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. Many people begin searching online for phrases such as “I need a new job”, “I want a new career” or “I need a career change”, hoping the right opportunity will magically appear. Most career advice begins at the wrong point. It starts with curriculum vitae (CV) documents and LinkedIn profiles, interview preparation, job applications and networking. All of these have their place. Yet they come much later in the career change process than many people realise. The need for a more deliberate process is not abstract. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) research published in 2025 found that more than 1 million United Kingdom (UK) workers had left their jobs in the previous year due to a lack of flexibility. A job move may change the employer without resolving the underlying mismatch unless the person first identifies what work now needs to provide. Yet I kept noticing the same pattern. Those who made the most successful career decisions rarely started by asking, “What jobs could I apply for?” Instead, they asked a far more important question, “What am I actually trying to change?” That question changes everything because until you understand what is driving the desire for change, every job advert begins to look like a potential solution. That realisation became the foundation of what I now call the Career Compass. The framework brings together themes explored in my earlier Brainz articles on why knowing you need a career change is not enough, why career change can feel harder than it should, and why CV language can hide transferable value. Here, those issues become four connected conversations rather than isolated pieces of advice. I chose the word Compass deliberately. Career change is rarely a straight line. Priorities shift. Opportunities appear unexpectedly. Circumstances change. A map assumes you already know exactly where you are going. A compass helps you navigate uncertainty while keeping you moving in the right direction. The Career Compass is not another personality profile. It is not a psychometric assessment. It is not a list of careers matched to your interests. It is a practical framework built around four conversations that consistently help people make better career decisions, clarity, alignment, positioning and movement. Each conversation builds on the one before it. Miss one, and the process becomes more difficult. Work through all four, and career change becomes less about searching for another job and more about making thoughtful decisions that reflect your strengths, your aspirations and the life you want work to support. Clarity: Understanding what is really driving the desire for change The difficulty is that activity without clarity rarely creates progress. More often, it creates confusion. People apply for roles that look attractive on paper but never really address the reason they wanted to make a change in the first place. After weeks of applications, they begin to lose confidence, assuming the problem is their CV or the competition, when in reality they may have been pursuing opportunities that were never the right fit. What are you actually trying to change? People often believe they need a new job when what they really need is a different way of working, a different organisation or a different role within the same sector. Others discover they don’t want to leave work altogether, they simply want work that better fits their lives. Throughout my coaching, I often encourage people to stop asking, “What job do I want?” and instead ask, “What needs to be different for work to become sustainable again?” That subtle shift changes the entire conversation. Instead of chasing vacancies, they begin recognising patterns. They identify what gives them energy and what consistently drains it. They separate temporary frustrations from genuine long-term dissatisfaction. Alignment: Recognising what genuinely fits What does the right career actually look like for you? Many people assume this question can be answered simply by looking at their qualifications or previous job titles. In my experience, it goes much deeper than that. A fulfilling career is rarely built on skills alone. It is created when your strengths, values, motivations and lifestyle all work together. This is why I describe the second stage as alignment rather than simply identifying strengths or transferable skills. The challenge is understanding how they fit together. Over the years, I have worked with teachers, healthcare professionals, military personnel, finance directors, operations managers, engineers and senior leaders from many different sectors. Despite their very different careers, I have noticed something remarkably similar. Many define themselves by what they do rather than by the value they create. The capabilities people develop do not disappear simply because they change sector. What often changes is not capability but identity. Many people have spent years describing themselves by their profession. Leaving that profession can therefore feel like leaving part of themselves behind. Recognising that your value extends far beyond your job title is often one of the biggest breakthroughs in the coaching process. The challenge is recognising those capabilities. Alignment is about helping people understand the combination of strengths, experiences and personal values that make them successful. It is also about recognising what they need from work to thrive. For some people, that means autonomy. For others, it means flexibility. Some need opportunities to lead. Others value collaboration, creativity or purpose above status or salary. Positioning: Communicating your value with confidence Many people believe positioning is simply about writing a better CV. It isn’t. A CV is only one way of communicating your value. Positioning is about being able to explain, consistently and confidently, why you are the right person for a particular role. It starts with recognising your transferable skills. One of the biggest challenges when changing sectors is understanding how to transfer your skills into language that employers immediately recognise. One of the most valuable parts of career coaching is helping people identify those transferable skills and translate them into the language of the sector they want to move into. The capability already exists. It simply needs translating. Many organisations now use Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) and recruitment tools assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) to screen applications before a hiring manager ever reads them. If your experience is described only in the language of your current profession, the technology may fail to recognise how well your skills align with the new role. The capability is there. The evidence is there. The application simply isn’t telling the story in the language the employer is looking for. Positioning is about bridging that gap. It is about translating your experience into language that is both authentic and relevant to the organisation you want to join, ensuring that AI systems recognise your transferable skills and that hiring managers immediately understand the value you bring when your application reaches them. Confidence is not about pretending to know all the answers. It is about understanding your strengths well enough to communicate them with clarity, credibility and purpose. Movement: Taking action with purpose The problem is that without the three preceding conversations, career moves are often reactive rather than intentional. Without clarity, many professionals apply for roles they do not really want. Without alignment, they pursue opportunities that fail to reflect their strengths, values or the life they want work to support. Without positioning, they struggle to communicate their value in a way that both AI recruitment systems and employers recognise. Movement is where all of that thinking becomes purposeful action. Importantly, movement does not always mean changing employer. For some people, the right decision is to apply for promotion. For others, it is moving into a different department, negotiating flexible working or taking on a project that better reflects their strengths and aspirations. Sometimes the right decision is to stay exactly where they are, but with renewed purpose and a clearer direction. The Career Compass is not designed to persuade someone to change careers. It is designed to help them decide whether change is actually necessary. That distinction matters. Successful career decisions are rarely driven by urgency. They are driven by understanding. Once someone understands what they are looking for and feels confident communicating the value they bring, movement becomes far more strategic. Rather than applying for every role that appears remotely relevant, they begin focusing their time and energy on opportunities that genuinely fit. Movement is also about recognising that career development is rarely a single decision, but a series of thoughtful decisions made over time. Sometimes the next step is a new role. Sometimes it is gaining an additional qualification. Sometimes it is volunteering, shadowing someone in another organisation, taking on a project or building experience that strengthens your position before making the move. The aim is not to secure the next job as quickly as possible. The aim is to secure the right job, for the right reasons, at the right time. By this stage of the Career Compass, people have usually stopped asking, “What’s available?” Instead, they begin asking, “Which opportunities genuinely move me closer to the career and life I want to build?” That question transforms the quality of every decision that follows. Movement is no longer driven by frustration or uncertainty. It is guided by clarity, alignment and confident positioning. For me, that is where the Career Compass comes together. Clarity helps someone understand what they are really trying to change. Alignment helps them recognise what genuinely fits. Positioning enables them to communicate their value with confidence and credibility. Movement turns that understanding into purposeful action. It is the difference between searching for another job, and building a career that continues to fit as your life evolves. More than a framework for career change Each conversation strengthens the next. Miss one, and the whole process becomes harder. Work through all four, and career decisions become calmer, more intentional and far more sustainable. Choosing where we spend such a significant part of our lives deserves more than a rushed application or a reactive decision. It deserves reflection. It deserves intention. It deserves direction. That is what the Career Compass is designed to provide. It is not a shortcut or a guarantee, but a practical way of making career decisions that reflect not only the work you want to do, but also the life you want your work to support. Successful career change is rarely about finding the next job. Whether you’re looking for a new job, exploring a new career, changing sectors or simply questioning whether your current role still fits the life you want to live, the Career Compass is designed to help you make those decisions with greater clarity, confidence and purpose. A map tells you where to go. A compass helps you choose the right direction. The Career Compass is explored in more depth in my book, RenewEd Career: How Career Change Coaching Provides Clarity and Direction. If you are considering a career change and want to work through the Career Compass with a coach, visit RenewEd Ltd to book a confidential consultation. 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 Tanner O. Campbell, Philosopher of Stoicism Tanner Campbell is a public philosopher specialising in orthodox Stoicism. He hosts the Practical Stoicism podcast, co-authored "What Is Stoicism? A Brief and Accessible Overview", and runs a private Stoic coaching practice in Dundee, Scotland. Most people who tell you they’re into Stoicism have never studied Stoicism. Instead, they’ve consumed a lot of so-called Stoic content on social media and mistaken that content for an education in the philosophy. The result is that a version of the philosophy which would have baffled Epictetus and bored Seneca has become the mascot of Stoicism–to the detriment of all. Here are the five ideas about Stoicism that do the most damage, and what the actual Stoics said instead. First, what is Stoicism? Stoicism is a ~2,300-year-old philosophy and virtue ethics framework founded by a Phoenician merchant-turned-shipwrecked-homeless-immigrant named Zeno (of Citium). It teaches that the proper use of a human life is to perfect one’s rational faculty so that one may “live according to Nature.” To live according to Nature means to perfect one’s natural purpose. As a parallel, consider the honeybee. The nature of a honeybee is to pollinate and serve the hive, and the better it does this, the better a honeybee it is. The nature of a human being, so say the Stoics, is to reason. It is a thing we cannot help but do. You’re doing it right now as you read these words, and you’ll continue to do it every moment of the rest of your life, well or poorly. To reason well, one needs to interpret reality as honestly as possible so they can first understand their roles and duties to others and themselves. Once they’ve done this, they can begin the lifelong process of training their mind and character toward fulfilling these roles and duties. Or, in the shortest of short form, Stoicism is a naturalistic theory for living a good life, where “good” means virtuous. If you’d like a more robust explanation, you might consider my book. Why is Stoicism so often misunderstood? Like any theory meant to give you a complete picture of human purpose, morality, ethics, and the natural laws which govern the cosmos, and, indeed, how the cosmos itself came to be in the first place, Stoicism is deeply nuanced and requires years of study to understand properly. It’s also the case that the Stoics were more specific in their use and definition of words than we are accustomed to being today. For example, when the Stoics use the word “Good,” they don’t mean it in the way we mean it today, as in, for example, “I’m having a good day,” or “he’s a good guy,” or “that was such a good book.” Combine these reasons with an internet culture of click-baiting and view-chasing for profit, and what you have is a nuanced philosophy being cherry-picked for marketable content, misinterpreted by the uninformed, and popularised through shallow but catchy maxims that look nice on coffee mugs but do very little to teach anything truly useful to anyone. Five common misconceptions about Stoicism 1. Stoicism is a philosophy for men only Since Stoicism is the pursuit of a virtuous character, and the Latin root vir- denotes “of men,” some people say that only men can pursue virtue. Thus, Stoicism is a philosophy and practice reserved for men alone. This is, frankly, stupid. For a couple of reasons. First, Stoicism is an Ancient Greek philosophy and, I probably don’t need to tell you, the Ancient Greeks didn’t write their philosophies (or anything else) in Latin. “Virtue” is the Latin best equivalent for the original Greek “Aretḗ,” which meant “excellence.” In particular, it meant excellence of character. Certainly women have characters the same as men, and certainly the perfection of character cannot be valuable to one gender without being likewise valuable to the other. But in addition to this, Aretḗ is the name of a Greek Goddess (see, woman) who was the Goddess of excellence! If all that isn’t enough, consider the words of Stoic philosopher Musonius Rufus, who said: "Women as well as men have received from the gods the gift of reason, which we use in our dealings with one another and by which we judge whether a thing is good or bad, right or wrong. Likewise, the female has the same senses as the male, namely sight, hearing, smell, and the others. Also, both have the same parts of the body, and one has nothing more than the other. Moreover, not men alone, but women too, have a natural inclination toward virtue and the capacity for acquiring it, and it is the nature of women no less than men to be pleased by good and just acts and to reject the opposite of these. If this is true, by what reasoning would it ever be appropriate for men to search out and consider how they may lead good lives, which is exactly the study of philosophy, but inappropriate for women?" Stoicism is a philosophy for human beings, and one’s gender has nothing at all to do with it. 2. Stoicism teaches you to stop caring When translating from Greek to Latin to English, a lot of unfortunate artifacts arise. One such artifact is that when you say the words indifference and indifferents out loud, it sounds as though you’ve said the exact same word twice. Since most people aren't familiar with the plural form of indifferent, they think they are hearing the word “indifference.” This has led to the (incorrect) belief that Stoics are meant to practice indifference. That is to say, they are meant to be indifferent toward things. What things? “Anything they cannot control.” But none of that is correct. In Stoicism, an “indifferent thing” is a thing which neither reflects our character nor impacts our character’s development. For example, being poor does not reflect whether I am a good person or a bad person. Nor does being poor prevent me from developing my character toward excellence, toward virtue. So money is an indifferent thing, not in the sense that it doesn’t matter, but in the sense that it doesn’t say anything about our character or prevent us from improving ourselves morally. From the Stoic perspective, almost all things are “indifferents.” Freedom, slavery, peace, war, wealth, poverty, etc. The Stoic never held that these things don’t matter. Of course, they can matter a great deal! They held only that the presence of these things is not a sign of our individual character. We can become better and act well, or worse and act poorly, whether we are free or enslaved, whether the world is at war or peace, and whether we are rich or poor. Stoics, in fact, have to care about a great many things. Stoics have to care about things like freedom, slavery, poverty, wealth, war, and peace to execute their roles and duties appropriately (and thus pursue Virtue). After all, what would it say about a person’s character if they said, “Oh, slavery doesn’t affect me, and so I don’t care about it!” Would that suggest a virtuous and excellent character to you? Of course it wouldn’t. 3. Stoicism is for lone wolves Stoics were notoriously problematic for corrupt leadership and, as a result, they were exiled a number of times throughout history. Musonius Rufus, quoted earlier, was one such exiled Stoic, banished to the island of Gyaros by the tyrant Nero. It is perhaps for this reason that there has been credence lent to the idea that Stoics are meant to live lives of solitude, in need of nothing and no one, to subsist on their own mental musings and intellectual pursuits alone. But this is wrong. One of the things that distinguishes Stoics from Cynics is that Stoics believe the pursuit of virtue, of an excellent moral character, is best pursued through the appropriate fulfillment of duties and roles within the Cosmopolis. The Stoics were prosocial and believed that participation in society was key to attaining virtue. Stoics are meant to be able to endure exile, solitude, and loneliness, to be sure, but they are not meant to seek it out as if it were the point. 4. Stoicism is a resilience programme Google “Stoic resilience routines,” and you’ll discover a theme. Stoics seem to like to punish themselves to prepare for the worst. There is some truth to this, but only a small amount. There is a (Latin) phrase, “Premeditatio Malorum,” or “the premeditation of evils,” which suggests Stoics spend some amount of time, on a regular basis, thinking about all the things that might go wrong in the world so that they might be less caught off guard when those things wind up actually happening. As I said, there is some truth to this, and it predates Stoicism by a century. Aristippus of Cyrene, a sensual hedonist, seems to be the one responsible for the idea. It was not until the 21st century, however, inspired by English translations of Seneca, that several Anglophone Stoics coined the expression “negative visualization” and gave it the dog-Latin, that’s made-up Latin, expression “premeditatio malorum.” So the term is more marketing than it is anything else, but the idea is somewhat Stoic. We should prepare ourselves for what may come, in whatever ways we’re reasonably able to do so. But not for the purpose of being strong and resilient when and if those terrible things we’ve prepared for finally arrive. Rather, so that those terrible things, which are also indifferent things, which you now understand, do not overpower our rational faculty and cause us to act unjustly, immorally, or with evil intent. Stoics prepare appropriately for the worst so they can keep improving their moral character in its wake. 5. Stoicism means suppressing your emotions It seems that when the word “stoic” is used to describe someone, it’s frequently meant as a pejorative or as shorthand for a lack of appropriate emotion. This use of the word isn’t without its truth. Whether we Stoics, with a capital “S,” like it or not, the compartmentalisation of duty from emotion is associated with “being stoic,” note the lowercase “s.” This sort of stoicism, again, lowercase “s,” does have some utility in the world. Certainly a combat medic cannot go to pieces when attending to the needs of wounded soldiers, no matter the horrors he or she may be witnessing while doing so. But Stoicism, I’ll point out the capital “S” this final time, doesn’t encourage this sort of emotional compartmentalisation. Instead, Stoics must be highly in tune with their emotions, because being unaware of them risks being overpowered by them. A Stoic must notice when they are angry, for example, so that they can hold that emotion in their mind, examine it, and determine whether it’s a safe and appropriate emotion to have. There are two categories of emotion in Stoicism, unhealthy passions (pathē) and healthy feelings (eupatheiai). It is rarely, if ever, appropriate to validate indulgence in pathē, and it is encouraged to express eupatheiai appropriately. Pathē include hate, anger, jealousy, and lust, to name a few. Eupatheiai include love, joy, contentment, and so forth. Pathē always encumber just and appropriate action. Eupatheiai are the opposite. If you feel rage about injustice, for example, and you use that rage to motivate your response, it will ensure your actions are both inappropriate and unjust. Whereas, if you use the emotion of love to motivate your response to injustice, your actions can be both appropriate and just. This doesn’t mean that a response to injustice cannot be violent, or cannot involve force, consider the Stoic Opposition. It only means that our deployment of reason in planning our response is not fueled by negative emotions that cloud both right reason and a proper understanding of our duties and result in a less thoughtful and less ethical response to injustice, which frequently only makes things worse. Where to start with real Stoicism If you’re interested in learning more about actual Stoicism, you can listen to my free podcast or buy my book. Or, if you’re a successful professional who, despite their success, is feeling a bit lost and uncertain about what comes next in life, you might consider engaging my private Stoic coaching practice. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Tanner O. Campbell Tanner O. Campbell, Philosopher of Stoicism Tanner Campbell is a public philosopher who teaches Stoicism as the ancient Stoics actually practised it, not in the way that pop culture has bastardised it. He hosts the award-winning Practical Stoicism podcast (over 10M downloads), and co-authored "What Is Stoicism? A Brief and Accessible Overview." Through his company, 134 Labs, he delivers decision-making and team workshops to businesses, mentors private clients one-on-one, and writes the Stoic Brekkie newsletter weekly. He writes the journaling curriculum at StoicJournaling.com, a year-long daily journaling programme. Tanner lives in Scotland with his wife and their son.

Written by Michael J McCusker, Founder & Podcast Host Michael J McCusker is a Global Freedom Fellow, a multiple-time author, and host of the acclaimed “Lived Experience Podcast Series.” He’s a respected advocate for justice reform and a thought leader in Lived Experience Leadership, using storytelling to spark social change. Virality has become a false god in the digital age. A seductive metric, numbers that flash across screens and convince people that attention equals impact. Spiking visibility is mistaken for a shift in influence. Yet beneath the noise, beneath the endless scroll and algorithmic theatre, something quieter and far more powerful is at work. Trust does not trend, nor explode overnight. It does not arrive in waves of anonymous engagement from people who will forget your name as quickly as they discovered it. Trust is slower. Heavier. Earned through consistency, clarity, and lived alignment between what is said and what is done. A viral post might bring a million eyes. Few of those eyes will stay, and even fewer will listen. Almost none will act. A trusted voice, on the other hand, can move a room with fifty people. Influence decisions inside organisations. Open doors that metrics alone will never unlock. Create opportunities that are not available to those chasing reach without resonance. The obsession with going viral has distorted what thought leadership actually means. It has encouraged performance over substance. Speed over depth. Reaction over reflection. The result is a landscape flooded with content but starved of conviction. Authority is not built in moments. It’s built in patterns. A pattern of showing up when it is easier to stay silent or saying something meaningful when others are saying something popular. Patterns refine ideas, sharpen perspectives, and allow lived experience to shape the message rather than forcing the message to fit a trend. This is not as immediately rewarding as virality. It does not deliver the same dopamine hit or provide the illusion of instant validation. What it does provide is something far more enduring. Credibility. The kind of credibility that makes people pay attention when you speak and leads to invitations rather than requests. It positions you as someone worth listening to, not because you are everywhere, but because what you say carries weight. In a world driven by algorithms, it is easy to forget that real influence still operates through human judgement. Decision makers are not looking for the loudest voice. They are looking for the clearest thinking, for individuals who understand nuance, who can navigate complexity, and who can articulate ideas with both conviction and care. Those individuals are rarely the ones chasing virality. They are the ones building trust with the right people. The right people are not defined by numbers. They are defined by alignment. Alignment of values, ambition, and perspective. When your message reaches individuals who recognise themselves in your thinking, something shifts. The interaction moves beyond consumption. It becomes a connection. Connection is where influence begins A trusted voice does not need to convince everyone. It needs to resonate deeply with a specific audience. An audience that sees not just the content, but the intent behind it. That recognises the consistency and begins to associate your name with a certain standard. That standard becomes your currency. When you write, speak, or share from a place of lived understanding, something changes in the way your message lands. There is a depth that cannot be manufactured. A tone that cannot be replicated by those who are simply repackaging ideas. Authority that comes not from volume, but from experience. People can feel the difference, and this is why trust compounds Every piece of content becomes part of a larger narrative. Reinforcing a reputation that is being constructed in the minds of your audience. Over time, this creates a body of work that speaks for itself. No single post needs to carry the weight of your entire platform. A single moment need not define your trajectory. Instead, your influence is built through accumulation. Through sustained presence and a refusal to dilute your message in pursuit of attention. The pressure to go viral often leads to compromise. It encourages individuals to say what will be shared rather than what needs to be said. Rewards exaggeration and pushes people towards the edges of their integrity in exchange for visibility. This is a dangerous trade. Visibility without trust is fragile. It can disappear as quickly as it arrived and does not translate into long-term opportunities, create meaningful impact, or build a legacy. Trust, however, creates leverage. Leverage in conversations and rooms where decisions are made, shaping narratives that extend beyond your immediate audience. When people trust you, they do not just engage with your content. They advocate for your ideas, reference your work, and bring your name into spaces you have not yet entered. This is how influence expands. Not through a single viral moment, but through a network of trusted relationships that amplify your voice in ways that algorithms cannot replicate. For those building a platform rooted in lived experience, this distinction becomes even more important. Lived experience carries a responsibility. To develop it into a trusted body of work is to honour its depth. This requires discipline, patience, and a willingness to prioritise long-term impact over short-term attention. It requires an understanding that not every message will resonate with everyone, and that this is not a failure, but a sign of clarity. Clarity attracts the right people The right people are not looking for perfection. They are looking for authenticity, consistency, for voices that feel grounded, considered, and real in a space that often feels performative. When they find that, they stay. They read more, listen more closely, and engage more thoughtfully. Over time, they begin to trust not just what you say, but how you think. That trust becomes the foundation of your influence. From that foundation, opportunities emerge. Speaking engagements that are not based on follower counts, but on perceived value. Partnerships that are built on a shared vision rather than transactional reach. Audiences that are invested, not just interested. This is the difference between being seen and being respected Being seen can happen in an instant. Respect is built over time. One can be achieved through tactics. The other requires substance. The current landscape rewards those who understand this distinction. Those who are willing to step back from the noise and focus on depth. Understanding that influence is not about how many people hear you, but how many people trust you enough to act on what you say. Going viral might change your numbers. Being trusted by the right people will change your trajectory. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Michael J McCusker Michael J McCusker, Founder & Podcast Host Michael J McCusker is a dynamic storyteller and podcast host who uses the power of voice to spark meaningful change. As a seasoned leader with lived experience, they’ve dedicated their life to guiding others toward purpose, self-leadership, and impact. Through powerful interviews and transformative conversations, their podcast The Lived Experience Series amplifies voices that are often unheard but deeply needed. A published author, Michael J McCusker, writes with clarity and conviction in Hidden Potential: Unlocking The Door Within, turning personal insight into universal lessons. Their work empowers individuals to own their story, speak with influence, and lead with authenticity. Whether on stage, behind the mic, or on the page, The Resilient Irishman: How to Tackle Life's Adversities. Michael J McCusker is committed to shifting narratives and building a legacy that inspires others to rise.

Written by Phyllis R. Caddell, Communications Strategist Phyllis Caddell is an author, ghostwriter, publicist, and communications strategist. She has been guiding clients in developing, crafting, and improving their brand narratives for over 27 years. We tend to celebrate founders. They take the risk, build something from nothing, and leave behind organizations that outlast them. What we talk about far less is what happens next: the harder, quieter work of carrying that vision forward. What does it actually take to inherit someone else's life's work and make it your own? That question matters more every year as founders across industries plan their exits, family businesses pass to the next generation, and organizations everywhere ask what leadership looks like once the person who started it all has stepped back. Building something is one kind of challenge. Inheriting it and earning the right to lead it is another entirely. Joy Rohadfox has lived both. Her father, Dr. Ronald Rohadfox, founded Rohadfox Corporation in 1976. Today, it's a respected global construction and program management firm with a footprint across major transportation, aviation, and public infrastructure projects. Under Joy's leadership, that footprint has grown to include work tied to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), and the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) expansion ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics. When Joy stepped into leadership, the company was only part of what she inherited. She also took on a name, a reputation, a workforce, a client base, and a set of relationships that had been built long before she arrived. Her path holds real lessons for anyone thinking about what legacy demands. Stewardship comes before leadership Leadership conversations tend to center on authority: who's in charge and who decides. Legacy asks something different of you. It asks for stewardship. That's the word Joy returns to when she talks about her own approach: protecting what her father built while making sure the organization is ready for a future she won't be around to see. That mindset changes how decisions get made. It's no longer just, "What's right for the business today?" It becomes, "Will this leave the organization in better shape for whoever leads it next?" For someone stepping into a second-generation role, that's not simple. There's real pressure to honor what came before. But honoring the past isn't the same as being bound by it. Markets shift. Clients change. Technology moves on. Whoever comes next has to be free to move with it. The best successors don't see it as a choice between preservation and reinvention. Their real job is figuring out which parts of the foundation are nonnegotiable and which parts were never meant to be permanent. Related article: Moving a Family Business Beyond the Founder's Vision, Harvard Business Review Taking over doesn't mean being believed Joy became Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Rohadfox Corporation at 27. She was stepping into a company her father built in an industry, construction and infrastructure, where women, and especially Black women, almost never held the top seat. So the job wasn't just running a business. It was leading while constantly working against assumptions that came with the last name on the building. She's talked about sitting in meetings as CEO and watching people direct questions to someone else at the table, anyone but her. There are a lot of ways to respond to that. Joy responded by getting sharper. Instead of letting other people's doubts shape how she saw herself, she kept building her knowledge, experience, and judgment. It's a lesson that applies well beyond one boardroom: You can't control what people assume about you when you walk in, but you can make sure your work leaves no room for the assumption to hold. Nobody inherits trust Maybe the clearest lesson in Joy's story is this: Succession hands you a title. It doesn't hand you credibility. A last name can connect you to a legacy. A title can give you authority on paper. Neither one makes people trust your judgment. While running the company, Joy earned her Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Georgia State University because she wanted to be genuinely better equipped for the job she'd already been given, not to prove a point. She didn't lean on the company's history to vouch for her. She built her own case. There's a real gap between being handed an opportunity and actually earning the confidence of the people counting on you to lead. That confidence gets built slowly through consistency, sound decisions, integrity, and results that hold up over time. Employees notice how you handle failure. Clients notice whether your word is good. Partners notice whether you follow through when it's inconvenient. The real test tends to show up when things go sideways. Joy's take on leading through hard stretches is instructive: People don't need a leader who has every answer. They need one who's honest about the problem, steady under pressure, and visibly working toward a solution. Anyone can look like a good leader when the numbers are up. Leadership becomes much clearer when they aren't. That holds whether you're running a family company, a startup, a department, or just trying to level up in your own career. A title can start your leadership. It can't finish it. Sometimes growth means leaving home In 2001, Joy made the call to move Rohadfox's headquarters from Durham, North Carolina, to Atlanta, a decision she's said came down to Atlanta's talent pool and its room to grow. It is easy to admire that decision now, but much harder to be the person who has to make it. Legacy has a way of tying you to what's familiar. When something's worked for decades, changing it can feel like a betrayal of the people who built it that way. But real stewardship means recognizing when growth requires letting go of the familiar. Relocating wasn't just a logistics decision. It was a statement that her father's foundation deserved to be planted somewhere with more room to expand. It paid off. The move opened the door to Hartsfield-Jackson work and gave Rohadfox real standing in Atlanta's infrastructure world. There's a broader takeaway here. Respecting where something started doesn't mean staying put. Sometimes honoring a foundation means giving it space to outgrow its original footprint. Related article: How to Build Upon the Legacy of Your Family Business and Make It Your Own, Harvard Business Review Trust is the real scoreboard You can measure Rohadfox by its project list. Or you can measure it by its relationships, and that tells a different story. Construction runs on deadlines, budgets, and deliverables. But companies that last decades aren't surviving on technical skill alone. They last because people trust them. Joy's view on this adds something important. The business world loves to highlight the visible wins, including the signed contract, the completed build, and the expansion. But some of the most valuable things a company owns never show up on a financial statement. Trust is one of them. Clients come back because they trust the delivery. Employees stay because they believe in the culture. Partners go deeper because consistency has earned their confidence. You can't fake that with a slogan or a polished mission statement. It's built one kept promise at a time. This is where leadership stops being abstract. Plenty of organizations spend years building a portfolio. The strongest leaders understand they're simultaneously building people, relationships, and a reputation that will outlast any single project. A portfolio shows what a company can build. Relationships show who's actually leading it. Real leaders build room for whoever comes next One of the most underrated jobs of a leader is preparing people to eventually take their place. Experience matters, but it turns into a liability the moment it convinces you there's nothing left to learn. There always is. Technology keeps reshaping how organizations run. Younger employees show up with different expectations. Entire industries that operated the same way for generations are being pushed to rethink how they recruit, communicate, and serve clients. If you want your organization to outlast you, you have to make room for that shift. Joy has spoken about adjusting to a changing workforce without losing sight of the standards that shouldn't move. Listening to younger employees doesn't mean throwing out what worked. It means staying open enough to hear a different perspective and honest enough to admit when it's right. Preparing the next generation isn't just about handing down what you know. Sometimes it means being willing to learn from them, too. No legacy survives on one person staying in charge forever. It survives by producing other leaders, people ready to make hard calls, question old assumptions, and eventually take the organization somewhere its current leadership never could have pictured. Related article: How Family Business Leaders Make Room for New Generations, The Right Time and the Right Way, Forbes What legacy actually measures We throw the word "legacy" around a lot in business. Maybe we've overcomplicated it. Legacy isn't the eulogy people give when your career ends. It's what's still standing because you were there. It's worth asking yourself: Who got an opportunity because you opened a door for them? Who became a better leader because you took the time to invest in them? What community is better off because your company chose to show up, not just profit? What's stronger today because you made a hard call when it would've been easier not to? Those questions say more about a legacy than any award or headline ever will. Joy has said that watching employees grow into leaders, mentoring, developing talent, and helping people see their own potential rank among the most meaningful parts of her career. That reframes the whole idea of legacy. It stops being about what carries your name and starts being about what keeps going because you put something into someone else. You can't expect loyalty from people you haven't invested in. Leaders serious about building something lasting have to treat people development as part of the business, not separate from it. When Atlanta declared May 15, 2026, Joy Rohadfox Day, it was a meaningful honor. But it meant something because of everything that led up to it: years of leadership, growth, and community work that reached well past her company's walls. Recognition is the outcome. Impact is the legacy. The inheritance every leader faces Joy Rohadfox's story starts with a company her father built. But the lessons in it go well beyond succession planning. Everyone inherits something eventually: a company, a team, a client relationship, a community role, or just an opportunity someone else made possible. The real question is what you do with it. Do you protect it so tightly it can't evolve? Do you tear it down to make it yours? Or do you find the harder path, honoring what came before while taking full responsibility for making it better? The best leaders hold all three at once: respect for the past, accountability for the present, and enough vision to build toward a future they may never personally witness. That's what it means to lead beyond the founder. The responsibility of legacy was never just about protecting what someone else built. It's about making sure there's something worth handing off. Follow Phyllis on her Instagram or visit her website for more info! Read more from Phyllis R. Caddell Phyllis R. Caddell, Communications Strategist Phyllis Caddell is an author, ghostwriter, publicist, and communications strategist. She has been guiding clients in developing, crafting, and improving their brand narratives for over 27 years. A subject matter expert (SME) and adjunct professor at Azusa Pacific University, she holds a Master of Arts (M.A.) in Organizational Communications, a Master of Science (M.S.) in Internet Marketing, and a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Public Relations.

Written by Susan F. Moody, Intuitive Business, Life, and Success Coach As a Life Mastery Certified Coach®, Susan integrates spirituality with practicality, guiding women to discover their unique Soul Goal™ and chart a personal path to success and happiness. Unlock your inner wisdom, align your heart with your mind, and uncover actionable steps that resonate with your authentic self. Is today a good day or a bad day? Maybe it's neither. Maybe it's just, a day. The kind of day where nothing spectacular happens. Nothing terrible happens either. You move through your routine, check things off your list, and before you know it, the day is almost over. Yet somehow, you don't feel particularly energized, fulfilled, or excited. I've noticed that whenever I start feeling dissatisfied with my life, it's often because I've shifted my focus to what's missing, what's not working, or what I wish were different. That's usually my cue to 'stop'. To take a breath. To focus on what I appreciate. It's amazing how quickly our perspective can change when we stop dwelling on what's wrong and start noticing what's right. Appreciation doesn't change our circumstances overnight. But it does change the lens through which we view them. Sometimes, that makes all the difference. When appreciation makes a difference The beauty of appreciation is that it works whether you're having a wonderful day, a difficult day, or an ordinary one. When you're feeling discouraged: It's easy to focus on setbacks, disappointments, and things that haven't gone according to plan. Appreciation reminds you that not everything is going wrong. When you're comparing yourself to others: Social media and everyday life can make it seem like everyone else has it figured out. Appreciation helps you recognize the blessings, strengths, and opportunities already present in your own life. When life feels routine: Even ordinary days contain moments worth noticing: a good conversation, a warm cup of coffee, a beautiful sunset, or simply the comfort of coming home. These small moments may not seem significant at first, but they have the power to shift your mood and your mindset. Simple ways to practice appreciation 1. Pause and notice what's going right Our minds naturally focus on problems. Appreciation requires us to intentionally look for what's working. Action step: Take a moment today and identify three things that are going well in your life right now. 2. Celebrate the small things Not every blessing arrives with fanfare. Sometimes the greatest gifts are the ones we overlook because they seem ordinary. Action step: Notice one simple pleasure today, a smile, a meal, a comfortable bed, or a supportive friend, and allow yourself to truly appreciate it. 3. Keep an appreciation list Writing things down helps reinforce positive thoughts and creates a record you can revisit on harder days. Action step: Start a daily appreciation journal. List three things you're grateful for each evening before bed. 4. Shift your inner dialogue The way you speak to yourself influences how you feel about your life. Action step: When you catch yourself focusing on what's lacking, gently ask: What do I have right now that I appreciate? 5. Share your appreciation Expressing gratitude not only benefits you but also uplifts others. Action step: Reach out to someone today and tell them why you appreciate them. Your words may mean more than you realize. The wise woman says Some days are wonderful. Some days are challenging. Many days fall somewhere in between. No matter what kind of day you're having, appreciation has the power to shift your perspective. When you stop focusing on what's missing and start noticing what's already present, you begin to see your life differently. You feel lighter. More hopeful. More content. So the next time you find yourself questioning whether today is a good day or a bad day, pause for a moment and focus on what you appreciate. You may discover that the life you're looking for is already closer than you think. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Susan F. Moody Susan F. Moody, Intuitive Business, Life, and Success Coach Susan F. Moody, Wise Woman, is dedicated to empowering women to tap into their own inner wisdom and discover the power of intentional living. Along her personal journey, Susan became a wisdom seeker looking for ways to connect with the divine for inspiration and guidance. She started working with the I Ching, angel cards, wisdom cards, runes, and pendulum work over 20 years ago and now offers these spiritual insight tools as an option to her clients. She has also developed a tangible technique, the Soul Goal™ finder, to help clients answer the contemplative question “Why am I here?”

Written by Michael J McCusker, Founder & Podcast Host Michael J McCusker is a Global Freedom Fellow, a multiple-time author, and host of the acclaimed “Lived Experience Podcast Series.” He’s a respected advocate for justice reform and a thought leader in Lived Experience Leadership, using storytelling to spark social change. Many of these voices are only beginning to find platforms where they can be heard beyond their immediate communities. Leadership has long been measured in credentials. Degrees framed on office walls. Institutions listed on curricula vitae (CVs). The language of expertise is shaped by universities, think tanks, and professional hierarchies. For decades, this was the accepted pathway to authority. If you wanted to be heard and to lead, you first had to be qualified, and you needed to pass through the gates of institutions that could legitimise your voice. But something is changing. A new kind of leader is emerging, not from lecture halls or corporate graduate programmes, but from places society once dismissed as the margins. Prisons. Recovery communities. Neighbourhoods shaped by poverty and adversity. Lives marked by trauma, failure, and reinvention. These individuals are not leading despite their experiences. They are leading because of them. The rise of the survivor leader marks a significant shift in society's view of authority For much of modern history, lived experience was treated as something to overcome privately. It was rarely considered a legitimate form of knowledge. Institutions were comfortable hearing about hardship in reports and statistics, but far less comfortable when those who had endured it began to speak for themselves. Yet the past decade has seen a growing recognition that experience carries its own form of expertise. Those who have navigated addiction, lived through incarceration, or faced exclusion, stigma, and structural barriers bring a perspective that policy frameworks often fail to recognise. This knowledge is not theoretical. It is embodied. When it is shared with honesty and clarity, it carries a different kind of authority. Audiences feel it. They sense the difference between someone who has studied a problem and someone who has lived inside it. That difference is not about emotion alone. It is about credibility. In an age of information overload, people are increasingly drawn to voices that feel real. The polished certainty of traditional expertise is being challenged by something more grounded in the testimony of experience. This is where storytelling becomes powerful For survivor leaders, narrative is often the bridge between personal history and public influence. A story allows lived experience to move beyond the individual and enter the collective conversation. It transforms something deeply personal into something socially meaningful. Stories create connections, they also create understanding When someone speaks about incarceration, addiction, or adversity from direct experience, they disrupt the distance that often surrounds these issues. They humanise systems that are otherwise discussed in abstract terms. A prison sentence becomes a life story. A policy failure becomes a lived reality. A statistic becomes a person. In that moment, the narrative shifts. With it comes the possibility for change. But the path of the survivor leader is rarely straightforward. While institutions increasingly speak about the importance of lived experience, the structures that shape power have not always adapted to accommodate it. Many people with lived experience find themselves invited into spaces where their story is welcomed, but their influence remains limited. They are asked to share their journeys, yet they are often excluded from the decisions that shape the systems they understand so intimately. The risk is that lived experience becomes symbolic rather than transformational. A powerful speech at a conference, a panel discussion that acknowledges adversity, or a moment of inspiration can fade once the event ends. True leadership demands something deeper. It requires institutions to recognise that lived experience is not simply a narrative asset. It is a form of insight that can inform strategy, policy, and leadership itself. Survivor leaders are not only storytellers. They are bridge builders between worlds that rarely meet, carrying the language of communities often unheard within systems that shape their lives. This position is not always easy to hold To share your story publicly is to revisit moments many people would rather leave behind. Standing in front of audiences and speaking about trauma, incarceration, or addiction requires a level of vulnerability that traditional leadership models rarely demand. Yet many survivor leaders continue to do it, not because it is comfortable, but because it is necessary. They recognise that silence allows harmful narratives to persist. When those who have lived through systems remain unheard, the stories about those systems are written by others. Narrative power matters. The stories society tells about crime, addiction, poverty, or failure shape how people are treated. They influence policy decisions, public attitudes, and the opportunities available to those seeking to rebuild their lives. Changing those narratives requires voices that carry authenticity. This is why the emergence of survivor leaders is so significant. Their presence challenges assumptions that have gone largely unquestioned for generations. They disrupt the idea that leadership must always come from those who have moved smoothly through conventional pathways. Instead, they demonstrate that insight can be forged through adversity. The sharpest insights on justice reform come from those who have navigated the system themselves. The most resonant voices in recovery belong to individuals who have overcome addiction, while the advocates shaping meaningful social change are often the very people who were once excluded from the conversations they now influence. This does not diminish the value of traditional expertise. Academic research, professional training, and institutional knowledge remain vital. But the future of leadership may depend on something more collaborative, a meeting point between experience and expertise. When lived experience sits alongside policy knowledge, something powerful happens Systems begin to see themselves more clearly. Solutions become grounded in reality rather than theory alone. Leadership begins to reflect the complexity of the world it seeks to serve. The rise of the survivor leader is still unfolding. Many of these voices are only beginning to find platforms where they can be heard beyond their immediate communities. Yet their influence is already visible. At conferences, speakers with lived experience are transforming the dialogue. In books and podcasts, stories of adversity become lessons in resilience and leadership. Within grassroots movements, individuals once defined by their past now guide the future of their communities. It is a redefinition of authority Leadership is no longer confined to those who have studied systems from the outside. Increasingly, it includes those who have survived them, challenged them, and emerged with insights that cannot be taught in classrooms. Their journeys remind us of something fundamental. The leaders who understand the future are not always those who have been protected from struggle. Often, they are the people who have walked through it, reflected on it, and chosen to turn their experience into something that serves others. In that transformation lies a new model of leadership, one grounded not only in knowledge but in humanity. Follow me on Instagram and visit my website for more info! Read more from Michael J McCusker Michael J McCusker, Founder & Podcast Host Michael J McCusker is a dynamic storyteller and podcast host who uses the power of voice to spark meaningful change. As a seasoned leader with lived experience, they’ve dedicated their life to guiding others toward purpose, self-leadership, and impact. Through powerful interviews and transformative conversations, their podcast The Lived Experience Series amplifies voices that are often unheard but deeply needed. A published author, Michael J McCusker, writes with clarity and conviction in Hidden Potential: Unlocking The Door Within, turning personal insight into universal lessons. Their work empowers individuals to own their story, speak with influence, and lead with authenticity. Whether on stage, behind the mic, or on the page, The Resilient Irishman: How to Tackle Life's Adversities. Michael J McCusker is committed to shifting narratives and building a legacy that inspires others to rise.

Written by Lisa Forsberg, Clinical Hypnotherapist Lisa Forsberg is a Clinical Hypnotherapist and narcissistic abuse recovery specialist who combines deep clinical expertise with her own lived experience of healing from a toxic relationship. Her mission is to help others rediscover a life filled with peace, purpose, and possibility. Clinical Hypnotherapist and Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Specialist Lisa Forsberg takes you inside the room, demystifying what trauma bonding work in hypnotherapy actually involves and why it works when other approaches stall. The questions that I am most often asked about hypnosis are all connected by a single concern: safety. "Is hypnotherapy mind control?" "Will I be unconscious?" "Will you make me relive my pain?" These are completely understandable questions for a nervous system that doesn't feel safe. There are many misconceptions about hypnotherapy, and when you're already feeling vulnerable, walking into an unfamiliar process to talk about the most painful relationship of your life is confronting enough without wondering if you're about to lose control of your own mind. So let me take you through the process. This is what actually happens when I work with a client on trauma bonding. Here's a step-by-step breakdown of the actual session. First, what trauma bonding is physiologically Before we get into the room, it helps to understand what we're actually working with. Trauma bonding isn't a metaphor. It's a real conditioning process, and it runs on the same mechanism that keeps a gambler feeding coins into a poker machine long after the wins have stopped coming. When affection is unpredictable, sometimes there and sometimes withdrawn without warning, the nervous system stops looking for consistency and starts craving relief instead. The high of reconciliation becomes physiologically compelling in a way that steady, predictable love never quite matches. This is why a client can sit across from me, list every reason her ex-partner was unhealthy for her, and still feel her whole body light up at a text from him. That's not a contradiction. That's conditioning. Conditioning doesn't respond to logic. It responds to a different kind of intervention entirely, and that's where hypnotherapy comes in. Before we begin: The conversation All of my sessions begin with a conversation, where I ask what's coming up for her at the moment. Not the whole history. We don't need to relive the relationship blow by blow, just what's present right now. A recent trigger, a physical sensation, or a specific belief that keeps looping. Every client comes in carrying a unique story, and hypnotherapy isn't a one-size-fits-all approach. So, as she talks, I'm listening for her specific language, her specific images, and the exact phrase her body tenses around, because that's what I'll be working with once we go deeper. The induction: Settling the nervous system first Here's something that brings great comfort to a lot of clients: we don't go anywhere near the relationship content until the nervous system has settled. This is the induction phase, and its only job is safety. I guide her through a slow physical and mental relaxation, often starting with the breath and moving through the body. Nothing mystical here. It's similar to a guided relaxation that you may have experienced with a good meditation teacher, except with a specific clinical intent behind it. Why does this come first? Because a nervous system that's activated, even subtly, can't do the deeper work. If she's sitting there gripping the arms of the chair, worried about what she's going to experience, we're not going to get anywhere useful. The body has to feel, on a very basic level, that it is safe right now, in this room, before it will let its guard down enough to look at what happened. The deepener: Moving past the analytical mind Once she's settled, we move into what's called a deepener. This is where we gently move past the critical, analytical part of the mind, the part that's been trying, and likely not succeeding, to reason her way out of this pattern for months or years. I want to be really clear about what this is not. She is not unconscious. She is not asleep. She's not under my control, and she can hear everything and open her eyes at any point. What's actually happening is that she's moving into a state of very focused, relaxed attention, similar to the feeling you get right before you fall asleep or the way time disappears when you're completely absorbed in a good book. You've been in this state before. It's nothing mysterious. We're just doing it deliberately, with a purpose. This is what makes the subconscious mind genuinely accessible, not to be manipulated, but to be worked with directly rather than filtered through the analytical mind that's been running the same defensive loop for a long time. The core work: Where the actual pattern lives This is the part clients are usually most curious about, and most nervous about. Contrary to what a lot of people expect, we don't spend this time reliving the relationship in vivid detail. That's not the goal, and it's actually not necessary. Instead, we work with the pattern itself, wherever it's currently held in her body and her beliefs. For one client, this might look like gently working with the sensation in her chest that shows up every time her phone buzzes, and she wonders if it's him. For another, it's the belief, planted long before this relationship even started, that she has to earn love by minimising her own needs. For someone else, it's the image of pulling into his driveway to collect the kids and everything her body braces for before she's even parked. Whatever it is, we work with it directly, at the level where it actually lives. This might involve reframing the belief, softening the emotional charge attached to a memory, or helping her body register, often for the first time, the difference between the relief of reconciliation and the safety of genuine peace. These are not the same feeling, even though trauma bonding trains the body to confuse them. Future pacing: Rehearsing the new pattern Once we've worked with the old pattern, we don't just stop there. We spend time future pacing, which is essentially mentally rehearsing her life with the new pattern in place. What does it feel like when he texts and she doesn't feel that same pull? What does it feel like to sit in silence without needing to fill it with validation from someone who hurt her? What does a version of her life look like where she isn't organising her nervous system around someone else's unpredictability? Without this step, she's released the old pattern but left the door open for it to walk right back in. The subconscious mind doesn't just need the old pattern released. It needs a new one to move towards, or it will simply default back to what's familiar. Coming back: The emergence The session ends with a gentle emergence, bringing her attention back to the room, her body, and the present moment. Most clients describe this part as similar to waking up from a really good nap, a bit hazy for a moment, then noticeably clearer and calmer than when they walked in. This isn't a dramatic snap back to reality. It's gradual, and it's designed to leave her feeling calm and refreshed, with a little more clarity. This is also the part nobody warned me about, though. A lot of my clients don't actually want to come back! I can't tell you how many times I've gently started the emergence, only to be met with a scrunched-up face, eyes clamped shut, and some version of, "No, I don't want to open my eyes. I don't want to come back!" followed by a cheeky laugh. Of course, I totally understand. For a lot of these women, this is the first time in a very long time that their body has felt completely safe and completely still, with nothing to monitor, nobody's mood to manage, and nothing to brace for. For some, being in hypnosis feels like complete bliss, so of course they don't want to leave that. If anything, it tells me we're doing exactly the right work because that feeling of deep, unguarded peace is precisely what we're trying to help her carry back out into the rest of her everyday life. What clients actually feel afterward The most common thing I see in a client after a session is a new sense of stillness. Clients often describe feeling like something that's been held tight for a very long time has finally released, even just slightly. That doesn't mean the pull disappears after one session. Trauma bonds that have been reinforced for years don't magically dissolve in an hour. But most clients notice a real, measurable difference in how loud the pull feels, even after the first session. That shift tends to compound as the subconscious mind continues to process quietly in the background in the days after the session and over the course of the work that we continue to do together. Why this reaches something talk therapy often can't I want to be careful here because I'm not interested in dismissing talk therapy. It's genuinely valuable, and understanding your story matters. But trauma bonding isn't a story problem. It's a conditioning problem, and it lives beneath the level where insight alone can reach it. You can understand exactly why you keep going back and still feel the pull because understanding happens in the conscious mind, and the pull is happening somewhere else entirely. Hypnotherapy doesn't replace that understanding. It works alongside it, reaching the part of the pattern that logic was never going to be able to touch. If you've been wondering what this actually involves If you've read this far because you've been curious, nervous, or both about what a session like this actually looks like, I hope this has taken away some of the mystery. There are no stage show shenanigans. No loss of control. Just a slow, trauma-informed process of helping your nervous system learn that it's safe to let go of what's familiar, even when what's familiar has been hurting you. If you're ready to understand what's actually keeping you held to a pattern you know isn't serving you, I'd love to talk it through with you. Reach out to book a discovery call. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Lisa Forsberg Lisa Forsberg, Clinical Hypnotherapist Known as The Healthy Hypnotherapist, Lisa Forsberg is one of Australia's leading specialists in narcissistic abuse recovery. A survivor of narcissistic abuse herself, Lisa brings both lived experience and deep clinical expertise to her work, creating a space where clients feel truly understood, often for the first time. She works with adults, teens, and children across Australia and worldwide, helping them heal from toxic relationships, rebuild their sense of self, and break free from repeating cycles. Lisa also mentors fellow hypnotherapists who want to work confidently in this deeply nuanced field.

Written by Erica Consoli, Mindset Coach & RTT Therapist Erica Consoli is a certified Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT) practitioner and Mindset Coach specialising in reprogramming subconscious belief systems, identity shifts, and behavioural change. Through her practice Will With Erica, she helps people overcome limiting beliefs, build confidence, and create lasting personal transformation. Every year, thousands of mothers watch their last child leave home and find themselves facing a question nobody prepared them for, “Who am I now?” This article explores the identity crisis hidden inside one of life’s most celebrated milestones, and how to find your way back to yourself. Lola’s story: What happens when motherhood is over? The morning after her youngest left for university, Lola woke up at 6:47 a.m., the same time she had woken up every day for the past twenty-three years. Her body didn’t know it was allowed to sleep in. She lay still for a moment, waiting for the familiar sounds, the arguments over the bathroom, the clatter of cereal bowls, the backpacks dropped heavily by the front door. But there was nothing. Her husband had already left for work. The house was still in a way it had never quite been before. She made coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and looked around at the life she had built. A beautiful home. A good marriage. Children who were healthy, capable, and moving forward into their own lives. Every box checked, every sacrifice vindicated. She had done everything right. Yet something in her chest felt loose. Unmoored. Like a sailboat with nowhere particular to go. She picked up her phone, scrolled without really seeing anything, then put it back down, face down, on the table. She said out loud, to nobody, “Now what?” Nobody had warned her about this part. What is the empty nest identity crisis? What Lola was feeling has a name, even if it rarely gets spoken out loud, an identity crisis. It’s far more common among mothers than we tend to acknowledge. For years, motherhood had given her life an unshakeable structure and direction. Every decision, every early morning, every carefully packed school lunch was an expression of who she was and what she was for. Her children were not just people she loved. They had become, over the years, the organising principle of her entire existence. But here is what Lola eventually came to understand, and what I want to offer to every mother in that same kitchen, the capacity to love, to nurture, to build, and to show up with devotion day after day. None of that retired when her son packed his bags. Those qualities are not a role. They are the core of who she is. They were always going to need somewhere to go. The children leaving did not take her purpose. It dismantled the container she had been pouring it into for two decades. That distinction changes everything. Wired to matter There is something that human beings need at a level deeper than comfort, deeper than success, and deeper even than happiness, the sense that we matter to something beyond ourselves. When that sense disappears, what follows is not simply sadness. It is disorientation. A loss of self. Because for so long, being needed was the self. What I have observed, both in my work and in life, is that this need to matter expresses itself in three essential ways: The need to create We need to bring something into the world that was not there before, whether with our hands, our words, our ideas, or our care. When this need goes unmet, we feel stagnant and invisible. The need to serve We need to feel genuinely useful to someone or something beyond ourselves. Human beings do not thrive when disconnected from others’ needs. When no one needs us, something in us dims. The need to make an impact We need to know, in some real and felt way, that our presence here has left a mark on the people or the world around us. Not fame or legacy in any grand sense. Simply the knowledge that we made a difference to someone. These are not aspirations. They are needs. When all three go unmet at once, as they so often do during the empty nest season, the result is exactly what Lola felt that morning, a life that looks whole from the outside and feels strangely hollow from within. How Lola found her way back For weeks, Lola moved through her days feeling like a visitor in her own life. She signed up for a yoga class. She had lunches with friends. She redecorated the spare bedroom. She stayed busy because staying busy was easier than sitting long enough to feel the disorientation underneath. Then one afternoon, her friend Sofia called. She was going through a painful moment in her marriage and needed someone to talk to. She called Lola because she always called Lola. Lola made her tea, sat with her for two hours, and talked her through what she was feeling with a warmth and steadiness that came from somewhere very practiced. After Sofia left, Lola stood in her kitchen and noticed something, she felt more like herself during those two hours than she had in weeks. She had not done anything remarkable. She had simply offered what she had always had, a deep capacity to hold space for people in difficult moments. It was something she had been doing for her children, her friends, and her husband for years. She had just never thought of it as anything beyond being a mother and a friend. That afternoon, she began to wonder where else that capacity could go. How to find your purpose again: Five practical steps From the outside, reading Lola’s story, her thread feels almost obvious. Of course it was the listening, the holding space, and the showing up for people. We can see it clearly because we are watching from a distance. But when we are living inside our own story, that same clarity is much harder to access. We are too close to it, too tangled up in who we have been, to easily see who we still are. That is what these questions and prompts are here for. Not to give you the answer, but to help you get still enough to hear it yourself. Ask yourself three honest questions Take some time alone, away from your phone and your task list, and write your answers to these, "What do I love to create, even in small ways?" Cooking, writing, organising, growing things, decorating, connecting people. Everything counts. Who naturally comes to me, and for what? Think about the people in your life who seek you out. What do they always ask of you? That pattern is data worth paying attention to. How do I want people to feel after spending time with me? Not what you want to achieve, but how you want people to feel. That is your impact, and it is your clearest clue. Look backward before you look forward Purpose rarely arrives as something entirely new. More often, it reveals itself as something that was always present, something you were drawn to before motherhood or alongside it that never got called anything important. Look back at what pulled you in before the years of busyness layered over everything. Let service lead you there If you feel completely lost, one of the most direct paths back to yourself is through being useful to someone else. Volunteer at a shelter, a school, or a community organisation. Join a faith community where service is woven into the rhythm of the week. Mentor someone younger in something you know well. Show up somewhere and offer what you have. You do not need to have found your purpose to begin living it. Starting the action often reveals the direction. Give yourself permission to explore without the answer One of the most common traps is waiting to feel ready, waiting to know exactly what you are building before you begin. Purpose is rarely a destination you arrive at fully formed. It is something you discover by moving, trying things, noticing what makes you feel alive, and following that signal without needing to justify it to anyone yet. Seek support Sometimes what stands between a person and their sense of purpose is not a lack of ideas. It is the weight of old beliefs and patterns that live below the surface and are difficult to see on our own. A mentor, a coach, or a therapist can help bring those patterns into the light. Hypnotherapy, in particular, can be a powerful tool for this kind of work. By accessing the subconscious, it may help uncover beliefs that have been subtly shaping your sense of what is possible for you and open the door to clarity and direction that conscious thinking alone may not reach. This is not only a mother’s story Lola’s experience belongs to a specific season of life. But the feeling underneath it, the disorientation of losing the role that held your identity together, is one that finds all of us eventually. The professional who retires and does not know who they are without their title. The person who ends a long relationship and realises how much of themselves they had built around another. The high achiever who reaches the summit they spent years climbing and feels, standing at the top, strangely empty. The details differ. The human need is the same, to create, to serve, to matter. The invitation, when that need goes unmet, is always the same, to look past the role that ended, ask what it was made of, what qualities, what capacity, and what love were flowing through it, and find a new place to pour all of that. Your purpose did not walk out the door. It is waiting for the next chapter you decide to write. Ready to find your way back to yourself? If something in this article stopped you, if you recognised Lola’s morning in your own, I would love to walk this journey with you. I am Erica Consoli, a hypnotherapist working with people in the moments when the old identity no longer fits and the new one has not yet taken shape. Through hypnotherapy, we move beneath the surface noise to reconnect you with your own clarity, your own direction, and your own deep sense of what you are here to do. The next chapter of your story is already waiting. Let’s find it together. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Erica Consoli Erica Consoli, Mindset Coach & RTT Therapist Erica Consoli has been fascinated by the human mind for as long as she can remember. With a background in Psychology and training in Rapid Transformational Therapy (RTT), she founded Will With Erica to explore one of the most complex and least understood tools we possess - our own subconscious. Her work focuses on helping people overcome phobias, trauma, self-doubt, and deep-rooted patterns that keep them stuck. What drives her is simple, a relentless curiosity about the mind and an equally strong desire to help people around the world use it better. Through her articles, Erica shares insights at the intersection of subconscious science, behavioural change, and real human transformation.

Written by Carmel Shami, Holistic Time Management Mentor Carmel is a time management mentor, author, and former social worker who helps overwhelmed professionals and individuals with demanding lives break free from burnout and constant overload. Using a holistic productivity and time management framework, she helps them regain clarity, balance, control, and live intentionally. We talk a lot about time management. We buy planners, make lists, organize our calendars, download apps, and learn new productivity techniques. Yet, so many people still end their day with the same feeling, "I didn't have enough time." I started wondering whether our struggle with time is always about time at all. What if, underneath our overloaded calendars and endless task lists, there is something deeper happening? I began calling this experience TDD, Time Deficit Disorder. TDD is not a medical or psychological diagnosis. It is a term I use to describe something I see repeatedly in people, and something many of us experience ourselves: the persistent internal feeling that there is never enough time. But I believe the story goes deeper than the clock. The deficit may not begin with time Think about how often the idea of “not enough” appears in our lives: I didn't accomplish enough today. I'm not making enough money. I'm not spending enough time with my children. I'm not exercising enough. I'm not giving enough to my relationships. I'm not growing my business fast enough. I'm not resting enough. I'm not doing enough. Eventually, that can become something even more personal, "I am not enough." When we carry this internal sense of scarcity into our relationship with time, our calendar becomes another place where “not enough” plays itself out. We begin to believe that if we could find another hour, become more efficient, wake up earlier, organize ourselves better, or finish more tasks, we would finally feel caught up. But often, we don't. Because when “enough” has no definition, there is no finish line. TDD is often a gap, not a shortage This is an important distinction. TDD is not necessarily a shortage of time. It is often the gap between what we expect ourselves to fit into our lives and our actual human capacity. We may be trying to meet the expectations of the ideal employee, business owner, parent, partner, friend, caregiver, and healthy person, all within the same 24 hours. We look at everything that could or should be done and assume it should somehow fit. But the calendar may technically have space while we do not. When our expectations continually exceed our capacity, time begins to feel like the problem. We assume we need to become faster or more productive when what may actually need attention is the amount we are asking of ourselves. That is where time management becomes about much more than scheduling. It becomes about awareness, boundaries, energy, expectations, and choice. How TDD begins to shape our behavior When we constantly feel that there isn't enough time, we don't simply think differently. We start behaving differently. We rush even when rushing isn't necessary. We say yes when we want to say no. We squeeze one more task into an already full day. We multitask because doing one thing at a time feels too slow. We may have difficulty resting because part of our mind is still thinking about what we should be doing. We fill open spaces in our calendars instead of protecting them. We complete five things and immediately focus on the sixth thing we didn't finish. Sometimes we are even physically present with the people we love while mentally living inside our unfinished task lists. The painful irony is that our fear of not having enough time can prevent us from fully experiencing the time we actually have. The time deficit cycle TDD can become a reinforcing cycle: "I don't feel like there is enough" to "I feel like I don't have enough time" to "I experience urgency and pressure" to "I overcommit, rush, multitask, or sacrifice rest" to "My energy and attention become depleted" to "I become less focused and less present" to "I fall behind or feel like I haven't done enough" to "This confirms my belief that there isn't enough time". Around we go. This is why another productivity technique isn't always the answer. Sometimes we don't need to become better at fitting more into our lives. We need to reconsider what we are trying to fit in, what it is costing us, and why we believe it all needs to fit in the first place. What if the opposite of time deficit is not more time? If TDD keeps us living from a sense of scarcity, the answer isn't finding more hours. We cannot create more time, but we can change the way we experience and relate to the time we have. That shift is what I call time abundance. Time abundance is a different relationship with time. It means moving away from constantly measuring our lives by everything we cannot fit in and beginning to make intentional choices about what matters, what deserves our energy, and what is realistically enough. Moving from time deficit to time abundance does not mean pretending that time is unlimited. It isn't. Our time is finite, and that is precisely what makes it valuable. To me, time abundance means experiencing the time we have as enough for what matters most. That requires something very different from squeezing more into our calendars. It requires intentionality, boundaries, awareness of our capacity and energy, and a willingness to examine the expectations that keep telling us we should always be doing more. 5 ways to move from time deficit toward time abundance 1. Find the deficit underneath the time deficit Before trying to manage your time differently, ask yourself, "What feels like it's not enough right now?" Sometimes “I don't have enough time” is carrying another message. Maybe I don't feel successful enough. Maybe I'm worried I'm not doing enough for my family. Maybe I feel behind compared with other people. Maybe I believe I should be further along in my career. Maybe I don't feel financially secure enough. Or maybe I haven't given myself permission to rest. When we don't recognize the deeper deficit, we can end up trying to solve an emotional problem with a scheduling solution. No calendar can tell us when we have achieved enough, given enough, or become enough. Understanding what is underneath the urgency gives us the opportunity to respond to the real need instead of automatically trying to fit more into the day. 2. Listen to your scarcity language Pay attention to the language you use around time: “I'm behind.” “I should have done more.” “I don't have time.” “I need to catch up.” “There aren't enough hours in the day.” Sometimes these statements are objectively true. We all go through periods when life asks more of us than our available time can comfortably hold. But sometimes this language has become automatic. It influences how we experience our day before we have even looked honestly at what we are asking of ourselves. When you notice it, ask, "Is there truly not enough time, or am I expecting too much from the time I have?" Those are very different problems, and they require very different solutions. 3. Stop confusing available time with available capacity A blank hour on your calendar doesn't automatically mean you have an hour available. You may have the time, but not the energy, attention, emotional capacity, or mental bandwidth. This is one of the biggest limitations of traditional time management. Human beings aren't calendars. Two hours at 9:00 in the morning may feel completely different from two hours at 7:00 at night. An hour after an intense meeting is not always equal to an hour after a restful morning. A day filled with small decisions can be more draining than a day with fewer but longer tasks. Managing time well means considering the whole person who has to live inside that schedule. 4. Choose before you schedule We often begin time management by asking, "Where can I fit this?" But there is a more important question that needs to come first, "Does this belong in my life right now?" Our calendars should not simply reflect everything that could get done. They should reflect our values, priorities, responsibilities, energy, relationships, and the reality of our lives right now. Every yes takes time from somewhere else. Every commitment has a cost, even when the commitment itself is meaningful. A calendar is not just a scheduling tool. It is a record of our choices. 5. Create intentional stopping points There will always be another email, another task, another improvement we could make, and another person or project deserving our attention. If we wait until everything is finished before allowing ourselves to stop, we may never feel finished. This is why we need intentional stopping points. That might mean deciding that three important tasks are enough for today. It might mean closing the laptop at a certain time even though work remains. It might mean deciding that a project is ready to move forward instead of continuing to perfect it. It might mean protecting an evening without needing to turn it into another productive block of time. A stopping point does not mean everything is done. It means I consciously decided where today's work ends and the rest of my life begins. Maybe time management needs a different goal For years, productivity has often been framed around doing more in less time. But I don't believe the purpose of time management is simply to become more efficient. Time management is about making intentional choices about a limited and precious resource. It is about understanding what matters, protecting our energy, creating boundaries, and building systems that support the way we actually live. It is also about accepting that choosing one thing often means not choosing another. That isn't failure. It is the reality of having finite time. Good time management is not about fitting everything in. It is about creating enough clarity to know what belongs, enough structure to support it, and enough awareness to recognize when the cost has become too high. What would enough look like today? Maybe our biggest time management problem isn't that we don't have enough time. Maybe we have forgotten what enough feels like. We keep searching for another hour, another system, or another way to become more efficient, hoping that eventually we will arrive at the magical place called “caught up.” But caught up is often a moving target. There will always be more we could do, improve, organize, answer, or achieve. Perhaps time abundance is not about reaching the bottom of the list. It is the ability to look at a life that will always contain unfinished things and still make a conscious decision about what deserves our finite time. That brings us to one simple question, "What would enough look like today?" Not enough forever. Not enough according to someone else's expectations. Not enough according to an impossible standard. Enough for today, based on what matters, what is needed, and what you realistically have to give. This question does not ask us to lower our standards or stop growing. It asks us to bring our expectations into conversation with our values, energy, responsibilities, and actual capacity. Our time will always be limited. But limited time does not have to create a constant experience of scarcity. Perhaps true time abundance begins when we stop measuring our days only by what remains undone and start recognizing the value of what we consciously chose to give our time to. We may never reach a point where everything is finished. But we can create a relationship with time that feels more intentional, more aligned, and more like our own. If this article feels familiar and you are ready to create a more intentional relationship with your time, one that works with your values, energy, responsibilities, and real life, I’d love to connect. Visit my contact form at It’s About Time and tell me a little about what feels most overwhelming right now. We can explore the best place to begin. Contact Carmel. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Carmel Shami Carmel Shami, Holistic Time Management Mentor Carmel is a time management expert who helps people rebuild clarity and balance in demanding lives. She is the founder of It’s About Time, a holistic productivity practice rooted in mindset, structure, and energy management. Drawing on her years of work with the elderly and families facing grief, she developed an approach that considers the whole person, not just their schedule. Witnessing how often people reach the end of life with unspoken regrets shaped her mission to help others choose intentionally how they live. As she often reminds her clients, no one dies finished. Choose what matters.

Mario Buchs is a certified endurance coach, ultrarunner and leadership performance practitioner whose career spans service engineering, international business, major project leadership, endurance sport and human development. After leading 18 people through the completion of a $110 million Australian dollars (AUD), approximately 65 million Swiss francs (CHF), greenfield printing facility in Liverpool, UK, and later completing 23 ultramarathons, Mario has experienced performance from both sides of the equation, leading people through complex challenges and pushing himself beyond perceived limits. Today, through Healthetica Coaching and Forward Motion Leadership, he explores the powerful parallels between endurance, leadership and human performance. In this interview, Mario shares why sustainable high performance is not simply about pushing harder, but about knowing when to persist, when to recover and how to unlock human potential without losing the human in performance. Mario Buchs, Certified Endurance Coach, Ultrarunner & Leadership Performance Practitioner What first drew you to explore the connection between endurance sport, leadership, and human performance? What first drew me to the connection was the discipline of endurance sport and the realisation that the little things we do consistently are what prepare us for the moments that matter. An ultramarathon doesn't suddenly make you resilient on race day. The resilience is built in the months and years beforehand, in the training sessions you complete when you don't feel like it, the strength work, the recovery, the nutrition, the decisions you make when nobody is watching. Great athletes and leaders are made when no one is watching. Then, when the big moment arrives, you have something to draw upon. I see exactly the same principle in leadership. Great leadership isn't created when a crisis happens. It is built through the everyday behaviours that establish trust, communication, accountability and confidence long before they are truly tested. My own journey through business, leading people and eventually endurance sport made me realise that performance is rarely about one big action. It is the accumulation of small, intentional actions repeated consistently over time. These are usually quite boring. That's where the connection became really interesting to me, how we prepare determines how we perform when we're finally called upon. After 23 ultramarathons, what have you learned about performing well when your physical and mental resources are running low? Believe! Believe in the training. Believe in the countless hours, the early mornings, the sacrifices and all the work that happened when nobody was watching. When you're deep into an ultramarathon and your physical and mental resources are running low, you can't suddenly create fitness, resilience or confidence. You have to draw on what you've already built. That's when all those seemingly small decisions and sessions become incredibly important. You realise that the race isn't just about what you do on the day, it's about everything you did beforehand that prepared you for that moment. I see exactly the same thing in business and leadership. The preparation often happens quietly, studying after hours, getting up early, preparing for the difficult conversation, learning a new skill, thinking through scenarios, doing the work when nobody is asking you to do it. When the pressure eventually arrives, you don't rise to the occasion, you fall back on your preparation. That's where belief comes from. Not blind optimism, but the confidence that comes from knowing you've done the work. When resources are running low, that belief can be the difference between thinking “I can't do this” and thinking “I've prepared for this. Keep moving.” After all, we have built a toolbox over many years of racing, performing and training. What did leading a $110 million AUD, approximately 65 million CHF, greenfield project teach you about people that technical expertise alone could not? Leading is not about doing everything yourself or bossing people around all day. It is about understanding your role, staying in your lane and giving the specialists around you the space and support to do what they do best. Yes, I knew most of the machinery and was involved in some of the commissioning myself. But I quickly realised that letting the people who built the equipment test and commission it was far more beneficial to the overall outcome than me occasionally appearing at the machines to show that I knew how they worked. My job was to create the environment where the experts could succeed, to remove as much of the noise, uncertainty and distraction happening behind the scenes as possible so they could focus on their work. Communication was critical, as was treating everyone as an equal and recognising that every person on that site had an important role to play. We started in April with essentially no walls, constant rain and a huge site, installing state-of-the-art technology while working towards final sign-off. That experience taught me that technical expertise can get you a long way, but people make the project happen. Give good people clarity, trust them, communicate openly and remove the obstacles in their way, and extraordinary things become possible. Where do you see leaders making the biggest mistake when they treat resilience as simply pushing through? I think the biggest mistake is confusing resilience with endurance. Pushing through can be necessary, but it isn't always resilience. Sometimes resilience is recognising that something isn't working, having the courage to pause, reassess and change direction. I've seen this in endurance sport and I've experienced it personally. There are moments in an ultra when you have to dig deep and keep moving. But there are also moments when your body is telling you something important, and ignoring that signal isn't toughness, it's poor decision-making. Leadership is much the same. A leader who constantly asks their people to “push through” can unintentionally create a culture where exhaustion becomes a badge of honour and asking for help is seen as weakness. True resilience is more nuanced. It is knowing when to push, when to pause, when to adapt and when to recover. The strongest leaders don't create teams that can survive anything, they create teams that can perform sustainably because people know when to step forward, when to step back and when to support each other. Why do you believe consistency and recovery deserve a bigger place in conversations about high performance? I believe we are far more often under-recovered than overtrained. That has become a big part of my coaching philosophy, protect your next training session rather than trying to win every workout. It sounds simple, but it changes the way you approach training. If you constantly push beyond what you can recover from, eventually the quality of your training suffers. Consistency disappears. Consistency, in my view, is the real game changer. Do ultrarunners ever feel completely fresh? Usually not! Part of becoming an ultrarunner is learning to perform when the legs aren't perfect and the body isn't bouncing with energy. Particularly as training progresses, we deliberately teach the body to keep moving and performing when there is some fatigue present. This is where the magic happens. When the deeper part of the workout arrives and the athlete can still execute, stay composed and finish strong, we're seeing the result of all those consistent sessions. We've built a body and a mind that can handle the demands we've asked of it. But recovery is what allows that adaptation to happen. Training provides the stimulus, recovery allows us to absorb it. High performance isn't about doing more every day. It's about doing the right amount, recovering from it and coming back tomorrow ready to do it again. When an athlete or leader feels they have reached their limit, how do you help them distinguish between a barrier to work through and a signal to pull back? The first thing I do is listen. The person is always at the centre of the decision, not the training plan, the race goal or the KPI. In coaching, I want to understand what has changed. Is this discomfort that comes with adaptation and growth, or is it something that could indicate a deeper problem? Sometimes the answer is relatively simple, adjust the workload, change the approach, allow more recovery or work through a mental barrier. But sometimes the right decision is to stop and investigate further. That's where our Healthetica Performance Ecosystem becomes important. We don't operate in isolation. We have a trusted network of professionals across podiatry, physiotherapy, chiropractic care, massage, strength and conditioning, medical and specialist fields. As coaches, we need to know where our expertise ends and when another professional should be brought into the conversation. I don't see that as stepping away from coaching. I see it as responsible coaching. Our job isn't always to find a way to keep someone moving. Sometimes our job is to recognise when the smartest performance decision is to pause, ask better questions and bring the right person into the room. What is one practice from endurance training that leaders could realistically apply to perform better under pressure? One practice I think leaders could take directly from endurance sport is learning to stay patient and trust the process when things don't immediately go to plan. As endurance athletes, we spend a lot of time visualising the big day. We think through the course, the difficult sections, how we might feel and how we will respond when things inevitably don't go according to plan. Then, when the race starts, we don't panic if everything doesn't click immediately. We stay calm, make adjustments and trust the preparation that got us there. I think business leaders can benefit from exactly the same approach. When pressure arrives or results aren't immediately what we expected, there can be a tendency to make quick, sometimes harsh decisions simply because we feel we need to do something. But reacting and responding are not the same thing. Taking a moment to pause, assess what is actually happening and draw on the preparation you've already done can completely change the outcome. For me, endurance teaches us that not every problem requires an immediate reaction. Sometimes the best performance decision is simply to stay calm, trust the process and give the plan time to work. What does “unlocking human performance without losing the human in performance” mean to you in practice? For me, it means remembering that the person comes before the performance. We have more data, technology and measurement available to us than ever before. That's fantastic, but none of it tells the complete story. Behind every metric, target or KPI is a human being with emotions, relationships, competing priorities, good days and bad days. Whether I'm coaching an ultrarunner or working with a leader, I want to understand the person first. What motivates them? What matters to them? What are they carrying that may not be visible? What does success actually mean to them? High performance shouldn't require us to become less human. In fact, I believe the opposite is true. Self-awareness, empathy, trust, connection and recovery aren't distractions from performance, they are part of performance. For me, unlocking human performance means creating the conditions where people can challenge themselves, grow and perform at a high level while still having the permission to be human. The goal isn't to get more out of people. It's to help people become more capable of getting the best out of themselves. What is the one lesson about sustainable performance you hope people take away from your work? If I could leave people with one lesson, it would be, stay true to yourself. Be 'you'. Whether you're an athlete, a leader or simply trying to perform better in life, I think one of the hardest and least sustainable things we can do is try to become someone we're not. We look at other people's success and think we need to behave like them, lead like them or perform like them. But eventually, that becomes exhausting because you're constantly trying to maintain a version of yourself that isn't real. Through Forward Motion Leadership, I talk a lot about human performance, and for me, that starts with authenticity. Be unique. Be approachable. Have a laugh. Make a fool of yourself occasionally. Those things don't make you a weaker leader or a less serious performer, they make you human. The same applies to endurance sport. You don't need to become somebody else's athlete. You need to understand who you are, what drives you and what works for you. Sustainable performance comes from being able to consistently show up as yourself. You can't sustainably perform at your best while pretending to be someone else. The most powerful thing we can do, whether leading a team, running an ultramarathon or navigating life, is become more of who we actually are, not a copy of somebody else. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Mario Buchs

Written by Saaid Radwan, Behavior Analyst and Family Consultant Saaid Radwan is a Behavior Analyst, Neurodiversity and Family Consultant, and Continuing Professional Development (CPD) certified trainer with 20+ years of international experience across the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Europe, and Central Asia. He specializes in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), communication support, emotional regulation, and family-centered care, advocating inclusive, lifelong development. In my twenty-five years of working with families across six continents, I have learned that the hardest conversations are rarely about therapy or behavior plans. They are about genetics, tradition, and the unspoken fear that a marriage choice made two generations ago may be shaping a child's diagnosis today. Consanguineous marriage, the union of two individuals related by blood, most commonly first cousins, is one of the most culturally entrenched and scientifically consequential practices in global health. It is also one of the most politically sensitive. As I prepare to speak at the international autism conference in Tashkent next month, I am acutely aware that this topic sits at the intersection of faith, family, public health, and national policy. It cannot be shouted down, and it cannot be whispered away. It must be addressed with data, dignity, and a clear view of what is at stake. The global map: A billion people, one pattern Consanguineous marriage is not a fringe practice. It involves over one billion people worldwide, with prevalence rates between 20% and 50% in affected regions. In Pakistan, 50% to 60% of marriages are consanguineous. In Saudi Arabia, the figure reaches 51% to 58%. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Jordan all report rates of 40% to 50%. Morocco recently reported 26.7%, with 69.4% of those being first cousin unions. The practice is not limited to the Middle East or South Asia. In the United Kingdom, 38% of marriages within the Pakistani heritage community in Bradford are between first cousins, and the landmark Born in Bradford study found that these unions accounted for an estimated 30% of all congenital anomalies and 25% of infant mortality in that cohort. The science: Why related parents raise the risk The genetic mechanism is straightforward but devastating. When parents are closely related, they are more likely to carry the same rare, recessive gene variants. If both pass the same faulty gene to a child, the child has a significantly elevated risk of developing an autosomal recessive disorder. The baseline risk of congenital anomalies in the general population is roughly 3%. For children of first cousins, that risk approximately doubles to 6%. But the implications extend far beyond structural birth defects. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis examining 12 studies and 6,592 participants found a significant association between parental consanguinity and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) risk, with an adjusted odds ratio of 1.78 (95% confidence interval: 1.09 to 2.47). Other research has reported even higher odds ratios. A large study in India concluded that consanguinity increases ASD risk, with an odds ratio of 3.22. These are not abstract numbers. They represent children who will need lifelong support, families who will face crushing emotional and financial burdens, and healthcare systems that are unprepared for the surge in demand. The Uzbek wake-up call: 1,000 genomes and a regional reckoning In October 2025, Uzbekistan's Center for Advanced Technologies dropped a bombshell that should have made headlines worldwide. The "1,000 Genomes of Uzbekistan" project, the country's first large-scale whole-exome sequencing study, revealed that 86% of children examined were carriers of at least one pathogenic gene, roughly twice the international average of 30% to 40%. Every second child with a rare disease carried a hereditary mutation. Nearly one third of the identified mutations had never been recorded in global scientific literature. The researchers were unequivocal about the cause: consanguineous marriages, which make up nearly one fourth of all unions in some regions of Uzbekistan. This is not an isolated finding. The broader Central Asian Genetic Diversity Project (CAGDP) has conducted whole-genome sequencing of 166 individuals across 20 Central Asian and Afghan populations, identifying significant genetic differentiation and characterizing the mutation spectra of candidate disease-causing variants unique to the region. Together, these projects are painting a picture that Central Asia can no longer afford to ignore: the genetic architecture of its populations carries a heavy recessive burden, and consanguinity is amplifying it. A voice from the steppe: Tradition, responsibility, and the seven generations Not every culture that opposes consanguineous marriage does so from a Western liberal framework. Some traditions have held this view for centuries, not out of stigma, but out of profound responsibility toward the unborn. Sabina Bailauova, a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and Founder and Director of the Algiz Correctional Centers in Atyrau, Kazakhstan, offers a perspective rooted in Kazakh cultural wisdom: "I am against marriages between first cousins not only as a representative of Kazakh culture, but as someone who believes it is vital to look at this issue through the prism of responsibility toward future generations. In Kazakh tradition, the question of kinship has always been taken very seriously. The concept of 'Jetti Ata,' knowing seven generations of one's lineage, was not simply a cultural artifact. It was a moral and social compass that defined the boundaries of what was acceptable in matters of family and marriage. Unions between relatives within seven generations were traditionally not welcomed precisely because the lineage was perceived as a unified space of origin, memory, and responsibility. For me, this carries very deep meaning. Family is not only the feelings of two people. It is also the consequences of their decisions for their children, for subsequent generations, and for the entire lineage. When it comes to marriages between close relatives, one cannot fully separate personal choice from medical responsibility. From a genetic point of view, close relatives have a higher probability of carrying the same rare recessive genetic variants. If both parents are carriers of the same variant, the risk of certain hereditary diseases in the child increases. Of course, this does not mean that in every such marriage a child with pathology will necessarily be born. But the elevated statistical risk exists, and in my view, it cannot be ignored. The boundaries of kinship themselves matter to me as well. First cousins remain, above all, part of one family and one lineage. I believe that preserving these boundaries has significance not only for tradition, but for the internal structure of the family, for respect toward one's origins, and for understanding one's place in the genealogical system. At the same time, I do not consider it right to condemn people or cultures in which different traditions exist. Different societies have historically developed different norms. But respect for cultural differences does not mean abandoning one's own position. My position is clear enough: I do not support marriages between first cousins. For me, this is not a question of prohibition for prohibition's sake, but of awareness, genetic responsibility, respect for the boundaries of kinship, and care for the next generation. Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that the ancient Kazakh tradition of 'Jetti Ata' sounds especially modern today. Embedded within it was a simple but powerful thought: in making the decision to create a family, a person is responsible not only for the present, but for those who will come after them." – Sabina Bailauova, Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA). Founder and Director, Algiz Correctional Centers. Atyrau, Kazakhstan Bailauova's voice matters because it reframes the debate. This is not East versus West. This is not secularism versus tradition. It is a convergence of ancient nomadic wisdom and modern genomic science, arriving at the same threshold and asking the same question: What do we owe the children who have not yet been born? The legal tide: When governments choose to intervene Faced with mounting evidence, several governments are moving from education to prohibition. Norway banned first cousin marriage entirely in 2023, citing public health risks and the goal of preventing forced marriages. Sweden followed suit, with its parliament voting in May 2026 to enact an unconditional ban effective July 1, 2026, which will also end recognition of foreign cousin marriages. In the United Kingdom, the Marriage (Prohibited Degrees of Relationship) Bill 2025 proposes prohibiting first cousin marriages, though it faces significant human rights and indirect discrimination challenges. In the United States, Congressman Keith Self introduced the Consanguineous Marriage Prohibition Act of 2026, which would deny federal benefit recognition to first cousin marriages. In Uzbekistan, the Ministry of Justice published draft legislation in December 2025 that would ban marriages between relatives up to the fourth degree of kinship, including first cousins, with penalties including fines and corrective labor for up to two years. Why bans alone are not the answer I support evidence-based policy. But I have also sat in enough living rooms to know that prohibition without prevention is performative, not protective. Banning cousin marriage does not eliminate recessive genes from a population. It does not provide genetic counseling to couples already in love. In cultures where cousin marriage serves critical social functions, such as preserving family wealth, protecting women's safety, and maintaining tribal identity, a ban can drive the practice underground, stigmatize communities, and erode trust in public health institutions. The Swedish commission itself acknowledged that the public health argument alone was insufficient to justify prohibition, noting that smoking and alcohol carry greater correlations with birth defects. Sweden's ban is framed primarily around combating honor oppression and forced marriage, not genetics. If we care about outcomes, not optics, we need a different playbook. What actually works: Screening, counseling, and cultural literacy The most successful models do not shame tradition, they inform choice within it. Iran operates one of the world's most robust premarital genetic counseling systems. In southern Iran, a study of 2,686 couples found that 85% of those seeking genetic counseling were in consanguineous relationships, and 80% of all referrals were for premarital counseling. This proves that when services are accessible and culturally positioned, families use them. Saudi Arabia made premarital screening mandatory in 2003. Between 2004 and 2009, the national program for sickle cell anemia and beta thalassemia saw a fivefold increase in voluntary cancellation of high-risk marriages, and the prevalence of thalassemia dropped from 32.9 to 9.0 per 1,000 examined persons. Critically, the program is voluntary in its outcomes. Couples receive information and make their own decisions. That balance of state responsibility and personal autonomy is the key. In England, community-based models using multilingual health visitors and family-centered genetic services have increased uptake of counseling and testing among at-risk populations. The lesson? Trust is built at the community level, not imposed from above. A Central Asian blueprint: From data to dignity Uzbekistan's 1,000 Genomes Project and the Central Asian Genetic Diversity Project have given the region something priceless: a national genetic reference database. Now the question is what to do with it. Here is what I believe a culturally intelligent, scientifically rigorous Central Asian strategy should look like: Integrate genetic screening into primary care, not just specialty clinics. Screening must be affordable, routine, and available before engagement, not after pregnancy. Train community health workers and religious leaders as genetic literacy ambassadors. In societies where imams and elders shape marriage decisions, these voices are more powerful than any government poster. Make premarital counseling culturally normative, not shameful. Frame it as responsible family planning, akin to checking blood type, rather than a judgment on cousin marriage itself. Build regional data sharing networks. The Central Asian Genetic Diversity Project (CAGDP) should link with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan to create a Central Asian and South Asian genomic consortium. Recessive disorders do not respect borders. Protect autonomy. Even high-risk couples should be informed, not coerced. The goal is not to control who marries whom. The goal is to ensure every child is born with the healthiest possible genetic start. The deeper truth There is a narrative in global health that awareness leads to acceptance, and acceptance leads to action. But we have been aware of the genetic risks of consanguinity for decades, and in too many communities, we have accepted the tradition without acting on the science. This is not about dismantling family structures. It is about equipping families with the knowledge to protect their children. The siblings I wrote about last month, the silent crisis bearers, deserve to grow up in homes where prevention was possible, not just treatment. The 1,000 Genomes of Uzbekistan project has shown Central Asia its genetic mirror. The laws being drafted in Tashkent signal political will. The science is clear. The solutions are proven. What remains is the courage to turn data into policy and policy into practice before another generation pays the price. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Saaid Radwan Saaid Radwan, Behavior Analyst and Family Consultant Saaid Radwan is a Behavior Analyst, Neurodiversity and Family Consultant, and CPD Certified Trainer with over 20 years of international experience across the UAE, MENA, Europe, and Central Asia. He specializes in ABA, communication support, emotional regulation, and family-centered care across the lifespan. Saaid is passionate about inclusive education, early intervention, and empowering families and professionals through practical, compassionate strategies. His work bridges evidence-based practice with real-world impact.

Written by Paul Corke, Leadership Innovator, Author & Speaker Paul Corke is an executive coach, author, speaker, and leading expert in mindset, leadership, and innovation, as well as Managing Director of Paul Corke International. With 25 years of award-winning corporate experience, he specializes in organizational effectiveness, coaching, employee engagement, talent management, and leadership development across global markets. There is something extraordinary about the way nature sustains life. A tree does not grow for itself alone. Its branches provide shelter. Its roots help stabilise the earth. Its leaves return nutrients to the soil. Beneath the surface, networks of fungi and roots connect one organism to another, exchanging resources and responding to the needs of the wider ecosystem. The forest survives not because every tree competes successfully against every other tree, but because life is interconnected. In my previous article, The Intelligence of Intent, I explored the idea that leadership begins internally. Before leadership becomes visible in our behaviour, it is established in the mind. We choose who we intend to become before we can meaningfully influence who others might become. But there is another question that follows. Once we have chosen who we are going to be, what are we going to do with that choice? For me, part of the answer lies in something we rarely talk about seriously enough in leadership, love. The will to love The word love can feel uncomfortable in the language of business. We are comfortable talking about strategy, performance, transformation, productivity and growth. We talk increasingly about empathy, wellbeing and psychological safety. Yet love still sounds somehow too personal, too emotional, perhaps even too soft. I think we misunderstand it. Love in leadership is not sentimentality. It is not avoiding difficult conversations, lowering standards or trying to make everybody happy. Love can be demanding. It can tell someone a truth they do not want to hear because allowing them to continue failing would be easier, but less caring. It can challenge behaviour while preserving dignity. It can make an unpopular decision because it is the right decision. It can put the long-term wellbeing of people, an organisation, a community or even the planet ahead of short-term personal gain. Love, understood this way, requires will. The psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm argued in The Art of Loving that love should not simply be understood as a feeling that happens to us. It involves practice, discipline, patience and commitment. That distinction matters enormously for leadership. We cannot always choose whether we like someone. But we can choose how we treat them. We can choose respect or fairness, choose to listen, or choose to care. Perhaps most importantly, we can choose to recognise the humanity of another person even when they disagree with us. That is the will to love. From intention to humanity This is where the idea connects directly with Psychological Intelligence, or PsyQ. If PsyQ is the intelligence of intentional self-leadership, then intention cannot stop with ourselves. We first choose who we need to become. Then we choose how that person will show up in the lives of others. There is an important sequence here. Intent shapes identity. Identity shapes behaviour. Behaviour shapes relationships. Relationships shape culture. Culture ultimately shapes what organisations become. That is why authentic leadership is never merely personal. The internal world of the leader eventually becomes part of the external world experienced by everybody around them. A leader driven by insecurity creates one kind of environment. A leader driven by ego creates another. A leader driven by fear creates another still. But what happens when the starting point is care? Leadership as stewardship Nature offers us another useful perspective. Healthy ecosystems do not exist through extraction alone. They survive through cycles of contribution and renewal. For too long, some of our thinking about leadership has mirrored an extractive model. How much productivity can we get from people? How quickly can we grow? How much value can we create? How much more can the organisation deliver? Future-ready leadership requires a different question, "What are we putting back?" What are we giving back to our people? What are we giving back to our communities? What are we giving back to the environment from which, ultimately, all economic value originates? This is where love connects with stewardship and sustainability. If we genuinely care about something, we become concerned with what happens to it after we leave. That might be a person we have developed, a team we have built, an organisation we have shaped or a planet we will hand to generations we will never meet. Suddenly, leadership is no longer simply about success. It becomes about legacy. This is fundamental to the thinking behind Leadership 5.0. The future-ready leader cannot simply be technologically capable or strategically agile. Artificial intelligence will increasingly augment knowledge, analysis and decision-making. As technology advances, the qualities that make leadership profoundly human become more valuable, judgement, empathy, ethics, imagination, courage, compassion and care. The more intelligent our machines become, the more intentional we may need to become about our humanity. Love does not remove accountability One of the greatest misconceptions about human-centred leadership is that care somehow comes at the expense of performance. It shouldn't. Think again about nature. A gardener who cares deeply about a garden does not simply allow everything to grow unchecked. Plants are pruned. Diseased growth is removed. Some things are moved because they are preventing something else from flourishing. Care sometimes requires intervention. Leadership is similar. A leader who continually avoids difficult feedback because they do not want to upset somebody is not necessarily acting lovingly. They may simply be avoiding their own discomfort. Sometimes the most caring thing we can say is, this isn't good enough, and I know you are capable of better. The difference lies in intention. Are we challenging to demonstrate our authority, or because we genuinely want someone to grow? Are we listening so that we can respond, or because we genuinely want to understand? Are we developing people because the succession plan requires it, or because we recognise potential in another human being? People often sense the difference. The leaders we remember Think about the leaders who have had the greatest positive influence on your life. Years later, you may not remember their strategy. You probably cannot recall their KPIs, and you may have forgotten most of the meetings you attended with them. But you remember how they made you feel. Perhaps they believed in you before you fully believed in yourself, or they gave you an opportunity. Perhaps they listened when others didn't, or they challenged you at exactly the moment you needed challenging. Or perhaps, during a difficult period in your life, they simply treated you as a human being rather than a resource. Those moments matter, and they often become part of the leader we subsequently become. Leadership passes from person to person in ways that organisational charts will never capture. Much like the forest, its influence travels through an invisible network. A small leadership practice The philosophy sounds large, but its practice can be remarkably small. Before your next important interaction, pause for a moment. Before the performance conversation. Before the difficult meeting. Before responding to the email that has irritated you. Before speaking to the person who sees the world completely differently from you. Ask yourself, "How can I show care here?" Not, "How can I be nice?" Not, "How can I avoid conflict?" But, "What would care require from me in this moment?" That single question changes the intention you carry into the conversation, and intention has a remarkable way of changing everything that follows. The philosophy behind the leader This is why I increasingly believe every leader needs a leadership philosophy. Techniques tell us what we can do. Philosophy helps us decide what we should do. It gives us principles when the answer is unclear. It creates consistency between who we say we are and how we behave when circumstances test us. Ultimately, integrity is exactly that, alignment between what we believe and how we live. For my own Leadership Philosophies, one of those principles is very simple, to lead is to love. Without some kind of love, it becomes difficult to truly care, to serve, or to lead with authenticity, respect and integrity. The best leaders are not simply skilled at strategy, execution or influence. They bring humanity into the room. They create trust. They listen. They challenge with care. They lead in a way that allows people to feel seen, valued and respected. This is not weakness. It is not softness. It is leadership at its most grounded and most real. The forest we leave behind Eventually, every leader leaves. The role changes. The organisation moves on. Someone else occupies the office. The title that once seemed so important belongs to another name. What remains is what grew around us while we were there. Nature understands this better than we do. The oldest tree eventually falls, but even in falling, it feeds the forest from which new life emerges. Perhaps that is a better metaphor for leadership than climbing the corporate ladder. Not how high did I climb? But, "What grew because I was here?" That is a very different measure of leadership. As we move towards a future increasingly shaped by technology, uncertainty and extraordinary change, perhaps it is also one of the most important. Because the future of leadership will require intelligence. It will require adaptability. It will require courage and vision. But if we want that future to remain genuinely human, it will require something else too, the will to care, the will to serve, and ultimately, the will to love. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Paul Corke Paul Corke, Leadership Innovator, Author & Speaker Paul Corke is an executive coach, author, speaker, and Managing Director of Paul Corke International. With over 25 years of experience in leadership development, coaching, employee engagement, and organisational effectiveness, he has worked across the UK, Ireland, Europe, the US, and the Middle East. Recognised by Thinkers360 as a No. 1 Health & Wellness Thought Leader, Paul is also the author of Leadership 5.0:The Future of Leadership, which explores new perspectives on leadership, innovation, and the future of work.