that help create a space in which someone can explore and potentially shift their inner experience. The idea that a person's emotional state has a single measurable frequency that can be matched by a tuning fork has not been scientifically established. Nevertheless, resonance remains a useful metaphor for understanding why different sounds can feel meaningful to different people. Perhaps the question is not simply which frequency is being played, but how the individual responds to it. Planetary tuning forks and cosmic connections Planetary tuning forks introduce another fascinating dimension to sound healing. These instruments are commonly associated with frequencies calculated from astronomical cycles using octave relationships. For example, the familiar 136.1 Hz frequency, often called the OM or Earth year frequency, is derived through repeated octave scaling of the Earth's orbital period. The mathematical conversion produces an audible frequency. However, the association of that tone with grounding, spiritual awakening, or a particular chakra is a metaphysical interpretation rather than a demonstrated consequence of planetary motion. In my work, planetary tuning forks are meaningful because they provide a structured symbolic relationship between sound, nature, and the cosmos. The Sun, Moon, Earth, and other planetary correspondences can become focal points for intention, meditation, and energetic exploration. I find that combining these symbolic associations with acupuncture points and meridian theory creates a particularly interesting approach to sound-based practice. The scientific question of whether these specific planetary frequencies produce distinct therapeutic effects remains open. Can sound influence consciousness? This is where scientific research becomes particularly interesting. We know that sound can influence attention, emotion, and sensory awareness. We also know that meditation and contemplative practices can be associated with measurable changes in brain activity. A 2016 review and meta-analysis by Fox and colleagues examined 78 functional neuroimaging investigations of meditation. The researchers identified different patterns of brain activation and deactivation associated with different meditation styles, including focused attention, mantra recitation, and compassion-based practices. This suggests that the way we direct consciousness can influence measurable brain processes. It does not prove that tuning forks activate chakras or open spiritual portals. But it does support the broader understanding that focused attention and contemplative experiences involve real neurological activity. For me, that creates an interesting bridge. A tuning fork may act as a focal point for awareness, helping someone enter a meditative state in which their internal experiences become more noticeable. The heart chakra and the experience of connection The heart chakra, traditionally known as Anahata, occupies an important place in many energetic healing systems. Metaphysically, it is associated with compassion, love, emotional connection, and the relationship between our physical and spiritual selves. When I use tuning forks around the heart space, the intention is often to encourage openness, relaxation, and emotional awareness. What interests me scientifically is the relationship between the heart, body, and brain. Research by Lisa Feldman Barrett and W. Kyle Simmons, published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2015, explored how the brain predicts and interprets internal bodily sensations. This process is known as interoception. Our experience of emotion is deeply connected to how the brain processes signals arising from within the body. Could this help explain why someone becomes emotional during a sound session? Possibly. A quiet environment, focused attention, and awareness of bodily sensations may create conditions in which previously unnoticed emotions become more apparent. This is not evidence that the heart chakra has been physically activated. It is a scientifically plausible way to understand part of an experience that spiritual practitioners may describe using energetic language. Why sound can bring emotions to the surface One of the more interesting aspects of sound healing is that the experience is not always simply relaxing. Some people report sadness, memories, joy, or unexpected emotional shifts. From a spiritual perspective, practitioners may describe these experiences as the release of stagnant energy or unresolved emotions. From a psychological perspective, focused sensory experiences can alter attention and bring internal thoughts and feelings into awareness. Research into spiritual experience offers an interesting connection. A 2019 review by Michael Lifshitz, Michiel van Elk, and T. M. Luhrmann explored the relationship between absorption and spiritual experiences. Absorption refers to a person's capacity to become deeply immersed in sensory or imaginative experiences. The researchers discussed how individuals with higher absorption may experience music, meditation, and other practices with greater intensity. This may help explain why two people attending the same sound session can have completely different experiences. One person may simply feel relaxed. Another may see colours or images. Another may experience a powerful sense of spiritual connection. These experiences can be personally meaningful without requiring us to assume that every image or sensation represents an external supernatural event. The role of intention Intention is central to many spiritual healing practices. Before working with tuning forks, I believe it is important to create a clear, compassionate space and allow the person to experience the session without forcing a particular outcome. From a metaphysical perspective, intention is often described as directing energy. From a scientific perspective, intention can influence attention, expectations, behaviour, and the way experiences are interpreted. These are not identical explanations. But they do suggest that the mindset brought into a session can matter. The relationship between practitioner, client, sound, and environment may contribute to the overall experience. I believe the most meaningful work happens when we approach that relationship with curiosity rather than trying to control what someone should feel. Sound, spiritual well-being, and inner awareness One of the most relevant studies in this area was conducted by Tamara Goldsby and colleagues and published in 2017. Their observational research examined the effects of Tibetan singing bowl meditation on 62 participants. Following the sessions, participants reported improvements in several emotional measures and increased spiritual well-being. Although this research involved singing bowls rather than tuning forks, it is relevant to the broader relationship between sound-based meditation and subjective spiritual experience. Another systematic review, published in Explore in 2018, examined transcendent states across meditation and contemplative traditions. The researchers reviewed 25 studies involving 672 participants and found that reported transcendent experiences were associated with various physiological and neurological patterns, including changes in breathing and brain activity. The evidence was preliminary, and the studies varied considerably. Still, the research suggests that experiences people describe as transcendent can be studied scientifically. The spiritual interpretation and the measurable physiological processes need not be treated as the same thing. Are we working with energy or awareness? This may be one of the most important questions in sound healing. When someone reports feeling lighter after a session, what has changed? Has an energetic blockage been released? Has the nervous system settled? Has attention shifted? Has an emotional realization occurred? Perhaps several processes are involved. As a practitioner, I find value in listening to the person's experience without insisting on one explanation. The metaphysical model offers language for energetic balance, chakras, meridians, and spiritual connection. Neuroscience offers language for attention, sensory processing, interoception, emotion, and consciousness. These frameworks are not scientifically interchangeable, but they can encourage us to ask better questions. The deceptive power of something so simple A tuning fork does not look like an instrument capable of inspiring a profound experience. It is small, uncomplicated, and often quiet. Yet its sound can become a focal point for meditation, its vibration can bring awareness to the body, and its symbolic associations can invite reflection. Perhaps that is its most deceptive quality. The instrument itself is simple. The human experience of receiving it is not. I believe sound healing invites us into a relationship with ourselves that is often missing from everyday life. We become quiet enough to notice what we are feeling. We become present enough to recognize what needs our attention. Sometimes, within that stillness, we experience something that feels deeply spiritual. Where science and spirituality meet I don't believe we strengthen sound healing by claiming science has already proven every energetic explanation. We strengthen it by being willing to investigate. Physics demonstrates that vibration is real. Neuroscience demonstrates that sound and bodily sensations are processed through complex neural systems. Research into meditation demonstrates that contemplative experiences can be accompanied by measurable changes in brain activity. Studies of sound meditation suggest potential benefits for relaxation and spiritual well-being. None of these findings prove that planetary tuning forks balance chakras, clear meridians, or transmit cosmic energy. But they provide useful foundations for studying why sound can become such a meaningful part of human experience. For me, the beauty of planetary sound healing lies in the meeting place between ancient traditions, physical vibration, consciousness, and personal experience. Perhaps tuning forks do not need to hold every answer. Perhaps their greatest gift is the invitation to listen. Because sometimes the most profound experiences begin with the simplest vibration. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Kelly Wolf Kelly Wolf, Integrated Energy Medicine Practitioner Kelly Wolf is an acupuncturist, clairvoyant, animal communicator, and Planetary Sound practitioner dedicated to supporting the health and well-being of both people and animals. Her mission is to educate, empower, and inspire others by integrating Traditional Chinese Medicine, sound, frequency, and energy medicine into a holistic approach to healing and consciousness. References: Fox, K. C. R., et al. (2016). Functional neuroanatomy of meditation: A review and meta-analysis of 78 functional neuroimaging investigations. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 65, 208–228. Barrett, L. F., & Simmons, W. K. (2015). Interoceptive predictions in the brain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 16, 419–429. Lifshitz, M., van Elk, M., & Luhrmann, T. M. (2019). Absorption and spiritual experience: A review of evidence and potential mechanisms. Consciousness and Cognition, 73, 102760. Goldsby, T. L., et al. (2017). Effects of singing bowl sound meditation on mood, tension, and well-being: An observational study. Journal of Evidence-Based Complementary & Alternative Medicine, 22(3), 401–406. A systematic review of transcendent states across meditation and contemplative traditions. (2018). Explore, 14(1), 19–35. Kelly Wolf is an intuitive practitioner, acupuncturist, planetary sound practitioner, and metaphysical educator. Her work combines Traditional Chinese Medicine, sound-based practices, and spiritual exploration.

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. A safeguarding concern needs an immediate decision. A staffing absence has left an important part of the day uncovered. Papers for governors are due, and a family commitment cannot simply be moved again. This is not necessarily a sign of poor organisation. It is the reality of headship: several legitimate claims can coexist at the same time, and each can seem to need the leader now. Conventional ideas about work-life balance offer little help in this moment. The image of two evenly weighted sides suggests that the answer lies in dividing time more fairly or keeping work within fixed boundaries. For many headteachers, that picture feels so far removed from the role that the very idea of balance can begin to sound unrealistic. Education Support’s Teacher Wellbeing Index 2025 found that 86% of senior leaders feel stressed, while 81% say they have too much to do and not enough time. The figures reinforce the point that headteacher work-life balance cannot be treated as a private scheduling problem. But balance in school leadership was never going to mean equal hours, a quiet diary or reduced commitment. It means retaining the judgement to decide what this moment genuinely requires, without allowing its demands to become the permanent shape of leadership. Some imbalance is part of leadership There are periods when work must expand. A serious safeguarding matter, an inspection, a staffing crisis or a difficult budget decision may rightly command more time and attention than anything else. Sustainable leadership does not require a headteacher to hold back when the school needs more from them. The important distinction is between a conscious response to exceptional pressure and an unexamined pattern of permanent overextension. Temporary intensity has a purpose. The leader knows why it is necessary, what has been displaced, and when they intend to return to it. Permanent overextension is different. Everything continues to feel exceptional. Strategic work is repeatedly postponed, personal commitments become permanently negotiable, and the leader absorbs more because there is no time to reconsider who should carry it. The number of hours worked may look similar from the outside. The leadership reality is not. In one, the headteacher is making a deliberate trade-off. In the other, pressure has begun making the decisions. Balance is a judgement, not a timetable In “Why Sustainable Schools Depend on Sustained Headteachers,” I argued that sustainable schools depend on headteachers who can sustain their own thinking, energy and perspective. The Headteacher Compass develops that argument through four interconnected dimensions: Balance, Clarity, Impact and Renewal. Balance is the first, but also one of the most easily misunderstood. Within the Compass, Balance means equilibrium: the capacity to adjust as circumstances change and return deliberately to a sustainable centre, rather than a fixed state. This makes the most useful questions different from the familiar question of whether a leader is working too many hours. Hours matter, particularly when excessive working becomes chronic, but they do not tell the whole story. A fuller test is whether attention remains proportionate. Can the leader still think beyond the immediate issue? Are they choosing where to intervene, or reacting to the next demand that arrives? Has one period of pressure displaced every other part of the role and life around it? Consider a secondary headteacher dealing with a serious staffing issue during the same week as an important curriculum review. Giving both matters equal attention would not be balanced. The staffing issue needs more of her now. She postpones the review rather than quietly abandoning it, asks the appropriate senior leader to continue the preparation, and sets a date for her return to the strategic discussion. Her attention has not been evenly divided. It has been consciously moved and then restored. That is balance in practice. When intensity becomes the culture A headteacher’s way of responding to pressure does not remain personal for long. It becomes an organisational signal. When the head is always available, answers every question and responds immediately to every escalation, staff may interpret this as commitment. Over time, however, the school can learn something less helpful: difficult decisions should travel upwards, urgency secures attention and progress depends on the headteacher being involved. The consequences spread. Senior leaders wait for permission instead of exercising judgement. Staff mirror the expectation of constant availability. Strategic conversations become shorter because operational issues always appear more pressing. What began as one leader’s attempt to protect the school can make the school increasingly dependent on that leader’s overextension. Calm boundaries send a different message. They show that an issue can matter without becoming everybody’s emergency, that leaders are trusted to use their authority and that thoughtful decisions are valued more than immediate ones. Boundaries cannot remove structural workload, financial constraints or accountability pressure. They can prevent those pressures from dictating every organisational habit. This organisational effect is why the wider Brainz discussion of balance and boundaries matters: a leader’s boundaries shape the expectations and decision-making habits around them. Accountability does not require personal ownership of everything One of the hardest tensions in headship is that accountability remains with the headteacher even when others must carry the work. It is easy for accountability to become personal ownership of every action, emotion and decision. Yet being responsible for the quality of safeguarding, attendance, curriculum or staff development does not mean personally resolving every issue within those areas. Sustainable leadership requires the headteacher to know where their involvement adds unique value, where another leader needs clear authority and where support should strengthen someone else’s judgement rather than replace it. This is not a withdrawal, and it is not delegation as a way to avoid difficult work. The headteacher still establishes expectations, checks quality and intervenes when necessary. The difference is that responsibility is held without absorbing everything the organisation needs to do. In my own headship, and now through my work as a headteacher coach and school leadership coach at RenewEd Ltd, I often support headteachers who are carrying too much personally, losing time for strategic thinking or struggling to balance competing demands. Coaching does not make the role undemanding. It provides a confidential space to separate genuine accountability from unnecessary personal ownership, clarify priorities and make decisions that protect both leadership effectiveness and wellbeing. A practical reset Balance does not need another productivity checklist. It needs a regular return to three questions: What genuinely needs more of me now? What has this period displaced? What must I deliberately restore when the immediate pressure passes? The first question permits intensity where it is justified. The second makes its cost visible. The third prevents a temporary response from becoming the leader’s permanent operating model. Restoration might mean returning to a strategic priority, handing authority back to a colleague, rebuilding thinking time, or becoming properly present outside work again. The answer will change with the circumstances. The discipline lies in making the return intentional. Leading sustainably Balance is not achieved by making headship smaller, caring less or lowering expectations. Nor is it evidence that a leader has finally organised every competing demand into a manageable week. It is maintained through continual adjustment. Sustainable leaders can lean into pressure when the moment requires it, while remaining alert to what that pressure is displacing. They know that exceptional effort may sometimes be necessary, but permanent overextension is not a credible leadership strategy. Balance is not the absence of pressure. It is the ability to give pressure its proper place, then return deliberately to the wider work and life that leadership must not permanently displace. That return also protects clarity. When leaders no longer treat every demand as equally important, they are better able to decide what genuinely deserves their attention and what the school needs from them next. If you’d like to explore Balance alongside the rest of the framework, it’s set out in full in my book, RenewEd Leadership: How Coaching Transforms Headteachers and Schools. If you are a headteacher struggling to find balance, 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 Sarah Hurst, Coach & Creator of the Mind Medicine Movement™ Drawing on her own healing journey through cancer, Sarah Hurst is a coach and creator of the Mind Medicine Movement™. She helps people calm the nervous system, reconnect with themselves, and take back their power to heal body, mind, and soul. There is a particular kind of anxiety that can arrive before a cancer scan. You may feel relatively steady for weeks or months, then suddenly find your thoughts racing, your body tense, and every unfamiliar sensation carrying more meaning than it did before. This experience is often called scanxiety, and understanding why it happens can make it easier to meet the fear with compassion rather than feeling you should somehow be coping better. What is scanxiety? Scanxiety is the anxiety or distress that can arise before, during, or while waiting for the results of medical scans. The word is informal, but the experience is very real and widely recognised within cancer care. The National Cancer Institute acknowledges that follow-up tests and scans can create significant anxiety, particularly because they can reactivate fears that cancer may have returned. Macmillan Cancer Support has reported that up to two-thirds of people experience scanxiety before cancer scans. For some people, it begins days beforehand. For others, the anxiety builds several weeks before the appointment without them immediately understanding why they are feeling unsettled. You might notice disrupted sleep, irritability, racing thoughts, difficulty concentrating, or a growing urge to check your body for symptoms. You may find yourself imagining conversations with your oncologist that have not happened, mentally preparing for bad news, or searching online for reassurance. None of this means you are negative, weak, or failing at recovery. You have lived through an experience that taught you that scans can carry enormous consequences, so it makes sense that your mind and body pay attention when another one approaches. Why scans trigger fear Before cancer, a medical appointment may have been simply a medical appointment. After diagnosis, that innocence changes. A scan becomes connected with uncertainty. It may remind you of the moment cancer was first found, the wait for staging results, the fear of recurrence, or a previous occasion when a routine check brought unexpected news. This is partly why scanxiety can feel so physical. In my article Why Your Body Still Reacts After Stress or Trauma, I explored how the nervous system learns associations from experience. A hospital smell, waiting room, scanner, or appointment letter can become linked with previous fear, allowing the body to react before the rational mind has caught up. The National Cancer Institute also recognises that people affected by cancer may develop conditioned responses to reminders of treatment, including anxiety in response to medical settings, sights, and smells. This does not automatically mean somebody has post-traumatic stress disorder. It means our nervous system is very good at learning from experiences that once mattered to our safety. When your heart begins beating faster before a scan, your body is not trying to sabotage you. It is responding to something it has learned is important. Waiting feels different Sometimes having the scan is not the hardest part. Waiting for the results can feel far worse. There is little to do and very little to control. The scan has happened, but the answer has not yet arrived, which leaves an uncomfortable gap where imagination can take over. The mind dislikes uncertainty. It wants to fill the empty space with an answer, and when you have already experienced cancer, it has some frightening material available. A small ache suddenly feels suspicious. Fatigue becomes evidence. You replay the radiographer's facial expression and wonder whether they noticed something. You may analyse how quickly the appointment finished or convince yourself that a delay in receiving results must mean something. This is the mind trying to create certainty where none currently exists. Unfortunately, worrying harder cannot give us the answer any sooner. Recognising that does not instantly stop the thoughts, but it can help us separate what we know from what fear is predicting. A useful question is: What are the facts available to me today? Not the possibilities. Not the worst-case scenarios. Just the facts you genuinely have in this moment. Don't fight the fear One of the things I learned through my own experience of cancer is that fighting fear often makes it louder. We can easily create a second layer of distress by telling ourselves we should be calmer. Perhaps we have been doing meditation, mindset work, or nervous system practices and think we ought to be handling scans better by now. But emotional healing does not mean fear never returns. You can have done enormous inner work and still feel anxious before a scan. You can trust your body more than you once did and still notice fear when you enter a hospital. You can be hopeful and frightened at exactly the same time. The aim is not to become so evolved that cancer can no longer scare you. The aim is to develop ways of meeting that fear so that it does not completely take over the days surrounding the scan. This is one of the reasons I prefer hope to forced positivity. As I explored in Why Hope Is More Powerful Than Positive Thinking, hope does not require us to pretend everything will be fine. It allows us to acknowledge uncertainty while remaining connected to possibility. Give fear a container Scanxiety has a way of spreading. A scan on Friday can somehow begin occupying Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and perhaps the whole week before. One way to work with this is to deliberately give the worry some boundaries. Instead of trying never to think about the scan, you might decide to give yourself ten or fifteen minutes to write down everything you are frightened of. Let the thoughts exist on the page rather than asking your mind to hold them continuously. You can also write down questions you want to ask your medical team. This helps separate concerns that require an answer from fears that currently cannot be resolved. When the thoughts return later, you do not need to battle them. You can acknowledge them and remind yourself, I've already given this some space today. I don't need to solve it again right now. This is not about suppressing fear. It is about allowing fear to have a place without giving it the entire house. Use the body first When scanxiety is strong, trying to reason yourself calm may not be enough. The body may already be responding to threat, which is why grounding and sensory practices can be useful. You do not need an elaborate technique. Begin by orienting yourself to where you actually are. Feel your feet touching the floor. Notice the chair supporting your weight. Let your eyes move around the room and take in something ordinary. One of the grounding practices I use is my Four Corners of Calm. Look around you and notice four different things. With the first, silently remind yourself, I am safe. With the second, I am supported. With the third, I am steady. With the fourth, I am here. Then take a slower breath and allow your attention to return to the present moment. The words are simple, but that is the point. When anxiety has pulled us into an imagined future, grounding helps us return to what is happening now. As I explored in The Nervous System and Healing, calm is not about forcing the nervous system into submission. It is about giving it repeated experiences of safety and presence. Choose what you control Cancer can make us painfully aware of how much we cannot control. Scans bring that reality particularly close. There are, however, small areas where choice still exists. You can decide who comes with you. You can ask when and how you are likely to receive your results. You can prepare questions in advance rather than relying on yourself to remember everything while anxious. You can plan something gentle for afterward rather than expecting yourself to return immediately to normal life. You can also decide how much information you consume while waiting. For some people, researching every possible symptom creates reassurance. For many others, it feeds the fear. Pay attention to what happens in your body after you search online. Do you genuinely feel more informed, or do you simply find another possibility to worry about? Taking back power does not mean controlling the outcome. Sometimes it means recognising where choice still exists within uncertainty. Protect the waiting time There can be a temptation to put life on hold until the results arrive. We tell ourselves we will relax after the scan, book something after the appointment, or make plans once we know everything is okay. This is understandable, but if you have regular monitoring, life can gradually become divided into the periods before and after scans. The days in between still belong to you. That does not mean filling them with distractions or pretending you are not worried. It means allowing ordinary life to continue alongside the uncertainty. Have dinner with somebody you enjoy being with. Walk somewhere you love. Watch something that makes you laugh. Keep an appointment you were looking forward to if you have the energy for it. Look for glimmers, not as a way of denying fear, but as reminders that fear is not the only experience available today. Cancer may have made the future feel uncertain, but uncertainty does not have to take the present as well. After the results Even good scan results do not always produce the emotional response we expect. Sometimes there is enormous relief. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes you simply feel exhausted. After days or weeks of tension, the body may need time to come down from the experience. Try not to rush past that. A clear scan does not mean the fear you felt beforehand was unnecessary or silly. It means you have new information now. Allow yourself to receive it. If the news is difficult, the same principle applies in a very different way. You do not need to process your entire future in the first conversation. Listen to what your medical team is telling you, ask what happens next, and allow support around you. A frightening result is not the moment to demand that you become positive. It is the moment to come back to the next piece of information, the next decision, and the next step. When anxiety takes over Some anxiety around scans is understandable, but there are times when additional support is important. Macmillan advises speaking with your GP, cancer doctor, or specialist nurse if anxiety is affecting daily life. Professional psychological support can also be valuable when fear becomes persistent, leads to panic, severely disrupts sleep, or causes you to avoid necessary medical appointments. Asking for help is not evidence that you are coping badly. Cancer places extraordinary demands on emotional wellbeing as well as the body, and support deserves to be part of cancer care. If you are struggling significantly, your medical team can help you access appropriate services. Complementary practices such as meditation, massage, breathwork, and grounding can sit alongside that care, but they should not replace professional mental health support when it is needed. Steady through the scan I wish there were a technique that could remove scanxiety completely. There isn't, and I am not sure that should be the goal. The scan matters, so some fear may always make sense. What can change is your relationship with that fear. You can notice the mind travelling into the future and gently bring it back. You can recognise the body's response without interpreting it as proof that something is wrong. You can create boundaries around worry, make conscious choices about what supports you, and allow another person to hold some of the uncertainty with you. Most importantly, you can remember that you only need to live the moment you are actually in. If your scan is next Friday, you do not have to live Friday today. Today, you can breathe. Today, you can notice what is here. Today, you can let life contain something other than cancer. When Friday arrives, you can meet Friday then. If you are living with cancer, navigating scans, or finding that fear of recurrence is taking up too much space, you can explore my coaching and the Mind Medicine Movement™. You do not have to become fearless to take back your power. Sometimes the first step is learning how to feel fear without allowing it to take today away from you. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Sarah Hurst Sarah Hurst, Coach & Creator of the Mind Medicine Movement™ After walking her own path through cancer, Sarah Hurst discovered that true healing isn’t just physical, it’s emotional, spiritual, and deeply personal. She went on to create the Mind Medicine Movement™, helping others calm their nervous systems, rediscover purpose, and reconnect with themselves through her SIPS™ framework: Slow Down, Identity, Purpose, Self-Love. Today, Sarah supports people living with or beyond cancer and anyone seeking calm, clarity, and wellness through her coaching, meditation, and touch therapy practice in Hove, East Sussex. She also offers an online coaching service.

Written by Emma Abalogun, Leadership Consultant & Speaker Emma Abalogun is a leadership consultant, speaker, and creator of the RAM-R™ Method. She works with organizations to address leadership behavior under pressure – helping leaders stay consistent, accountable, and effective when it matters most. Her work focuses on the patterns that drive performance, trust, and retention across teams. You've probably been in a leadership training room at some point in the last 12 months. Maybe more than once. You may have even left with good ideas, good intentions, and a workbook that didn't survive the first difficult week back at your desk. Now, that doesn't reflect your commitment. What it does reflect is how most leadership development is designed. Most leadership training is designed to give you information, to teach you something new that you may not have heard of before. But the majority of these training sessions rarely give you the capacity to use that information under pressure, when the stakes are high, when you're tired, or when the conversation is hard. That gap between knowing what good leadership looks like and being able to do it under pressure is exactly what the RAM-R™ Method was built to close. Why most frameworks don't stick Most leadership frameworks focus on behavior. What leaders say. How leaders delegate. When leaders should give feedback. All very useful information that doesn't always translate into leading others under pressure. For instance, when a manager is publicly challenged in a meeting, when a senior leader gets bad news right before a critical presentation, or when a team misses an important deadline. In those moments, the framework goes out the window, and reactive leadership takes over. This is where the leader defaults to whatever feels most familiar in the moment, not what’s most effective. The issue here isn't knowledge. It's capacity, specifically emotional capacity under pressure, and that is a very different thing to train. Introducing the RAM-R™ Method The RAM-R™ Method is a four-stage framework designed to build the inner infrastructure leaders need to lead consistently, not just when conditions are easy, but when they're not. It works in four stages: R: Reflection Before behavior can change, a leader has to understand what's actually driving it. Reflection isn't just journaling for its own sake. It's a structured, honest examination of the patterns that show up under pressure. Where do they come from? What triggers them? What do they cost, personally and organizationally? Most leaders have never been given the space or the tools to do this work properly. That's where it all starts. A: Awareness Reflection builds the foundation. Awareness is what you do with it in real time. This is the ability to notice in the moment, mid-conversation or mid-decision, that a trigger has been activated. That the emotional response kicked in before the rational one, and that a choice is available that wasn't visible before. Developing awareness gives leaders more space between trigger and reaction, giving them the opportunity to choose an appropriate response. In-the-moment awareness is one of the highest-leverage leadership skills. It's also one of the least developed. M: Management This is where the practical work happens. Management in this context isn’t about suppressing emotion or performing calmly. It's about developing real, embodied tools to regulate how emotions are expressed, so the leader's response is the one they intended, not the one pressure triggered. This is what separates leaders who are effective under pressure from those who are only effective when conditions are favorable. R: Repeat Most programs skip this stage entirely, and it's the most important one. Behavior doesn't change after one workshop, one insight, or one good conversation. It changes through consistent, deliberate practice over time, through repetition in real conditions, and through accountability to the leader they said they wanted to become. Repetition is what turns a learning moment into a lasting shift. What this looks like when leadership behavior impacts the entire organization When leaders move through the RAM-R™ process, the shifts are visible, and they show up where it counts. Difficult conversations happen earlier, before small problems become expensive ones. Teams feel safer, which means they contribute more and hide less. Decisions get made with more clarity and less reactivity, and the culture starts to actually reflect what the organization says it values. Most importantly, others start to shift, too. Because leadership is contagious. When the person at the front of the room changes how they show up, the room changes around them. That's the leadership ripple effect. Ready to go deeper? If the RAM-R™ Method resonates and you want a practical tool to start working through it, the RAM-R™ Workbook PDF is now available for direct download. It's designed for leaders and managers ready to move beyond knowing and start doing the work. Grab your copy today! Download the RAM-R™ Workbook. If you're ready to help your managers build that kind of trust, let's talk about bringing the RAM-R™ Method to your team. Get in touch today. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Emma Abalogun Emma Abalogun, Leadership Consultant & Speaker Emma Abalogun is a leadership consultant, speaker, and creator of the RAM-R™ Method, a four-step framework for understanding and changing leadership behavior under pressure. Her work focuses on the gap between how leaders intend to show up and how they respond when pressure, uncertainty, conflict, and responsibility make conscious choice harder. Drawing on her background in leadership development, emotional intelligence, and risk assessment, Emma helps organizations develop managers and leaders who stay clear, consistent, and accountable when the pressure is on.

Written by Sonya Black, Coach and Psychotherapist Sonya Black is an accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist, Coach (trauma-informed), and trained family mediator with 20+ years’ experience. She helps people in life's challenges, moving from crisis and complexity to clarity and action, using evidence-based psychology and practical tools so clients can live the life they want to live. You promised yourself it would be different this time. Then a familiar situation brings the same rush of anxiety, the same urge to withdraw, another yes when you needed to say no, or another relationship challenge. Why do these patterns persist, even when you understand them? Across anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma, there can be processes that keep us stuck. Understanding and working with them opens the possibility of deep healing and lasting change, so that you can live the life you want. What does healing involve? Psychological healing involves working with the effects of painful experiences and changing the responses that continue to cause distress or limit your life. This can include how you remember an event, what you believe about yourself, and the ways you protect yourself in relationships. The experience remains part of your history, while its emotional impact and influence on your choices can change. For some people, healing includes treatment for a recognised mental health condition. For others, it means addressing recurring patterns, rebuilding self-trust, or reconnecting with parts of life they have lost touch with. The work begins with understanding what is happening for you. Why patterns persist You may understand why you react the way you do. You have read the books, talked things through, and tried to make changes. Yet a brief message can still leave you feeling rejected. You say yes when you need to say no. Your mind keeps replaying a conversation, or your body remains on alert long after a difficult situation has ended. Afterward, you wonder why you are still struggling. You know what you want to do differently. Why does it feel so hard? In more than twenty years as a psychotherapist, I have worked with people whose experiences are very different, yet who recognise these same struggles. Some arrive with anxiety or depression. Others are navigating trauma, relationship breakdown, or a growing sense that the way they are living is no longer sustainable. In my article on the hidden psychology of divorce, I explore how a major life transition can affect emotional responses and decision-making. Making sense of what is happening can bring enormous relief. Deeper healing also involves working with the experiences, beliefs, and responses that continue to shape the present, then practising a different way of living. This is the thinking behind Transcend and its three phases of healing: Understand & Stabilise, Update & Heal, and Reclaim & Live. We cannot change what has happened. We can heal from its impact and develop greater freedom to choose what happens next. Different difficulties can share familiar patterns Psychological difficulties rarely fit neatly into separate boxes. Anxiety, depression, trauma-related difficulties, and sustained stress can overlap, both in what we experience and in the patterns that keep us struggling. You might recognise worry, disrupted sleep, tension, withdrawal, or a harsh inner voice across several of these experiences. Stress itself is not necessarily a disorder, but it can interact with mental health difficulties. Avoidance offers one example. With anxiety, you might avoid situations you fear. Following trauma, you might avoid reminders of what happened. With depression, withdrawing from activities and people can reduce opportunities for connection or enjoyment, making low mood harder to shift. The reasons differ, while parts of the cycle overlap. A transdiagnostic approach looks across diagnostic boundaries at processes that can contribute to different difficulties. These might include avoidance, repetitive worry or rumination, harsh self-criticism, and difficulty tolerating uncertainty or painful emotions. Research into approaches such as the Unified Protocol supports addressing shared processes across several anxiety disorders. A person makes sense in the context of their life and experiences. Shared processes do not mean that every difficulty has the same cause or needs identical treatment. A diagnosis can guide treatment. An individual understanding, or formulation, helps explain how a particular person's experiences, circumstances, and responses fit together. This gives us several possible points at which to create change. We explore four interconnected areas: thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, and behaviour. A thought can trigger fear, fear can bring physical changes, and those sensations can influence what we do next. Our response then affects what we learn from the experience. Consider someone who worries that other people will reject them. They agree to requests they cannot comfortably manage. Saying yes brings immediate relief, but over time, they become exhausted and resentful. They also lose opportunities to discover that some relationships can withstand an honest no. Understanding the pattern helps us identify where change can begin. Understanding the whole person Our patterns develop within the lives we have lived. A biopsychosocial approach considers how biological, psychological, and social factors interact. Physical health, sleep, and bodily responses can influence how we feel. Our experiences, beliefs, and ways of coping shape how we interpret and respond to situations. Relationships, work, financial pressures, and the support available to us also matter. These influences work together. Sustained pressure at work might disrupt sleep, leaving us more vulnerable to anxiety and self-criticism. Withdrawing from others may then reduce the connection and support that could help us recover. This is why healing involves understanding the whole person and their circumstances. Within Transcend, we consider what needs attention internally, what may need to change around us, and where additional support could help. Lasting change becomes more possible when the work reflects the reality of someone's life. Relationships can influence our difficulties, support recovery, and become an important place where change is experienced and practised. How coping patterns develop Our ways of coping often have a history. Keeping quiet may have helped someone manage criticism. Constantly anticipating problems may have provided some predictability in an unpredictable home. Achievement may have become closely linked with approval and self-worth. These responses can persist after circumstances change. Recognising their history can soften shame, while examining what maintains them now helps us move forward. Difficult relationship decisions can bring these patterns into focus, a theme I explore in Should I Stay or Should I Go? Current circumstances matter too. An excessive workload, an unsafe relationship, or financial pressure needs practical attention. Healing includes recognising what needs to change around us, alongside the work within us. How lasting change develops One way to understand change is to think about an old system and a new system. This is a metaphor for learned patterns of thinking, feeling, and responding. The old system contains familiar predictions and responses: keep everyone happy, expect rejection, stay on guard, withdraw before you are hurt. Some developed during painful experiences, while others have become established through repetition. Even when they cost us, familiar responses can feel compelling and safe within our understanding of safety. A new system develops through therapeutic work and experiences that support different meanings and responses. We identify what happens, examine the beliefs and predictions involved, and practise alternatives. Support and repetition help us carry new learning into different situations. For example, you might notice an urge to apologise whenever you disagree. You explore what you fear will happen, express a manageable difference of opinion in a supportive relationship, and reflect on the response. Over time, several such experiences can help you learn that disagreement and connection can coexist. Where depression has led to withdrawal, a planned, manageable activity can provide an opportunity for engagement before motivation has fully returned. Lasting change involves working with what drives a pattern and making different responses available in everyday life. The three phases give this work direction. Phase 1: Understand and stabilise The aim is to increase your ability to remain present with difficult feelings and respond with greater choice. You do not need to become perfectly calm to do meaningful work. We begin by making sense of your experiences and developing ways to support yourself emotionally and physically. Together, we build an individual understanding, or formulation, of how your experiences, beliefs, emotions, bodily responses, and behaviour connect. This helps us recognise what triggers distress, what keeps a pattern going, and where change can begin. Understanding yourself in this way can soften self-blame and make your responses feel less confusing. Emotional regulation is central to this phase. We learn to recognise difficult emotions, understand what they may be communicating, and find ways to manage their intensity. The aim is to become more able to experience feelings without becoming overwhelmed by them or needing to escape them immediately. This includes working with the nervous system. When you have spent a long time feeling threatened or under pressure, you may find it difficult to settle, even when there is an opportunity to rest. Grounding, gentle breathwork, and somatic practices that bring attention to bodily sensations and movement can help you explore what supports steadiness. Practices are adapted to your responses, as focusing inward does not feel helpful for everyone. We also develop the compassionate self, a supportive way of relating to yourself when things are difficult. This involves noticing what you need and responding with care and wisdom. You might practise a more reassuring inner voice, use compassionate imagery, or ask, “What would help me through this moment?” Self-care becomes part of the foundation. Sleep, nourishment, movement, rest, and connection matter, alongside boundaries and practical support. We explore what nourishes you, what depletes you, and what is realistic within your circumstances. These practices support the conditions for healing and help you build capacity for the work ahead. You do not need to feel perfectly calm before meaningful change can begin. Where danger or adversity is ongoing, practical safety and external support also need attention. A question to reflect on: What am I feeling, what do I need, and how could I respond to myself with greater care? Phase 2: Update and heal “I’ve always been anxious.” “I’ve never felt good enough.” “My mental health has always been like this.” I often hear these words from clients. When a way of thinking or feeling has been present for years, it can become difficult to imagine anything different. A negative view of yourself can feel like a fact about who you are. In this phase, we work with the beliefs, memories, emotional meanings, and responses that keep those experiences alive. Longstanding difficulties deserve careful attention, and their familiarity does not mean they are beyond change. This is the deeper updating work at the heart of Transcend. Understanding how a pattern developed gives us a starting point. We then use appropriate evidence-based techniques to help change the meanings and responses attached to it. You may understand intellectually that you are worthy of care, yet still feel undeserving when someone offers it. You may know that an experience was not your fault while continuing to carry shame. Updating involves working with that gap between what you know and what you feel. Depending on your needs and the setting, this work may include examining core beliefs, imagery, behaviour experiments, compassion-focused techniques, or trauma-focused interventions such as eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR). We might revisit the meaning of an experience, test a feared prediction, or practise receiving support without immediately dismissing it. The aim is deep, lasting change in how you experience yourself and respond to life. A belief such as “I am not good enough” may begin to lose its authority. A memory may carry less distress. You may become more able to trust your judgement, express a need, or remain connected when you feel vulnerable. Using our old-system and new-system metaphor, we are helping established patterns update in the light of what you know and experience now. New learning is strengthened through practice and carried into everyday situations. This work can take time, and progress may be uneven. A familiar feeling returning does not automatically mean that nothing has changed. We look at its intensity, how long it lasts, what you believe about it, and the choices now available to you. We cannot change what happened. We can work towards changing the meaning it holds, the distress it evokes, and the influence it has over your life. A question to reflect on: What have I come to accept as a truth about myself, and what might become possible if that belief could change? Phase 3: Reclaim and live As patterns change, space opens for questions that may have been difficult to consider: What do I need? What matters to me? What kind of life do I want to create? This phase brings healing into relationships, identity, and everyday decisions. It may involve rediscovering interests, expressing needs, developing boundaries, or learning to stay connected through manageable disagreement. Sometimes it includes repairing relationships affected by a difficult period, with the recognition that repair requires participation from those involved. For someone who has spent years trying to avoid disapproval, expressing a different opinion can represent substantial change. For someone whose life has narrowed around fear, returning to a valued activity can be an important step. Interpersonal growth can be part of healing too. You may become more able to express a need, listen without immediately defending yourself, tolerate a difference of opinion, or recognise when a relationship is harmful. As you understand your own responses, you can take responsibility for your behaviour without taking responsibility for everyone else's feelings. Healthier connection also depends on the other person's willingness and behaviour. These experiences help consolidate new learning. Repeated practice gives a different response the opportunity to become more familiar and sustainable. Reclaiming your life also means recognising the limits of your control. You can choose how you respond and where you seek support, while acknowledging real constraints and allowing room for grief. Personal development has a place within this work. You can explore the person you want to become, develop strengths, and make more deliberate choices about your life, alongside addressing distress. Healing and growth can support one another. Following trauma, some people describe post-traumatic growth, positive changes that emerge through working with the impact of profoundly challenging experiences. This can include deeper relationships, a changed sense of personal strength, or new possibilities for the future. Growth can coexist with distress. It does not mean the experience was beneficial or that everyone must find a positive outcome. A question to reflect on: What small action would move me towards the life I want to live? Healing is not always linear Phased approaches have an established history in trauma recovery, including Judith Herman's work on safety, working through traumatic experiences, and reconnection. Transcend brings established psychological principles into a framework for understanding patterns, healing, and creating change. The phases overlap and can be revisited. You can begin reclaiming parts of your life while still healing. You may need more support during a period of change. Treatment research also shows that a separate preparatory stabilisation phase is not necessary for everyone before trauma-focused work. Individual assessment guides what is appropriate. Time and healing do not always move together in a straight line. Time may bring distance and opportunities to recover, while some difficulties continue to need active attention. A stressful week, an anniversary, or a new relationship can bring a familiar response back into view. In our old-system and new-system metaphor, the familiar response may still arise while the newer response is becoming established. Its return does not automatically erase the work you have done. You might recognise it sooner, spend less time caught in it, ask for support, or repair a conversation more readily. A sustained deterioration deserves attention and a review of the support or treatment you need. Healing, recovery, and growth are possible. Progress can include significant relief from symptoms, a less distressing memory, greater self-trust, or more freedom in relationships. The aim is change that reaches beyond a moment of insight and becomes part of how you live. Explore the Transcend programme Transcend offers a guided space for healing and personal development, grounded in evidence-based psychological approaches. This is a blended programme combining professionally facilitated live sessions with prepared and prerecorded learning between meetings. Participants have time to reflect privately and practise, then bring their learning and questions into the live work. The material continues to evolve alongside delivery, allowing the experience to respond to participants' needs. Shared learning can help us recognise that we are not alone. Personal disclosure is a choice, and participants do not share graphic details of their experiences. Individual trauma processing requires an appropriate clinical setting and assessment. Information is valuable. Knowing how to apply it to your own life, with opportunities to practise and support when you become stuck, is often where meaningful change develops. Your past may explain where you are. It does not have to decide where you go next. Explore Transcend and join the programme waitlist to learn more about the developing group experience and the support available. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, for more info! Read more from Sonya Black Sonya Black, Coach and Psychotherapist Sonya Black is an accredited Cognitive Behavioural Psychotherapist, Coach (trauma-informed) and trained family mediator with more than 20 years’ experience. She specialises in high-stakes life trainsitions including relationship breakdown and divorce, alongside trauma, anxiety, depression, and helping clients understand the complexity of what is happening in their mind and body so they can respond with clarity instead of overwhelm. As the founder of CBT in Partnership, Sonya combines evidence-based CBT, EMDR and Mindfulness with powerful coaching techniques to translate insight into action, supporting people to rebuild confidence, strengthen relationships, and move towards a life they want to live that feels aligned and fulfilling.

Brooklyn, New York – A treasured piece of Bay Ridge history now faces an uncertain future, and residents are being called to stand together to help protect it. The Visitation Academy and Monastery campus, a 7.5-acre property at 8902 Ridge Boulevard, is under contract for sale and faces potential redevelopment. On Saturday, November 14, 2026, at 11:00 a.m., the Visitation Academy & Monastery Landmark Initiative will hold a public rally in front of Sacred Heart Chapel to urge New York City leaders to evaluate the entire property for individual landmark designation. For generations, Visitation was more than a school or monastery. It was a place of faith, education, reflection, community, and belonging. Its history reaches back to 1867, when the Kings County Inebriates' Home was incorporated as an institution focused on treating alcohol and opiate dependency at a time when addiction was often met with punishment rather than care. The institution's Bay Ridge grounds later became home to the Sisters of the Visitation, who purchased the property in 1903 and developed it into a religious and educational campus. The property includes significant nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture, Sacred Heart Chapel, mature grounds and landscape features, and its distinctive perimeter wall. Visitation Academy, a women-run and women-led institution, educated generations of girls before closing in 2024. The campus also carries stories that extend far beyond Bay Ridge. Sister Ita Ford, M.M., who attended Visitation Academy, later became a Maryknoll missionary and was one of four American churchwomen murdered in El Salvador in 1980. Saint Teresa of Calcutta also visited the Visitation monastery in 1986, meeting with the Sisters and greeting students and families. "Visitation has been a home, a school, and a place of faith for generations - and its history began even before the Sisters arrived," said Caroline Cardillo of the Visitation Academy & Monastery Landmark Initiative. "We're gathering to make clear that this campus matters to all of New York City and deserves a thorough landmark evaluation." On October 1, the initiative submitted a 430-page Request for Evaluation to the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, including historical research, photographs, maps, newspaper records, and documentation concerning the property's historic burial ground. Landmark designation would not freeze the site in time, but it would require LPC review and approval before major alterations, demolition, or new construction affecting protected features. The November 14 rally is open to the public. Organizers are asking neighbors, alumnae, families, preservation advocates, and supporters across New York City to attend, share their connection to Visitation, and call for the campus to receive a full landmark evaluation. This is Bay Ridge's home, history, and heritage. The time to speak for its preservation is now. For more information. For donation. Instagram Facebook For media inquiries.

After decades of corporate leadership and two experiences with burnout, this executive turned coach discovered that sustainable success begins with whole-person development, inner leadership, and self-awareness. In this interview, she shares how leaders can move beyond performance-driven success, navigate uncertainty, and reconnect with what truly matters in their work and lives. Jan Turner, Executive Coach and Strategic Advisor Your career arc spans C-suite roles at major corporations to founding your own coaching and advisory practice. But you've described your path as one of 'achievement, hardcore burnout, and rebirth.' What does that arc look like from the inside? The operative word for me for years was ‘hardcore.’ I was hardcore in my decades-long pursuit of career achievement. As a financial services executive, I led teams across 11 functional disciplines and in the C-suite, and managed profit and loss in the best and worst of times. I consider myself a recovering overachiever. I’m also a two-time survivor of burnout. The first landed me in the hospital, and the second led to a deeper reckoning as I worked with an executive coach for the first time. Something in me cracked open and recognized itself. I had a clear calling to become a coach someday and to support others in the holistic ways I was yearning for. Years later, it all began falling into place: the right training, the right clients, and the outcomes that told me I was onto something significant. Coaching wasn't a pivot so much as a natural evolution of how life was reshaping me and how I already led. It began as a passion play and grew into a vocation, along with my business advisory, facilitation, and speaking engagements. I’m a student of business and the human condition. You use the phrase 'whole-person development' to describe your approach. In a corporate world that still largely separates the professional from the personal, what does that mean in practice? I see each person through a human lens and have sat in the seats my clients sit in. I help them explore and act on what’s most important to them in a way that is rooted in their inner self, not just the thinking mind. As a certified Integral Coach, Professional Certified Coach, and business leader, my approach is integrative, practical, and deeply needed in the world, especially now. Clients emphasize this to me. The reality is that we do not learn inner leadership in school or in traditional leadership development programs. When we focus on optimizing performance, we miss the point. What is truly needed is to transform the performer. It took my own experience to discover that my burnout was not a work problem. Rather, it was a wholeness problem, a consequence of constantly leading from performance. Leaders who do inner work, including developing self-awareness, emotional mastery, and grounded presence, outperform those who only develop skills and focus on strategy. They’re able to create real connection, operate with integrity and compassion, and access a well of resiliency. They embrace that they’ll never have all the answers or full control in work or life. Give us a sense of the types of clients and organizations who partner with you. Why is this work relevant now? The leaders and teams I work with are navigating increasing complexity and transitions of all kinds. They need to grow as leaders, bring teams together cohesively, innovate, and drive outcomes. They want to elevate their contribution or pivot. Many also want to improve their well-being, habits, or relationships in a sustainable way. While the challenges facing those working at the forefront of technology are particularly acute, the existential angst around AI is growing regardless of one’s industry or level. This concern should not be suffered in silence or considered ‘glass half empty’ thinking. Couple this with chronic stress and pressure from increasing business demand, shrinking budgets, and layoff risks, and you loop in most of the economy. I see these dynamics firsthand in my dialogues with professionals across sectors. Truly strong organizations recognize that people need to be grounded in themselves and feel psychologically safe to do their best work. They are making space for conversations on formerly taboo topics like burnout. They’re re-evaluating leadership models to include a richer set of capacities, not just competencies. They’re providing coaching and team-based support to help employees not only meet the moment but also learn to support themselves and each other more effectively for the long haul. The level of uncertainty facing leaders will not let up. The best organizations know this is not soft work. It is the hardest and most consequential work their leaders can do. Can you share a success story that deeply moved you? I coached a highly accomplished SVP who was ready to create his next chapter on his own terms. He engaged fully and developed a rich understanding of the mindset and behavioral patterns that no longer served him. His sense of personal agency deepened in a way that was increasingly visible to and felt by those around him. He soon pivoted into a new leadership role that met every “non-negotiable” criterion that mattered most to him. What moved me most was watching someone transition from performing a version of success that no longer fit to building something that aligned with who he'd yearned to become. That's the kind of shift I hope for with every client or team. Your own journey involved reconnecting with your inner wisdom and learning to lead from presence rather than performance. What would you say to a leader reading this who senses something similar but doesn't know where to begin? Pay attention to what stirs inside of you. Instead of pushing it aside or down, get curious about it. The most successful clients know intuitively that the time has come for them to change or shift something fundamental to get more of what they want out of work and life. Part of this is feeling into and naming the fear that is holding you back, keeping you stuck, or making you play small. Take ten minutes this week to sit in silence and ask yourself two questions: “What have I been ignoring?” and “What do I long for most?” Listen closely to and reflect on what comes up. Let what surfaces capture your attention. See where it takes you. If what I’ve shared resonates, reach out. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Jan Turner

Written by: Editorial Team Plastic waste can be difficult to recycle when it contains adhesives, contaminants, or a mixture of materials. Processing equipment may struggle to handle it, leaving potentially useful polymers unused. Manufacturers then have to find other ways to manage waste that could otherwise serve as raw material. Ukrainian engineer Oleh Bohila worked on this problem at Snizhnyanskremstanok, where he served as chief mechanical engineer from August 2014 to December 2016. He adapted the production process to turn waste from adhesive tape manufacturing into products made from a mixture of polymer and sand. His work offers a practical example of a circular economy approach in which one manufacturer’s waste becomes another’s raw material. Turning tape waste into raw material Manufacturers of adhesive tape approached Bohila looking for a way to recycle their production scraps. He says other recyclers had refused to accept the material because the adhesive made it hard to shred. Attempts to process the tape using standard methods clogged the equipment. Bohila began by testing samples of the waste tape. Fine shredding did not work, so he revised the preparation method and modified the melting equipment. Over roughly four months, he adjusted several stages of the process to make them work together. With these changes in place, the plant was able to turn the tape waste into roof tiles and paving stones by mixing the polymer with sand and molding the mixture. Manufacturers who had struggled to find a recycler now had an outlet for their production scraps. Using the recovered polymer also reduced the plant’s need for virgin plastic. Improving production by drying the sand The polymer was only one part of the production mix that needed attention. Moisture in the sand slowed production and made it harder to mold tiles consistently. Bohila designed and built a dryer that continuously removed moisture from the sand before mixing. He reports that this change improved production efficiency by approximately 15% and made molding more consistent. Adapting the process to different materials Testing revealed how changes in the size of the shredded polymer affected the equipment. When blockages occurred, Bohila modified the machinery and adjusted how material was fed into the melting unit. The tests showed why each adjustment had to be assessed across the production line. A change in material preparation could affect melting and mixing, so those stages needed to be checked together. Bohila drew on this experience when selling production equipment and advising customers in Ukraine. He helped customers choose operating settings suited to their raw materials and demonstrated how the equipment handled their samples. At another plant, the work starts with examining the waste materials and testing how they behave in the equipment. These tests help determine which adjustments are needed, since waste composition and operating conditions can differ from one facility to another. Making recycling work in practice For Bohila, the project reinforced a working principle that still guides his decisions: understanding the material comes before modifying the machinery. Testing helped him identify why the standard process failed and decide what to change. For manufacturers, technical feasibility is only part of the decision. They need to consider whether preparing the waste is affordable, whether the line can run reliably, and whether there is a market for the finished products. These factors help determine whether a successful trial can become a viable production process. Sorting alone does not make waste usable. The production line must also be able to handle it. In Bohila’s project, changes to material preparation and equipment allowed the plant to use discarded tape in place of some of its virgin plastic. Bohila moved to the United States in April 2022 and plans to apply his engineering experience to plastic recycling there. He is considering opening a facility that would use hard-to-recycle plastic waste to manufacture products for infrastructure projects. His plans build on his work at the Ukrainian plant, where changes to material preparation, melting equipment, and sand drying made previously unusable waste suitable for production. For any future facility, the priorities remain the same: reliable processing, consistent product quality, and economic viability.