Written by Char Scheuermann, Irlen Diagnostician Char first learned about Irlen syndrome when her niece was diagnosed in 2015. Irlen syndrome runs in her family, and two other nieces and a nephew were also diagnosed. Her second child, Daniel, was diagnosed in 2021, and her oldest, Anton, in 2022. That’s when she decided to train as an Irlen screener and later as a diagnostician. A quick trip to the grocery store can be unexpectedly difficult for someone who experiences migraines or light sensitivity. Bright overhead lights, glare from shiny surfaces, crowded shelves, and constantly shifting visual patterns may add to discomfort. Some people describe eyestrain, trouble concentrating, or a sense of overwhelm. Others notice that their headache is already beginning. Light sensitivity, also called photophobia, is common among people with migraine. Yet the relationship between light and migraine is not always straightforward. Light may contribute to discomfort or an attack for some people. For others, sensitivity to light may be an early sign that an attack is developing. Irlen syndrome may also be worth learning about when light and visually demanding environments cause ongoing discomfort. It may be more than brightness When someone says, “The lights bother me,” the experience may involve several things. Brightness is one possibility, but glare, flicker, contrast, and visually busy surroundings may also contribute. A grocery store combines many of these elements, including overhead lighting, reflective floors, colorful packaging, signs, movement, and long aisles. Research has found associations between migraine symptoms and visual experiences such as glare, flicker, and eye strain. This does not mean that every person with migraine will be affected by the same environment or that a specific kind of store lighting causes migraine. It does show why it can be useful to notice which settings feel difficult and what is happening at the time.[1] Is light a trigger or is light sensitivity an early symptom? People often identify bright or flickering light as a migraine trigger. But research suggests that light sensitivity can also occur in the early phase of an attack. In one study of people with migraine, reports of light as a trigger overlapped with reports of photophobia during the premonitory phase, the period before the headache begins.[2] This does not mean someone’s experience is mistaken. It means the sequence can be hard to interpret. A person may enter a bright store, notice discomfort, and develop a headache later. The light could have contributed, the sensitivity could have been an early symptom, or more than one factor could have been involved. Where Irlen syndrome may fit Irlen syndrome is associated with difficulties processing certain visual information. People may report light sensitivity, visual discomfort, or difficulty with patterns and visually demanding tasks. These experiences can affect reading, computer use, and time spent in bright or visually busy places. Irlen syndrome does not explain every migraine, and the two are not interchangeable. But when someone experiences ongoing visual discomfort in addition to migraine symptoms, it may be helpful to explore whether visual processing plays a role. In my work as an Irlen diagnostician, I hear from people who find bright lighting and visually busy environments difficult. Individualized Irlen Spectral Filters are selected during diagnostic testing. Some clients report that their filters reduce visual discomfort and make activities such as shopping feel calmer and more comfortable. Look for patterns without blaming yourself A brief symptom record can help make patterns easier to discuss with a healthcare professional. After a difficult outing, write down the following details. What kind of lighting or visual environment you were in Whether light sensitivity began before, during, or after other migraine symptoms How long the discomfort lasted Whether sleep, stress, meals, or other circumstances were different that day A record cannot prove that one exposure caused an attack. It can offer useful detail over time and help you describe your experience more clearly. You can also consider practical adjustments. When possible, choose a quieter time to shop, take breaks, or use curbside pickup during a difficult period. If you’d like to learn more about Irlen syndrome or find out whether individually prescribed Irlen Spectral Filters may be appropriate for your visual symptoms, contact me to learn about the assessment process. Keep the whole picture in view Persistent or changing light sensitivity deserves attention, especially when it interferes with daily activities. A healthcare professional can help assess migraine symptoms and consider other possible contributors to visual discomfort. An eye exam may also be appropriate, depending on the symptoms. An Irlen assessment is one option to explore when a person’s symptoms and history make it relevant. It does not replace medical care for migraine. The goal is to understand what may be contributing to a person’s discomfort and identify appropriate support. A small observation can be a useful starting point If the lighting in a grocery store feels overwhelming, you do not have to dismiss the experience or decide on your own what it means. Notice when the discomfort occurs, record the pattern, and bring those observations to a qualified professional. If visual stress seems to be part of the picture, learning about Irlen syndrome and Irlen Spectral Filters can be another step toward making everyday activities feel more manageable. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from Char Scheuermann Char Scheuermann, Irlen Diagnostician Char Scheuermann is an independent Irlen diagnostician serving clients throughout the northeastern United States. Drawing on both professional expertise and personal experience, she is passionate about raising awareness of Irlen syndrome and helping individuals find answers to challenges that are often overlooked or misunderstood. As an educator and advocate, Char is committed to making Irlen services accessible and convenient by offering screenings, diagnostic testing, and filter checks in clients’ homes. Her mission is to deliver exceptional care, personalized support, and solutions that improve comfort, confidence, and quality of life for those affected by Irlen syndrome. References: [1] Hayne, D. P., & Martin, P. R. (2019). “Relating Photophobia, Visual Aura, and Visual Triggers of Headache and Migraine.” Headache. PubMed [2] Schulte, L. H., Jürgens, T. P., & May, A. (2015). “Photo-, osmo-, and phonophobia in the premonitory phase of migraine: mistaking symptoms for triggers?” The Journal of Headache and Pain. PubMed

Written by Andy Hall, Executive Leadership & Business Coach Andy Hall is an executive coach, leadership development specialist, and founder of Andy Hall Coaching. Through Leader As A Coach, he helps organizations retain their best people by developing leaders who build trust, ownership, and performance every day. A deadline slips, and you chase it! The work arrives, but only after you have stepped in again. By Friday, you have spent more time checking other people’s commitments than moving your own work forward. You want people to take ownership, yet the more you chase, the more everyone seems to wait for you. For a chief executive officer (CEO), business owner, or any senior leader, this is more than a frustrating leadership habit. It can slow decisions, pull leaders away from developing their people, and leave reliable employees carrying work that others have not delivered. Over time, that experience can affect both performance and people’s willingness to stay engaged. Accountability needs a better conversation, one that makes the standard clear and gives people room to think. It also requires following through on what was agreed. When chasing becomes the management system In my previous article, I explored how leaders can take the THINKING out of their people’s hands by answering too quickly, rescuing too often, and becoming the center of every decision. Accountability is where those habits are often tested. You hand over a piece of work, and progress is slower than expected. You feel the pressure, so you take it back. The immediate problem gets solved, but the person loses an opportunity to work through the challenge and own the result. Next time, you check earlier, and they wait for your check. Before long, both of you are helping to maintain a pattern neither of you wants. Some leaders respond by tightening control, while others avoid the conversation because they want to preserve the relationship. Both responses can leave the real issue untouched. A coaching approach gives leaders a practical way to address the work and develop the person. It requires clear expectations and the willingness to challenge someone respectfully when their actions fall short. Start with the agreement you actually made Before deciding that someone lacks accountability, look at what was agreed. “Can you get this sorted?” may feel clear to the person saying it. The person hearing it may have a different view of the deadline, the quality required, or the decisions they are allowed to make. A nod is not enough to establish a shared understanding. Ask the person to describe the outcome in their own words. What will be delivered? By when? What does good look like? Who owns the result? Also check capacity. If you have just added a new priority to an already full workload, discuss what needs to move. Asking someone to own an impossible combination of commitments will not develop accountability. The leader has responsibilities here, too. People need the information, authority, and resources to deliver what they are being asked to own. Use 5 steps to turn concern into a clear commitment Consider a simple example. A colleague agreed to send a client proposal on Thursday. It’s now Friday, the proposal is unfinished, and another colleague has had to rearrange their work. This is an illustrative situation, but the conversation will feel familiar to many leaders. 1. Describe the gap without labeling the person Start with the facts and the impact. “We agreed the proposal would go to the client on Thursday. It hasn’t been sent, and that has delayed the next stage of their decision. Let’s look at what happened and agree on how you will move it forward.” “You’re unreliable” turns a missed commitment into a judgment about someone’s character. “We agreed it would go out on Thursday, and it hasn’t been sent” gives you something specific to discuss. Be direct and honest. Softening the message so much that the person misses it helps neither of you. 2. Listen before deciding what needs to change Ask, “What got in the way?” Then listen to the answer without preparing your response while the other person is still speaking. You may discover a skill gap, a missing decision, competing instructions, or an obstacle the person should have raised earlier. You may also discover that the commitment simply was not given enough attention. Those situations need different responses. A person who needs training will not become more capable because you repeat the deadline more firmly. A person who repeatedly ignores a clear agreement needs a direct and curious conversation about that pattern. Ask, “When did you first know the deadline was at risk?” and “What stopped us from having this conversation then?” Be willing to hear that something in your own behavior made it harder to raise the issue. 3. Keep the thinking and ownership with the person Once you understand the situation, resist the urge to design the whole recovery plan right away. Ask, “What do you recommend we do now?” Give the person time to think and then explore their proposal. “What can you complete today?” “Who needs an update?” “What will you do differently when a deadline is at risk?” Challenge an incomplete answer. If “I’ll try harder” is all you hear, ask what that will look like in practice. Your experience still matters. Offer direction when it’s needed, particularly when the person lacks knowledge or the situation requires an immediate decision. The aim is to develop sound judgment while getting the work done. 4. Agree on support and the boundaries of authority “What support do you need from me?” is useful only if the answer leads to a clear agreement. Perhaps the person needs you to resolve a conflicting priority or approve a specific cost. Perhaps they need help learning part of the task. Agree on what you’ll contribute without quietly accepting ownership of everything else. Make decision boundaries explicit. What can they decide themselves? What needs approval? What must they raise immediately? A leader who asks for ownership but reverses every reasonable decision teaches people to check first. People need to know where they can act, and they need you to honor that agreement. 5. Close with a commitment and review it Finish with something you can both describe. “You will complete the proposal by 2 p.m., send me the pricing section for approval, and update the client by 3 p.m. We will review progress at 1 p.m. so there is time to address any remaining obstacles.” Ask the person to summarize the commitment and confirm what you will do as well. How closely you follow up should reflect the risk, the person’s experience, and how reliably they’ve delivered recently. Agree on this openly. As their capability and reliability grow, review how much checking is still useful. When you follow up, discuss the result. If they met the commitment, recognize the specific behavior. If they missed it again, address that promptly and agree on what happens next. Repeatedly resetting a deadline without examining the pattern makes the agreement less credible. Accountability still includes consequences Taking a coaching approach does not mean every performance problem can be resolved by asking another question. When expectations are clear, support is available, and commitments are repeatedly missed, leaders need to address the continuing performance gap through the organization’s established process. Be specific about the improvement required, the review period, and the consequences of continuing to miss commitments. People should not have to guess where they stand. Fear can grow when standards change without explanation, mistakes attract humiliation, or consequences arrive as a surprise. Following through clearly and fairly gives people a more dependable experience of leadership. It also matters to the colleagues doing what they agreed to do. If the same people repeatedly absorb unfinished work, they may begin to question how fairly responsibility is shared. Make accountability part of everyday leadership For leaders at every level, the next step is to consider which conversations they’re equipped to have. Can they set a clear standard? Can they listen without retreating from it? Can they challenge a missed commitment without taking the work back? These skills need practice and feedback. Leaders also need their own managers to demonstrate the same behavior. A leader will struggle to create ownership if every decision is routinely taken out of their hands. Helping leaders have everyday conversations that build trust, ownership, and performance is central to the work we do through Leader As A Coach at Andy Hall Coaching. Start this week with one commitment you have been repeatedly chasing. Use the five steps to agree on a clear outcome, the support required, and a review point. Then follow through on your part. Before that conversation, ask yourself, “What have I made clear, and what have I simply assumed?” Your answer may change the conversation before it even begins. Follow me on Facebook and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Andy Hall Andy Hall, Executive Leadership & Business Coach Andy Hall is an executive coach, leadership development specialist, and founder of Andy Hall Coaching. He helps organizations reduce employee turnover, improve performance and strengthen trust by changing the everyday leadership behaviors that shape how people feel, contribute and stay. After more than two decades in senior corporate leadership roles across the UK and US, Andy created Leader As A Coach to help leaders stop creating dependency and start building ownership. His work focuses on practical conversations that improve accountability, engagement, confidence and results. Andy believes retention is not just an HR challenge, it is a leadership behavior challenge.

Written by Danielle Izaak-Lewis, Clinical Nutrition Strategist & Consultant Danielle Izaak-Lewis is a nutrition consultant, integrative and functional nutrition expert, and trauma-informed clinical nutrition strategist. She founded Mindful Nutrition & Wellness Solutions, helping high-achieving Black, Indigenous, and women of color recalibrate their health through evidence-based nutrition and cultural food wisdom. Your fasting numbers have held steady for months. If you wear a glucose monitor, the daily average looks ordinary. You track, you log, you eat the way the guidelines say to eat. Then your hemoglobin A1c result posts a few tenths of a percentage point above the line, and the word on your chart changes. Nothing you measured yourself changed with it. The gap between what you track and what the cutoff reports is not a verdict on your discipline. It reflects where someone drew the line, who stood in the reference group, and what the test measures. My previous piece for Brainz, The Labs Look Normal, But Your Body is Still Under Siege, asked what a clean panel was never calibrated to detect. This piece asks about the numbers a panel does measure. Where does the line sit? Who was it drawn around? What does it cost to move it? Lab Reference Ranges Weren’t Built on Every Body covers the thyroid case. A 2025 study recalculated thyroid reference ranges by age, sex, and race and reclassified 48.5 percent of people previously classified as having subclinical hypothyroidism as having normal thyroid function. This piece looks at two other tests, hemoglobin A1c and hemoglobin. One glucose, two verdicts Guidelines use a standard A1c cutoff when A1c is appropriate for diagnosis. A 2019 analysis of national survey data by Ford and colleagues compared A1c with glucose results from oral glucose tolerance testing in 5,324 Black and white adults. The A1c cutoff that best distinguished adults with diabetes from those without it was 6.0 percent in Black adults and 5.7 percent in white adults. For dysglycemia, the broader category, the figures were 5.7 percent and 5.5 percent, respectively. The authors concluded that A1c needs to be interpreted in relation to an individual’s glucose levels when used to diagnose diabetes or prediabetes. A 2023 Kaiser Permanente Northern California study by Karter and colleagues looked at the relationship using continuous glucose monitors. The study included 1,788 patients with diabetes and used about 124 million readings to calculate mean glucose over the 90 days before each A1c test. For a given mean glucose, A1c ran 0.33 percentage points higher in African American patients than in white patients. Same glucose. Different A1c. Asian, Latino, and multiethnic patients did not differ significantly from white patients. Then the authors reported the number that matters more. Sixty-five percent of the variation in the relationship between glucose and A1c was within racial and ethnic groups, and 9 percent was between them. The authors concluded that treatment decisions based on A1c targets need to be individualized and supported by direct glucose measurements. One distinction matters here. Karter’s patients already had a diabetes diagnosis, so that study speaks to monitoring and targets. Ford’s study speaks to diagnosis. The reason is still open Three possible explanations emerge, and the studies do not agree. Red blood cell lifespan comes first. Cohen and colleagues (2008) labeled red cells in 12 people and found that cell lifespan varied enough among hematologically normal adults to shift A1c at the same average glucose. That study did not compare racial groups. It shows the mechanism exists. It does not show that the mechanism explains this gap. A 2021 review by Harris and colleagues adds that red cell survival, inherited hemoglobin variants such as those associated with sickling, and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency can influence A1c. The review notes that reported effects in African American populations are contradictory and hard to explain. The second explanation is how hemoglobin itself glycates. Bergenstal and colleagues (2017) followed 104 Black and 104 white people with type 1 diabetes for 12 weeks using continuous glucose monitoring. A1c was 0.4 percentage points higher in Black participants at a given mean glucose. Glycated albumin and fructosamine, two markers that do not depend on red cells, showed no significant racial differences in their relationships with mean glucose. The authors pointed to possible differences in hemoglobin glycation and noted that race explained only part of the difference in A1c. The third explanation is glycemia that fasting tests miss. Selvin and colleagues (2011) studied 1,719 adults in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study and found that glycated albumin and fructosamine also ran higher in Black adults, even after adjusting for fasting glucose. Those markers do not depend on red cells, so the authors raised the possibility that glucose levels differed at times a fasting test would miss. The study did not use continuous glucose monitoring to test that possibility. Each study holds part of the picture. None closes it. A cutoff is a trade, and hemoglobin shows the price Clinicians use hemoglobin to identify anemia. Sekhar and colleagues (2017) evaluated a historical cutoff for Black women that was 1.0 gram per deciliter (g/dL) lower than the standard cutoff. The World Health Organization’s 2024 guideline uses a cutoff of 12.0 g/dL for nonpregnant women ages 15 to 65 and does not recommend adjusting hemoglobin concentrations for race or ethnicity when assessing anemia in populations. Sekhar and colleagues tested how hemoglobin cutoffs performed against an estimate of body iron calculated from ferritin and soluble transferrin receptor levels. The sample included 6,602 nonpregnant girls and women ages 12 to 49 from a national survey. Anemia can develop late in iron deficiency, so screening with hemoglobin alone can miss iron deficiency before anemia develops. At the standard cutoff of 12.0 g/dL, hemoglobin caught 42.9 percent of iron deficiency cases in the full sample and wrongly flagged 4.5 percent of those without iron deficiency. Among Black participants, the historical cutoff of 11.0 g/dL caught 37.4 percent of cases and wrongly flagged 1.3 percent of those without iron deficiency. The researchers then looked for the cutoffs that best balanced detection and false alarms. For the full sample, the cutoff was 12.8 g/dL. It caught 71.3 percent of cases and flagged 20.7 percent of participants without iron deficiency. For Black participants, the cutoff was 12.5 g/dL, with 80.7 percent of cases caught and 26.7 percent of those without iron deficiency flagged. For participants who were not Black, the cutoff was 13.0 g/dL, with 69.9 percent of cases caught and 20.7 percent of those without iron deficiency flagged. Raising the line catches more cases and produces more false alarms. The authors suggested that a practical cutoff might lie between 12.0 and 12.8 g/dL and proposed analyzing cost-effectiveness as the next step. They left open whether the difference between 12.5 and 13.0 g/dL was clinically meaningful. Two limits keep the picture honest. The study had no data on sickle cell disease or thalassemia, and the body iron estimate used as the reference was not adjusted for age or race. Age also shifted performance. Hemoglobin was better at distinguishing participants with iron deficiency from those without it at ages 22 to 49 (0.87) than at ages 12 to 21 (0.77). On that scale, 0.5 is a coin flip and 1.0 is perfect. What context adds Read together, these studies show one pattern three ways. A cutoff is a judgment about which error costs less, and that judgment changes with who stands in front of it. Race appears in these studies as a marker. Karter and colleagues describe race as a social construct, and they found much more variation in the relationship between glucose and A1c within racial and ethnic groups than between them. In Sekhar’s study, hemoglobin’s ability to detect iron deficiency varied by age, and the cutoffs that best balanced detection and false alarms differed across the groups studied. A cutoff works or fails depending on what else is known about the person holding the result. That context is specific. A glucose pattern next to the A1c. Ferritin next to the hemoglobin. Your age, any inherited hemoglobin variant, and your own trend over time. Bring three questions to your care team. What glucose measurement sits next to this A1c? What iron measure sits next to this hemoglobin? How does this result compare with my own earlier results as well as with the printed line? These questions inform a conversation with your clinician. They do not replace one. The patterns you track are part of the picture. A cutoff is a judgment about a line, and that judgment improves when it meets the context you carry. Read this alongside Lab Reference Ranges Weren’t Built on Every Body, which lays out the thyroid case with its figures and citations, and The Labs Look Normal, But Your Body is Still Under Siege, which asks what a clean panel was never built to detect. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Danielle Izaak-Lewis Danielle Izaak-Lewis, Clinical Nutrition Strategist & Consultant Danielle Izaak-Lewis is a nutrition consultant, integrative and functional nutrition expert, and trauma-informed clinical nutrition strategist. She founded Mindful Nutrition & Wellness Solutions to help high-achieving Black, Indigenous, and women of color recalibrate their health instead of following generic meal plans. Her work blends evidence-based nutrition science, epigenetics, and trauma-informed care with the cultural food wisdom many clients were taught to set aside. Danielle holds a Master's in Clinical Nutrition and built her practice after her own experience of stress debt revealed how those patterns show up in the body long before they show up as a diagnosis. She believes individual healing is generational healing. References: Ford CN et al. “Racial differences in performance of HbA1c for the classification of diabetes and prediabetes among US adults of non-Hispanic black and white race.” Diabetic Medicine (2019). Karter AJ, Parker MM, Moffet HH, and Gilliam LK. “Racial and Ethnic Differences in the Association Between Mean Glucose and Hemoglobin A1c.” Diabetes Technology & Therapeutics (2023). Cohen RM et al. “Red cell life span heterogeneity in hematologically normal people is sufficient to alter HbA1c.” Blood (2008). Harris NS, Weaver KD, Beal SG, and Winter WE. “The Interaction between Hb A1C and Selected Genetic Factors in the African American Population in the USA.” The Journal of Applied Laboratory Medicine (2021). Bergenstal RM et al. “Racial Differences in the Relationship of Glucose Concentrations and Hemoglobin A1c Levels.” Annals of Internal Medicine (2017). Selvin E et al. “Racial differences in glycemic markers: a cross-sectional analysis of community-based data.” Annals of Internal Medicine (2011). Sekhar DL, Kunselman AR, Chuang CH, and Paul IM. “Optimizing hemoglobin thresholds for detection of iron deficiency among reproductive-age women in the United States.” Translational Research (2017, published online in 2016). Li Q et al. “Thyroid Function Reference Intervals by Age, Sex, and Race: A Cross-Sectional Study.” Annals of Internal Medicine (2025). World Health Organization. Guideline on haemoglobin cutoffs to define anaemia in individuals and populations (2024). WHO guideline

Written by Timeout Taumua, Award-Winning Author On behalf of Brainz Magazine, let us introduce Timeout A. Taumua, a multi-award-winning author of The Magnificence of the 3, an expository book about the scientific nature of the Bible. The book and the author had been dubbed by some prominent editorial reviewers as "a rare work constructed by a rare being" and "a rare book by a rare person". This three-article series explores a controversial claim introduced in my book, THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE 3, and further developed in the second book of the series, The Great Commission’s 13th Tribe of Gentile Priests, scheduled for release in 2027. One of my claims presented in THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE 3 proposes that God replaced the original Land of Milk and Honey promised to Abraham with a second land, the modern-day United States of America.[1] I further propose that America's Declaration of Independence amounts to a foundational covenant with God, reflecting in principle the covenants God held with Israel, and provides a framework for fulfilling Jesus’s Great Commission, with its own land of Milk and Honey. The biblical foundation of the promised land The evidence was preserved in Genesis, dispersed throughout the Old Testament (OT), carried into the New Testament (NT), and ultimately extended into the modern world. Here is a short summary. It began with God's promise to Abraham that the land the Nation of Israel claims today was for his descendants. Significantly, and as a paramount biblical fact, when God first made this promise, He placed no conditions on Abraham or his descendants for receiving and keeping the land.[2] Generations later, Abraham's descendants found themselves enslaved in Egypt. After 400 years, God eventually intervened and freed them. Then they began their journey toward the promised land. On the third day of the third month after leaving Egypt, the Israelites arrived at Mount Sinai, where God assigned them as His tribe of Priests. But while Moses was on top of the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments from God, the Israelites were at the bottom creating a golden calf idol to replace God.[3] After this incident, and during their journey to the Promised Land, God promised blessings and curses that would govern their relationship with the land, recorded in the Book of Leviticus 26. Although God's original promise to Abraham was unconditional, after the incident on Mount Sinai, He changed His mind and imposed conditions on Abraham's descendants for retaining the land. The conditions were to obey His commandments, particularly the prohibition against idolatry, as stated in Leviticus 26:1–13. However, the OT records Israel's repeated disobedience, including idolatry and the murder and sacrifice of children by fire, an abomination to God.[4] The curses of Leviticus 26 clearly outline the consequences of violating the Commandments: First, despite remembering His covenant concerning the land with their ancestors, God declared that the land would be left empty by them to enjoy its Sabbaths (vs. 42–43). Second, God promised that He would not utterly reject or destroy them while they were in the lands of their enemies because doing so would violate His covenant (vs. 44). Third, God claimed that destroying them would violate the covenant held with their ancestors, whom He brought out of Egypt (vs. 44–45). This covenant held with their ancestors brought out of Egypt was their appointment as Priests, and did not involve the land. Supporters of modern Israel use verses 41–42, where God said that if they confessed their iniquity, He would remember the covenant with their ancestors. But they deliberately ignored verse 45, where God said that even if they humbled themselves, the land “shall be left empty by them,” and the only covenant He would remember was the one He held with their ancestors on Mount Sinai. Supporters of Israel also turn to Deuteronomy 30:1–10 to defend the re-establishment of modern Israel. This chapter, however, again emphasizes abiding by the commandments, particularly in verses 11–20, for keeping the land. In other words, Deuteronomy also reinforced the Leviticus curses for idol worship. So the conditions for keeping the land remained. It is important to recognize that nowhere in the Old Testament did God explicitly retract the curses established in Leviticus 26. This is why this scene in the New Testament is important for Gentile Christians and Americans. When the Israelite Apostles asked Jesus whether He would restore the kingdom to Israel, His response was simple: “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority.” – Acts 1:6-7 (NKJV). Jesus rejected the request, leaving the curses of Leviticus 26 intact and grandfathered into the modern world. As a reminder of the curse, the Romans not only enslaved them off the land for the third time but also burned Jerusalem and the Temple in the year 70 Common Era (Lohnes, 2018). These passages and others in upcoming articles provide the biblical foundation for three controversial propositions developed in THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE 3 and the upcoming second book: The Addition of a 13th Tribe of Priests. The Designation of a Second Land of Milk and Honey. The Recreation of the Ark of the Testimony/Covenant. Israel as a nation of priests God's decision to choose Israel as His Tribe raised two questions for me: Who were the Israelites chosen to serve as priests to, themselves or “all families of the earth”? If their mission was to serve mankind, how could they accomplish it while isolated on a piece of land? The answers can be traced to Genesis. When God called Abraham, He promised that through him, “all families of the earth would be blessed” (Genesis 12:3). I consider this the first indication of the priestly task, later assigned to Abraham's descendants on Mount Sinai. If God planned for all humanity to know Him, wouldn't it make sense to appoint messengers to teach the world about their Creator? This was Israel’s task and nothing more. But then, how could they bless all families of the earth while isolated on one piece of land without global media? This is why verses 42–45 of Leviticus 26 need to be understood. God not only promised to keep the land empty to enjoy its Sabbath but also could not fully abhor or destroy Israel while they were in the lands of their enemies, as doing so would break the covenant held on Mount Sinai. This covenant was their appointment as Priests only! This was how Israel was meant to fulfill its tasks as Priests, dispersed into the lands of Gentiles to bless “all families of the earth” by introducing God and the Commandments. The Social Brain Hypothesis, God’s priests, and the "Loving-thy-neighbor” law The Social Brain Hypothesis (SBH) is a scientific theory that explains why primates developed unusually large brains compared to other species of similar or even larger brain sizes. It proposes that the complexity of managing social relationships drove this development. As Dr. Dunbar explains: “Primate societies are unusually complex compared to those of other animals, and the need to manage such complexity is the main explanation for the fact that primates have unusually large brains.” This theory is symbolized by the slogan, “the bigger the tribe, the bigger the brain” (Dunbar, 2016). Dr. Dunbar inadvertently finds support in the Bible. The Ten Commandments, for example, inadvertently served the same purpose. Ever wonder about the simplistic nature of the Commandments, like obeying parents, not stealing, murdering, or bearing false witness? The SBH offers an interesting explanation beyond the traditional faith-based one. Would you rather live in a society of thieves, murderers, and liars, or among people who reject such behavior? It is reasonable to assume that the Commandments serve the same purpose: to expand God's tribe by establishing social principles necessary for people to live together. After all, the Commandments were designed as the Tree of Life. We can return to Genesis, where God promised Abraham that through him, “all families of the earth would be blessed.” Equipped with the Commandments, Israel's Priests were meant to expand God's tribe to include all mankind. The SBH reveals why: the bigger the tribe, the bigger the brain. Together, the SBH and the Commandments offer a new perspective on the purpose behind God's appointment of a nation of Priests. The Commandments as the Tree of Life fit the slogan conveniently. God, the Levites, versus the idol worshippers The fundamental principle of creation, as I propose in THE MAGNIFICENCE OF THE 3, is that every innate tool God designed for human development reflects His Image and Likeness, the God who knows good and evil, symbolized by the recurring pattern of three. Since the priestly assignment was part of God's design for human development, it too must reflect this pattern. Israel was therefore destined to be divided into opposing groups, with God serving as the neutral neutron between them. The golden calf incident at Mount Sinai preserved this element of the design. When Moses returned from the top of the mountain with the Commandments, he found Israel dancing around the idol and called for those on God's side to come to him. The Levites responded and, following Moses' command, killed approximately 3,000 idol worshippers.[5] This division continued in the Old Testament. Israel later split into the Northern and Southern kingdoms, killing each other in civil wars.[6] Centuries later, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE, internal civil conflict further weakened the city before its destruction, including the burning of the Temple (Ancient Jewish History: The Great Revolt, n.d.). This division continues into the modern world and is now reflected in the opposition between Diaspora Jews and Zionists (Lehman-Wilzig, 2025). Because God personally assigned Israel to be a nation of Priests, its structure reflected a recurring pattern of three opposing forces with God as the neutral center between them. As if to preserve the evidence, the Zionist Organization of America celebrated the Chicago World Fair in 1933 by recreating the Molech idol from the OT, complete with the head of a calf. Over a hundred thousand Jews danced in front of it, including imitating a child sacrifice (footagefarm, 2013). This same pattern appears in fundamental elements of creation: God, man, and his opposite, woman, the Garden of Eden with its opposite trees, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge (death), and the brain neuron (Tree of Knowledge), designed with three types: motor, sensory, and interneurons. As the Priestly task was a fundamental one, it follows the same pattern: God, Diaspora Jews, and idol-worshipping Zionists. Since God also personally assigned a Promised Land, there shall also be three of them, just as there are three religions following the same God: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. In Part II, I will lay out the evidence preserved in the Old Testament to prepare for the transition from the old world to the modern one, where the Ark of the Testimony made its appearance. “As the idea of blind faith loses popularity, writers like Taumua become critically important in filling the vacuum that was once exclusively the domain of churches.” – Readers’ Favorite Book Reviews and Awards. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Timeout Taumua Timeout Taumua, Award-Winning Author Timeout decided to join our community to share the scientific meaning of biblical stories that God revealed to him, such as the identities of the Ark of the Covenant, the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Knowledge, and the Tree of Life, including parabolic tales depicting the splitting of the atom. In light of the 26 book awards, a Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award, and the nature of our community, these discoveries should be of interest to some of us, if not all. References: [1] Genesis 15: 7, 17-21; 22: 13-15; 26:2-4 (NKJV). [2] Genesis 15:7, 17–21. [3] Genesis 32 [4] Deuteronomy 12: 31; 2 Kings 16:3; 21: 6; 23: 10; Jeremiah 7:31; 32:35 (NKJVs). [5] Exodus 32: 25-35 (NKJV). [6] 1 Kings 11: 29-31 (NKJV).

Written by Ben Crowther, Founder of Crow Flies Growth Systems & Co-Founder of Aiden Solutions Ben Crowther is the founder of Crow Flies Growth Systems and co-founder of Aiden Solutions. He helps businesses replace static websites and fragmented marketing with AI-powered growth systems built to convert, support and scale. The best first automation is usually a repeatable job with clear rules, a visible result and a way to recover when it goes wrong. The impressive demo can wait. The first task you automate probably shouldn’t be the one that looks best in a demonstration. Start with something your team does repeatedly and understands properly, where they can tell when it’s gone wrong. That might be acknowledging an enquiry, assigning it to the right person or checking whether a record is missing important information. There’s little glamour in any of it. There’s also little glamour in paying someone to chase the same missing details every Tuesday. Ask staff what they spend time correcting, chasing or entering twice. The answer may be a forgotten form field, a missing attachment or a routine status update. If that work happens every day and the rules are stable, there may be a useful starting point. If the team only encounters it twice a year, the business case will look rather different. The temptation is to start with the impressive part: an artificial intelligence (AI) system making decisions, generating proposals or running the customer conversation. Sometimes that’s appropriate. Sometimes the business has simply skipped the less exciting job of agreeing how the process should work. Use the simplest tool that works If the job is “when this form arrives, create a record and notify the right person”, it may need an ordinary workflow based on rules. It does not need a language model to develop an opinion about who should receive the email. Clear rules are easier to test, cheaper to maintain and less likely to surprise you. AI can help when the input is less structured, such as summarising an enquiry or finding an approved answer in a large collection of documents. Even then, decide what the system is allowed to do with the result. Preparing a draft for a person is a different level of permission from sending that draft to a customer or committing the business to a price. I would start with the part you can explain. If you cannot describe the decision, test the result or see when it has failed, adding another layer of AI is unlikely to make it easier to manage. Find a task with a clear answer I’d look at how often a task happens, how much time it takes, the cost of getting it wrong and how clearly you can write its rules. Check whether the information it needs is available and whether you can reverse an incorrect action. Ask what the task costs today, including the interruptions it causes. A job that takes two minutes may still matter if it happens a hundred times a week. A job that takes twenty minutes once a quarter might not justify an integration that needs somebody to maintain it. The calculation of savings needs to account for checking, corrections and support, not just how fast the demonstration runs. An automatic reminder for a confirmed appointment can be fairly straightforward. A recommendation that depends on an expert interpreting someone’s circumstances is a different job. Both can be described as automation, but that doesn’t give them the same level of risk. Think about the consequences of a mistake. A duplicate internal reminder is annoying. An incorrect payment instruction, public technical claim or sensitive recommendation can do real damage. Those jobs need different safeguards, and some should remain with a qualified person even when software can help prepare the information. If the task changes depending on who you ask, settle that first. Software can’t resolve a disagreement nobody has acknowledged. It’ll just follow whichever version happened to make it into the build. Write down what should happen Before choosing a tool, write down what starts the process, what information it needs and the rules for the next action. Name the person responsible. Explain how you’ll know it succeeded and what should happen when it fails. Take a hypothetical enquiry workflow. A form arrives, the system checks the service and location, creates a record and assigns an owner. What happens if the location is missing? What if it’s outside the service area? What if the record system is unavailable? These questions matter more than how quickly it runs when everything goes to plan. Now add the uncomfortable cases. If the form is incomplete, does the customer get asked for the missing detail, or does the record quietly fail? If it is outside the service area, who decides whether an exception is possible? If a required system is down, where is the information held until the connection recovers? The answers belong in the design, not in a frantic conversation after the first failure. Keep a unique identifier for each run, record when it starts and finishes, and prevent duplicate actions. Some temporary failures can be retried safely. That doesn’t mean sending the customer the same message with every attempt. Preserve the input and give someone a way to recover the work manually. Give the person taking over enough context to act. An error notice saying “something went wrong” is not a handover. It should identify the affected record, what the system attempted and what is safe to retry. Test a duplicate submission, a partial failure and a manual restart before expanding the workflow. Keep customer information under control A workflow may move names, contact details, purchase questions and internal notes between systems. Before connecting them, check what information is actually required and who should be able to access it. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) guidance on collecting personal information is a useful starting point for Australian businesses that need to establish their obligations. Do not give an automated assistant access to an entire customer database because it needs one field. Keep permissions narrow, make the records of its actions available for review, and decide what happens if information is wrong or a person asks for it to be corrected. Whether the law applies in a particular way depends on the business and the information involved, the sensible design principle is to collect and expose no more than the job requires. Earn wider permission I’d keep human approval for proposals, public performance claims, sensitive advice and first contact with a prospect. Preparation can often be automated while the decision stays with a person. That can still remove a lot of repetitive work. For work assisted by AI, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework describes the importance of defined human oversight, testing and monitoring during operation. You do not need a committee to send an appointment reminder. You do need to know who can stop a system and who is accountable when it gets a consequential decision wrong. For a publishing workflow with limited risk, I’d suggest starting with four clean weeks of reviewed output before considering automatic publication of a preapproved evergreen template. That’s a practical checkpoint, not an industry standard or proof of safety. Volume, subject matter and the consequences of an error may call for a longer review or keeping human approval permanently. Likewise, three repeated failures can be a useful trigger to pause the affected action and create a recovery task. Serious failures may mean stopping immediately. Keep the records and alert an owner, don’t let a dashboard turn missing data into a reassuring zero. A useful alert should tell someone what needs attention. It should not generate fifty new alerts because the same connection has failed fifty times. Distinguish the original customer request from repeated attempts, pause only the affected action where practical, and make recovery part of the normal work. Build one narrow version and test duplicates, missing information, unavailable services and a manual restart. Keep sampling the output after launch. Useful automation is something your team can trust enough to stop checking constantly, while still knowing how to step in. Measure whether automating the task saves work Record the starting point. How long does the task take? How often is information missing? How many corrections does somebody make? Then compare a small, supervised run with the old process. Look at completed tasks, time saved, errors caught and how often a person still has to intervene. Include the work required to keep the automation running. If it saves one hour a week and creates two hours of checking, debugging and explaining strange results, that is a fairly poor exchange. Equally, a workflow that saves little time but prevents expensive omissions may still be worth keeping. Decide what benefit you are actually testing. Keep reviewing it after launch. Products change, staff move roles and customer questions change. A workflow that was correct in November may be wrong in February if nobody owns its rules or information. Make someone responsible for those changes. My recommendation is to pick one repeated job, write down the steps and run the failure cases before buying anything. If it works and people can recover it when it does not, expand from there. Automation should leave the business with less work to chase, not another system to babysit. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Ben Crowther Ben Crowther, Founder of Crow Flies Growth Systems & Co-Founder of Aiden Solutions Ben Crowther is an Australian entrepreneur, marketing strategist and artificial intelligence (AI) advocate focused on how technology is changing the way businesses attract, convert and support customers. He is the founder of Crow Flies Growth Systems and co-founder of Aiden Solutions, a knowledge and customer support platform powered by AI. His work combines digital strategy, search engine optimisation (SEO), answer engine optimisation (AEO), generative engine optimisation (GEO), automation and conversational AI to turn traditional websites into active business systems. Ben is particularly interested in the shift from static online brochures toward intelligent digital experiences that can sell, answer questions and support customers around the clock. Through his writing, he explores AI, entrepreneurship, marketing and the future of digital business.

Written by Juna Ting-Wei Chang, Forest Therapy Guide Juna Ting-Wei Chang is a forest therapy guide and founder of Shinrin-Yoku Taiwan, specialising in evidence-based forest therapy and Shinrin-yoku. She supports individuals and organisations in slowing down and gently returning their attention to themselves and the more-than-human world through nature. Rest should come naturally, yet asking for it can take courage. Here is why scrolling doesn’t always provide the rest we need, and a handful of easy ideas for resting in nature on your own, with friends, or with kids. Be honest: when did you last rest without feeling you had to earn it first? Rest should be one of the most natural things in the world. Nobody has to teach a cat to nap in a sunbeam. Yet for many of us, asking for rest takes courage, and we end up apologizing for needing it. So let’s start with a small rebellion. Resting is not wasting time. It is a necessity for getting back into balance. Think of a phone you would never dream of running at 1% all week. Yet that is exactly how many of us treat ourselves. Rest is not a reward for finishing everything. It is how we come back into balance in the first place. Why your evening show and scrolling don’t quite count “But I rest every night,” people tell me. “I watch my soap opera. I scroll a little.” The body is still, so it feels like rest. The mind, though, may be working as hard as ever. Psychologists describe two kinds of fascination. Hard fascination captures so much of our mental bandwidth that little is left to reflect or let the mind wander.[1] So when we watch a drama or scroll a feed, the body may relax, but the mind keeps working: following the plot, reacting, taking in the next thing, and the next. In everyday terms, it can feel like rest while still keeping the mind occupied, which may help explain why we can end a whole evening on the sofa feeling just as drained. Soft fascination is different. It engages us without effort, so that the tired attention system can rest while we still feel gently interested.[1] 2 ways attention gets held Hard fascination: a gripping drama, a thrilling video, an endless feed. Always pulling you to the next thing. Soft fascination: clouds drifting, leaves moving, water flowing. Interesting enough to look at, quiet enough to let you rest. Researchers tested what happens when a break involves a screen. In one study, 81 participants took a break of 15 minutes in a green space or a barren one, with or without a laptop for leisure use such as social media, YouTube, or games. Only those who rested in a green space without a laptop showed a significant improvement in attention afterward. The other groups showed no significant improvement.[2] The study didn’t test soap operas, but it raises a question: if something keeps your attention firmly hooked, how much rest is your attention getting? Easy ideas: Rest in nature, your way You don’t need special gear, a summit, or any experience. A park, a riverside, or even a few trees in a schoolyard will do. Leave the phone in your bag, and pick whichever idea sounds the least like hard work. On your own The sit for ten minutes: Choose a spot, sit down, and have no goal at all. Let whatever happens be the whole plan. The curiosity walk: Stroll until something catches your eye, then stop. Stay with it for as long as it keeps you interested. Count the sounds: Close your eyes and see how many layers of sound you can find, near, far, high, low. Visit a tree: Pick one tree and return to it once a week. Notice how it changes, and how you do. With friends Silent first, talk later: Walk together without speaking for a while, then share one thing each of you noticed. The picnic without phones: Everyone’s phones go in one bag. Bring snacks, sit on the grass, and see where the conversation goes. Take turns leading: One person offers a gentle invitation, such as “find something that moves,” and everyone explores on their own before regrouping. With kids The snail walk: Move as slowly as a snail and see who notices the most things along the way. Sensory treasure hunt: Find something soft, something rough, something that smells good, and something that makes a sound. Cloud and leaf watching: Lie back on a blanket and tell each other what the clouds or the leaves look like. Sit like a deer: Sit very still for a few minutes and count how many creatures, big or tiny, come into view. With little ones, choose a safe spot and keep watch as you normally would. The aim isn’t to teach them anything, and there is no right or wrong. It is simply to give everyone permission to slow down and “be.” Start small You don’t have to wait for a free weekend. Try ten minutes this week, and notice what it feels like to rest without earning it. If it turns out to be harder than it sounds, that is completely normal, and it is exactly why guided walks exist! Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Juna Ting-Wei Chang Juna Ting-Wei Chang, Forest Therapy Guide Juna Ting-Wei Chang is a forest therapy guide and founder of Shinrin-Yoku Taiwan, now part of Green Shower. She is the first Taiwanese guide certified by the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy (ANFT) and also holds the Taiwan Forest Therapist Certificate. With a background in languages, cross-cultural experience, and landscape and recreation management, Juna brings science, tradition, and lived experience together in a warm, grounded way. Her work supports individuals, organisations, and international groups in cultivating emotional resilience, presence, and sustainable wellbeing through nature-based practices. References: [1] Basu, A., Duvall, J., & Kaplan, R. (2019). Attention restoration theory: Exploring the role of soft fascination and mental bandwidth. Environment and Behavior, 51(9, 10), 1055 to 1081. [2] Jiang, B., Schmillen, R., & Sullivan, W. C. (2019). How to waste a break: Using portable electronic devices substantially counteracts attention enhancement effects of green spaces. Environment and Behavior, 51(9, 10), 1133 to 1160.

Written by Jonathan Rozenblit, Guest Writer and Senior Level Executive Contributor Whether you're leading a team, a project, or work that brings people together from across the organization, your new leadership role is likely to bring you to a moment you haven't met before. In that moment, you'll have a decision to make about where your focus goes, and what you choose goes well beyond the result in front of you. How getting things done evolves The way you've been able to take pieces of work, see what is needed, and carry the work through to results has likely brought you into your new leadership role. Now the scope of what you're accountable for grows, from the results of your own work to the results you deliver with others. What the people alongside you bring to the work, and how they bring it, shapes those results. Many of the moments in this new role will feel familiar. What's new is that other people are involved, and their involvement changes how those moments unfold. More than fifteen years ago, I stepped into a role where I was accountable for results I could only deliver with other people. No one walked me through these moments, and I learned how to handle them the hard way. Consider a problem that needs solving. Up to now, you've worked out the answer and provided it. Now the answer can be something you shape with the people doing the work, and what you arrive at together can be better than what any of you would have reached alone. Then there are the questions that come to you. Answering right away has served you well. Now the person best placed to answer may be someone else doing the work, and you can point the question toward them. Timelines change too. You set your own because you knew your own work. With others doing the work, the timeline becomes something you work out together until it's one everyone can commit to. Decisions shift as well. You made the call on your own work. Now you might gather the information the people closest to the work need, ask them to recommend a way forward, and then make the decision. You might even ask them to make the decision instead of you. The same goes for knowing what to do. When the work was yours, you only had to tell yourself. Now you share what needs doing and why it matters, so the people doing it can work out the best way to do it. Coordination looks different. Before, the pieces of your work were yours to move, and you could own them end to end. Now delivering results depends on everyone working together, so much of your role becomes making sure each person has what they need to move their part of the work forward. In each of these moments, a familiar thought is likely to show up. The thought underneath The familiar thought often sounds something like this: I just need to get the work done. Sometimes it arrives as a question: I need to get the work done, so what do I need in order to do that? It's a practical thought, and it has served you well. In your own work, getting the work done was the job, and you were the one doing it. Asking what you needed was how you cleared the way. Look closely at the two parts of that thought. The first is "get the work done." It points your focus at the work itself, at the result in front of you. The second is "I." It places you at the centre, as the one who gets it done. Together, they settle where your focus goes before you've had a chance to choose. In your new leadership role, "get the work done" and "I" carry more weight. With others doing the work alongside you, "I need to get the work done" can turn every problem, question, timeline, decision and piece of coordination back toward you. The question "What do I need?" keeps the focus on you, even while the people alongside you are doing much of the work. Followed far enough, the thought takes on a bigger shape: I'm the leader, so I need to know everything, decide everything, coordinate everything so that I can direct everyone accordingly. It starts with getting the work done. Where it leads is carrying it all yourself. I know this thought very well. Back in that first role, my focus was very much on the work. I was "that guy" who solved the problem and then told others what to do and how to do it. I answered questions on the team's behalf, committed to timelines on the team's behalf and made decisions on the team's behalf, all without consulting them. Then I told them the outcomes and expected them to follow suit. At the time, nothing about working that way seemed out of place. Isn't that how a leader is supposed to work? Reality showed me otherwise. One day, my manager sat me down and told me that no one wanted to work with me anymore because of how I was showing up. That was when it occurred to me that taking a closer look at how the people around me were experiencing me was necessary if I wanted to keep delivering results with them. Where your focus goes as a leader Think back to those familiar moments. In each one, two pulls meet. The familiar thought pulls your focus toward the result in front of you: getting the work done and working out what you need in order to do it. Your wider scope pulls your focus toward the people delivering that result with you. Both pulls can be there at the same time, and both point toward delivering the result. Together, they create a tension. One asks what it takes for you to get the work done. The other asks what the people doing the work need you to contribute, or to help them with, to get the work done. You'll likely feel that tension in those moments. The thought "I just need to get the work done" feels familiar, so it tends to arrive first, especially with a deadline close or a question waiting. From there, the thought leads quickly to a decision, and the decision leads to action, often before there's been much time to think it through. Either focus delivers results. Focusing on just the result can get you today's result. Focusing on the people delivering it gets you today's result and the results after it. I call this the Delivery Paradox. What becomes available Here is the Delivery Paradox in one sentence: the way to more results is to focus less on the result and more on the people delivering it. The result is likely what your focus reaches for first. The people delivering it are the ones who make that result possible, and every result after it. When your focus goes to them, today's result still gets delivered, and more becomes available with it. In your new leadership role, your part is to make sure the people doing the work have what they need to be, bring and do their best. Getting things done evolves from what you do to what you make possible for the people alongside you. The people alongside you take on more of the knowing, the deciding and the coordinating. You get to deliver results with them without carrying everything yourself. Focusing on the people also makes new benefits possible, and they carry into every delivery from here on. The quality of the work can improve because the people doing it can bring more of what they know and get better at it each time. What they're capable of can increase as a result. The increase is what lets them deliver results the way they do. The people who delivered results this time will know you had a part in what they found they were capable of. People remember who was alongside them when they did their best work, and as a result, they'll likely want to be there for you the next time. When I started keeping the Delivery Paradox in mind and shifting my focus from the results to the people who delivered them, I noticed that the work came back faster, more complete, and sometimes better than I'd asked for. It no longer felt like I had to carry everything myself. People started offering their thoughts and suggestions. They took on tasks without being assigned, wherever they saw they could contribute. They raised concerns early, before those concerns became problems. They put more effort into the work. They brought me into their brainstorming and invited my thoughts on their process while it was still taking shape. The change in how people worked with me built up over time, one moment after another. How people feel about working with you develops over time, moving them toward wanting to work with you or away from it. That process runs on its own unless you're choosing where your focus goes each time the choice between the result and the people delivering it shows up. I wish someone had told me about the Delivery Paradox back then. It would have saved me a lot of effort rebuilding trust and my reputation. While you're still new to the role, there's an opportunity to shift your focus to the people delivering the results. How you work with each person the first time you deliver results together shapes their impressions of you, how they approach the work with you, and the habits you settle into together. With the people at the centre of how you work from the start, every delivery brings more of what you'd want: more ideas offered, more work taken on without being asked, more concerns raised early. Starting this way also leaves less to undo later. The next move is yours Picture the next problem that comes your way, the next question that needs an answer, or the next decision waiting for you. The familiar thought, "I just need to get the work done," will likely show up first. The choice between the result and the people delivering it will show up with it. Your next move gets made in that moment. Where will your focus go? Where to go from here Bring a moment you're meeting right now to an upcoming Delivery Paradox Workshop. We'll work through that moment together: what the choice between the result and the people delivering it looks like for you, and what your next move could be. I also regularly share small, deliberate moves that leaders can make one at a time as they focus on the people who deliver results with them. If you'd like them delivered straight to your inbox, subscribe to One Move to Practice on Substack. Follow me on Substack, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Jonathan Rozenblit Jonathan Rozenblit, Leadership Development Coach Jonathan Rozenblit guides corporate professionals in discovering and developing their own leadership practice so they can create the conditions for themselves and others to be, bring, and do their best at work. He holds the Professional Certified Coach credential from the International Coaching Federation and co-created the Leadership Practitioner program, which equips people with practical tools to inspire trust and build collaborative cultures. He also co-hosts the Leadership Practitioner podcast and co-authored The Essential Leadership Practitioner: A Framework for Building a Meaningful Practice of Leadership.

Written by Constanze Zientek, Women's Coach Constanze Zientek is a women's coach who works with highly sensitive women in their thirties, helping them to cultivate inner strength, embrace embodied leadership, and build an authentic, aligned life. Her approach blends emotional depth, clarity, and self-trust. Did you ever feel like it was finally time to let go of something, but the thought of doing so was still incredibly painful? Or did you find yourself secretly holding on to something you knew wasn’t good for you anymore because you just couldn’t bear the thought of letting it go? When I write about this, I immediately think of cleaning out old clothes from your closet, and sometimes even that can feel challenging. But that’s a very light example of how this can play out. Depending on the concrete situation and the circumstances, letting go can feel a lot easier or harder. Whether it is a relationship, an environment, or a habit, realizing that something might just not fit anymore can be a hard pill to swallow. So the following lines are dedicated to the fact that letting go doesn’t have to coincide with being happy about it or with expecting yourself to be fully over it as you do so. The subtle scratching when things do not fit anymore At some point, you might have had a new vision come in. Or you might have had the realization that certain people don’t have your best interests at heart. Or that a certain environment doesn’t really suit you anymore. Yet, here you might still be emotionally attached to the old story. To the history that you have with it, to everything that it has done for you, to all the security it has provided. You may not feel ready to let that go. It might feel like life is just asking a little too much from you to move away from it. Yet, you also feel this itch on the inside. Like the old situation is just not a fit for who you are becoming. As subtle as that feeling might be, it might be impossible to shake. Like there’s sand in between your wheels. Even though you really try to ignore it, it’s just there. Familiarity is not alignment Familiarity is all that is well known, but that also includes a bunch of things that can be very detrimental to your long-term well-being. With a little practice, we can get used to so many things. A close friend that’s regularly mistreating you. A habit that is completely detrimental to your health. All of it can become familiar, even in little time. Just the fact that it feels familiar doesn’t mean that it is aligned with you. So what is it that creates alignment? It’s making decisions in harmony with your values. Over and over again. If the decisions occur in small ways over time, they can become more effective than big decisions that are just made once. The process is not easy. But is it worth it? Definitely. The feeling that sets in once things start falling into place again on the outside can just bring in all the confirmation you needed. The mind can be clear, but grief sits in the body At this point, I might be repeating myself, but outgrowing an old version of yourself can bring up a lot of grief. Before letting in something new, we need to make space for it first. Many times, that requires letting go of something old. Even though you might perfectly know that you want the new or that the old isn’t even good for you, that doesn’t mean your body won’t tell a completely different story emotionally. Grief is stored in the body, and it can completely take over the intellect when letting go feels too uncertain and unfamiliar to go through with. Also, there might be a part of you that really loved the old. Jnowing that sometimes two important things can’t exist contemporaneously, not because of aversion, but because of functionality, can still be a hard pill to swallow. Why we tend to hold on to what we’ve outgrown Rather than looking for things that fit us, our brains and nervous systems always look out for the threats in the unknown. Do you still remember how things felt when you first got into your current situation? Chances are, they felt wonky and unsure until, at one point, they didn’t. Until security started building up through repetition. Now your brain and nervous system have gotten used to it and might find it very unpleasant to reemerge into another pattern change. Also, once we get so used to what has been established in our lives, it becomes harder to change it because of all the labor that it took to build it. The harder the process of working for something, the harder it can become to let go of it. One moment of change can likely destroy all the work that might have taken many years. The price of that can just seem too high to risk. How to stop waiting for readiness to let go One common assumption when it comes to letting go is that in order to release something, you have to let it go internally first. But sometimes, we absolutely know that releasing is the right thing for us to do, but we still feel very attached to the old circumstances. While inner detachment can undoubtedly help the process of letting go externally, sometimes waiting for the inner shift will just block any kind of action that is actually required on the outside in order to move on. In that case, waiting for the feeling of readiness leads to the exact opposite of the letting go that is actually wanted. When we feel like we really should move on but still haven’t, we can become frustrated. But taking action may still feel too scary. So what can you do to move towards your goal, even though you don’t feel ready? Choose the easiest step. Then something bigger. Make a plan about the main steps you are planning to take in the foreseeable future (that can be adjusted any time). Be honest with yourself about necessary recovery time and the practicality of the steps you’re taking. Hold yourself accountable for really going through with them and start to notice how slowly the momentum starts building. Always remember that action builds up readiness, not vice versa. Desire is not a command Especially in phases of big changes, we can have the thought that because we miss something, we have to reach out or take a step back. Of course, that’s not the case. According to scientific studies, it can take more than 200 days to establish a new habit, depending on the habit and the life circumstances of the individual person. That’s a lot more than just a few weeks. So if you still feel like you’re not over a former circumstance, person, or whatever you have let go of, don’t become impatient with yourself just because the feeling of belonging is still lingering inside of you. You’re allowed to move on, anyway. Need help moving on? Getting into a safe space in order to move through certain changes can be incredibly helpful in order to navigate the process. Working together with a qualified coach who will stay by your side, have an open ear for what you’re moving through, and give you the right steps in order to move forward can absolutely strengthen you so it becomes easier to let go. Contact me today to figure out how we can work together! Follow me on Instagram for more info! Read more from Constanze Zientek Constanze Zientek, Women's Coach Constanze Zientek is a women's coach working with highly sensitive women in their thirties. She supports them in cultivating inner strength, embodied leadership, and an authentic, aligned life. Her approach blends emotional depth, clarity, and self-trust. She furthermore practices as a lawyer with over ten years of work experience, specializing in inheritance law. Her work with clients in emotionally complex transitions, combined with her own journey through her thirties, led her to coaching. Today, she integrates structure and intuition to offer clear, deeply human guidance.

Written by Yaryna Carpenter, PCC ICF Executive, Leadership & Team Coach Yaryna Carpenter is a PCC ICF Executive, Leadership and Team Coach working with leaders and teams in high-trust, reputation-sensitive environments. She helps clients strengthen clarity, communication, cultural intelligence, and better judgment as they grow and scale globally. Every organisation has people it can depend on. They deliver results, meet deadlines and rarely need reminding of their responsibilities. Their performance reviews are positive, their managers trust them, and their careers appear to be progressing exactly as they should. Yet some of these professionals are quietly questioning the very success they have worked so hard to achieve. They may still enjoy the recognition, financial security and professional reputation that come with their achievements. What has changed is something less visible: their enthusiasm, their sense of direction, or the feeling that their work still reflects who they are and what matters to them. The difficulty is that organisations rarely notice this kind of disconnection while performance remains strong. Having spent more than twenty years in adult business education, leadership development and, more recently, professional coaching, I have become increasingly interested in what happens between the visible signs of career success and a person's internal experience of that success. We spend considerable time evaluating people's capabilities, setting targets and identifying development needs. Far less attention is given to whether the professional lives people have built still provide the meaning and fulfilment they once hoped to find. For leaders, this may be one of the most overlooked dimensions of sustainable performance. When success and fulfilment stop travelling together Research published in Psychological Reports in January 2026 offers an interesting perspective on the relationship between professional self-realisation and psychological wellbeing. Ukrainian psychologist Vsevolod Zelenin examined 163 Ukrainian IT professionals living in Ukraine and abroad, exploring psychological indicators in the context of the profound disruption caused by Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022. The study considered factors including life purpose, self-esteem, adaptability and readiness for change. Before the invasion, 73% of participants demonstrated a high level of life purpose, while 70% showed a high readiness for change. Among professionals who remained in Ukraine, the proportion reporting high positive self-esteem subsequently fell from 65% to 39%. The circumstances of war and displacement are exceptional and cannot be compared directly with ordinary workplace pressures. Nevertheless, the findings illustrate how significantly people's psychological experience can change when the world around them changes. The research also examines the potential contribution of coaching to professional self-realisation, although its findings should not be interpreted as conclusive evidence of coaching's causal effects. What particularly interests me is the broader question of how people maintain a sense of professional identity, purpose and agency when their circumstances or priorities evolve. In business, we tend to assume that professional development moves in one direction: greater competence, increased responsibility, higher earnings and, eventually, more senior positions. Human development is rarely so straightforward. A person can become more successful by external standards while feeling increasingly disconnected from the career they have created. That is a conversation organisations are not particularly well equipped to have. The invisible dissatisfaction of high achievers Consider a professional who has spent twenty years building a successful career. They have invested in education, developed expertise, accepted increasingly demanding responsibilities and achieved the level of financial security they once dreamed of. From the outside, everything suggests that their efforts have paid off. Yet the work no longer excites them. The promotion they spent years pursuing brings surprisingly little satisfaction. Their professional identity has become so closely connected to their achievements that questioning their career feels almost like questioning themselves. This is not necessarily burnout, nor does it automatically indicate a mental health problem. Sometimes it is simply the recognition that the goals which once provided direction no longer feel meaningful. In coaching conversations, I have noticed how difficult this can be for successful professionals to acknowledge. They often arrive with a clear understanding of what they should be doing. They know how to set objectives, manage priorities and deliver results. What they find harder to articulate is what they genuinely want. There can be a considerable difference between achieving the next career milestone and feeling that the milestone is worth pursuing. This distinction becomes especially important in organisations where ambition is associated almost exclusively with upward mobility. We assume that a high-performing specialist should become a manager, that a successful manager should pursue a directorship, and that an accomplished executive should continually seek a larger role. But what happens when the person no longer wants the next step? We rarely consider that a desire for greater autonomy, deeper expertise, more creative work or a different balance of responsibilities might represent professional growth rather than a lack of ambition. When organisations fail to recognise this, they risk developing people towards careers those individuals no longer wish to have. Why another leadership programme may not be the answer Much of my professional career has been connected with business education and organisational learning. I have seen the extraordinary value of well-designed development programmes, particularly when they respond to genuine business needs. I have also learned that not every performance challenge is a knowledge or skills problem. A manager who hesitates to make decisions may not need another course in decision-making. They may understand the process perfectly well but lack confidence in their judgement. A senior professional who seems reluctant to take on new responsibilities may not require motivational training. They may be questioning whether the proposed career direction is right for them. An employee who appears disengaged may not need a more ambitious set of targets. They may need an opportunity to reconsider what meaningful contribution looks like at this stage of their career. This is where coaching offers something different from conventional training. Rather than beginning with the assumption that a particular skill needs improving, coaching gives people space to examine their thinking, recognise patterns and explore the relationship between their choices, values and ambitions. In my experience, the most productive conversations often begin with a relatively practical concern and gradually reveal a more fundamental question. Someone wants to become more confident in meetings but discovers that their difficulty is connected to a fear of challenging authority. Another wants to become more productive but realises they have been accepting responsibilities that no longer align with their priorities. The value of coaching lies partly in helping people recognise these connections for themselves. The outcome is not simply greater self-awareness. That awareness can become the foundation for more deliberate decisions and meaningful action. Of course, coaching is not a universal solution. It cannot compensate for unreasonable workloads, poor management or a dysfunctional organisational culture. Nor should it be confused with psychological treatment when specialist support is needed. Its contribution is more specific: helping individuals examine their circumstances, clarify what matters and identify what they can realistically influence. What are leaders failing to ask to employees? One of the challenges of modern leadership is that managers are expected to understand their people while simultaneously delivering demanding commercial objectives. Performance conversations naturally focus on measurable outcomes. Targets are reviewed, achievements recognised and development plans agreed. These discussions are necessary, but they rarely provide a complete picture. Imagine a manager asking a successful employee how they feel about their work rather than immediately discussing their next promotion. The answer might be unexpected. Perhaps the employee enjoys solving complex problems but dislikes managing people. Perhaps they would prefer greater independence instead of a larger team. Perhaps they are curious about another part of the business but have never felt comfortable expressing that interest. None of these discoveries requires the organisation to abandon its objectives. They simply provide a more accurate understanding of the person expected to deliver them. I believe curiosity is one of the most underrated leadership capabilities. Not the superficial curiosity of asking employees whether everything is fine, but a genuine willingness to question assumptions about what motivates them. What gave someone satisfaction five years ago may no longer be relevant. Recognition that once felt rewarding may become less important than flexibility or professional autonomy. An ambitious employee may discover that contributing to a meaningful project matters more than acquiring a prestigious title. These changes are not necessarily signs of declining motivation. They may reflect a growing understanding of personal values and priorities. Leaders who make space for such conversations can make better-informed decisions about development, career progression and responsibility. They may also discover that some of their assumptions about employee engagement have been wrong. The danger of measuring everything except meaning Business leaders need measurable results. Financial performance, productivity, customer satisfaction and employee retention are essential indicators of organisational health. The difficulty arises when those indicators become the only definition of success. A company may achieve its quarterly objectives while employees experience increasing frustration. A department may meet its performance targets while losing the enthusiasm and creativity that made it successful in the first place. These patterns are not always immediately visible, particularly when employees have developed strong habits of professional responsibility. People can continue producing good work long after their sense of connection to it has weakened. I am not suggesting that organisations should attempt to measure every aspect of personal fulfilment. Nor should managers become responsible for ensuring that employees find complete meaning in their professional lives. Work is only one part of human experience. But organisations influence that experience through the roles they create, the behaviours they reward and the opportunities they offer. A culture that recognises only promotions and financial results communicates a particular understanding of success. A culture that also values learning, contribution, autonomy and collaboration offers employees a broader range of possibilities. This becomes increasingly relevant as artificial intelligence changes the nature of professional work. Technical knowledge remains important, but many professionals are already reconsidering how their expertise creates value in an environment where established tasks can be automated or transformed. For some, this creates exciting opportunities. For others, it challenges a professional identity developed over many years. Preparing people for such changes requires more than teaching them to use new technology. It also means helping them recognise transferable strengths, explore unfamiliar possibilities and remain open to redefining their contribution. The organisations that navigate these transitions effectively will need leaders who understand both business transformation and the human experience of change. Perhaps we need a different definition of growth When I reflect on my own professional journey, from teaching and business education to leadership development, mentoring and coaching, I recognise that growth has not always meant moving further along a predetermined career path. At different stages, it has involved learning new skills, accepting unfamiliar responsibilities, changing direction and reconsidering what meaningful work looks like. I suspect many experienced professionals would recognise something similar in their own careers. There are periods when achievement and advancement provide tremendous motivation. There are others when the more important task is to pause, reassess and decide what deserves our energy next. Successful organisations need ambitious, capable people who take responsibility for results. Nothing about professional self-realisation diminishes the importance of accountability or performance. But if we want people to contribute sustainably, we need to acknowledge that their relationship with success may change over time. The next important leadership conversation may therefore have little to do with targets, competencies or promotion opportunities. It might begin with a manager genuinely wanting to understand whether a valued employee still finds satisfaction in the work they do. Not everyone will welcome that question, and not every answer will lead to a simple solution. But the willingness to ask signals something important: that the organisation sees the person beyond their performance record. The employee who delivers exceptional results may not be looking for another challenge, a larger salary or a more impressive title. They may be looking for a reason to feel excited about Monday morning again. Unless somebody asks, their manager may never know. Follow me on Instagram and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Yaryna Carpenter Yaryna Carpenter, PCC ICF Executive, Leadership & Team Coach Yaryna Carpenter is a PCC ICF Executive, Leadership and Team Coach working with leaders and teams in high-trust, reputation-sensitive environments. She helps clients strengthen clarity, communication, cultural intelligence, and better judgment as they grow and scale globally. With over 20 years of international experience, Yaryna brings a structured, human-centred approach to leadership, team performance, and cross-cultural growth.

Written by Helen Kenworthy, Artistic Director Helen champions the arts as a tool for change. Now, as CEO of RYTC Creatives Community Interest Company (CIC) and Give Get Go Education, she mentors young people, creates pathways for them to thrive in the arts, and helps launch successful careers. When a child falls behind at school, the response usually follows a familiar pattern. More practice is suggested, extra sessions are arranged, and targets are tightened. The assumption is that the gap is academic, and so the solution must be academic too. Helen Kenworthy's work through Of Course You Can!™, serving the brilliantly underestimated, starts somewhere else. With decades of experience across education, theatre, and special educational needs (SEN) support, and as the author of GCSE resource books, Helen has seen firsthand that a child must feel safe enough to try before they can absorb anything new. That safety is not built in a classroom first. It is built at home, in the everyday relationships that shape how a child feels about themselves, their mistakes, and their place in the world. In Helen's experience, a child can have access to excellent teaching, well-designed resources, and dedicated professionals, and still make very little progress. Not because they lack ability, but because their energy is being spent elsewhere, on worry, on tension, or on simply holding themselves together through the day. Many parents sense this without being able to name it. They see a child who freezes at homework, who becomes tearful over a simple task, or who seems capable one day and completely shut down the next. They are often told to be firmer or more consistent, when what their child actually needs, Helen explains, is to feel more secure. This article explores why learning is best understood as something that happens through relationships rather than in isolation. It looks at what that means for families, how practitioners can support it, and eleven ways that trust and emotional safety at home open the door to meaningful academic progress. Why academic progress is so often separated from relationships Education systems tend to measure what can be counted: reading ages, test scores, attendance figures, and targets met. These measures have their place, but they can quietly suggest that learning is a purely technical process, something that happens when the right content meets the right method. What these measures rarely capture is how a child feels while they are learning. Helen often reminds families and professionals that it is the subconscious, not the worksheet, that drives learning. A young person who is anxious, ashamed, or emotionally exhausted may sit through every lesson and still retain very little. From the outside, it can look like a lack of effort. From the inside, it is often a nervous system that simply has no room left for new information. When relationships are left out of the picture, families can end up blamed for gaps they did not create, and children can end up labelled as unmotivated when they are actually unsettled. Recognising learning as relational helps correct both of these misunderstandings. What learning as a relational process actually looks like Seeing learning as relational means accepting that how a child feels about the people around them directly shapes how well they can learn. In Helen's view, trust, warmth, and predictability are not extras to be added once the academic work is done. They are the conditions that make the academic work possible. At home, this might look like a parent noticing that their child is overwhelmed and choosing connection before correction. It might mean sitting alongside a child during a difficult task rather than supervising from across the room, or allowing time to settle after school before any homework begins. None of this requires a parent to become a teacher. It asks them to be what they already are to their child, a steady and trusted presence, and to understand how powerful that presence is for learning. Signs a child needs more emotional safety before academic progress Children often show, through behaviour rather than words, that they need more security before they can engage fully with learning. Drawing on her work with families, Helen highlights signs such as: Strong emotional reactions to small mistakes or corrections Avoiding tasks they once found manageable Physical signs of stress such as headaches, stomach aches, or poor sleep Describing themselves in harsh terms, such as calling themselves stupid Struggling to start work even when they understand what to do Becoming withdrawn or irritable around school-related conversations Performing well in calm settings but struggling under pressure These signs are not evidence that a child cannot learn. They are signals that the conditions for learning need attention first. Responding to them with understanding rather than pressure often makes the biggest difference. The practitioner's role in supporting family connection Within Helen Kenworthy's approach, practitioners are not only there to support the child. They are also there to strengthen the relationships around that child, recognising that a calmer, more confident family creates a far better foundation for progress. This means taking time to understand the family's experience, listening without judgement, and helping parents see the value of what they already offer. It may involve gently encouraging a pause in academic pressure while trust is rebuilt, or helping parents find small, manageable ways to reconnect with their child around learning. Helen is clear that a practitioner who works this way does not see emotional safety as a distraction from education. They see it as the starting point that makes every other form of support more effective. What a safe learning relationship tends to involve Warmth: making sure a child feels valued regardless of how a task turns out Predictability: offering calm, consistent routines a child can rely on Patience: allowing time for a child to settle before expecting focus Encouragement: noticing effort and small steps forward, not only results Repair: reconnecting quickly and kindly after a difficult moment Presence: being alongside a child during challenges rather than watching from a distance Together, these qualities create an environment where a child feels secure enough to stretch themselves, make mistakes, and keep going. Why this matters for the brilliantly underestimated Children who are brilliantly underestimated are often those whose ability is hidden behind anxiety, past difficulties, or a learning profile that does not fit the usual mould. Their struggles can easily be mistaken for a lack of capacity. Helen has worked with many of these young people and has seen how emotional safety is often the key that allows their true ability to surface. Without it, they may spend years being judged on what they show under stress rather than what they can do when they feel secure. When families are supported to build trust and calm at home, these children are given the chance to be seen accurately and to show the capability that was always there. 11 ways trust and emotional safety at home support academic progress The link between relationships and learning becomes clearer when we look at what changes once a child feels genuinely safe. The following eleven outcomes, drawn from Helen's work with families, show how trust at home lays the groundwork for meaningful progress. 1. It settles the nervous system so learning can begin A child who feels safe is no longer using all their energy to stay on alert. That calm creates room for attention, memory, and curiosity. 2. It makes mistakes feel survivable When a child trusts they will not be shamed for getting something wrong, they are far more willing to attempt new challenges. Every attempt then becomes part of the learning. 3. It builds a child's belief in their own ability Children who feel accepted at home begin to see themselves as capable. That belief often unlocks more progress than any single intervention. 4. It reduces conflict around homework and school When learning is approached with connection rather than pressure, daily battles tend to ease. Home becomes a place to recharge rather than another source of stress. 5. It helps parents respond with understanding Parents who see learning as relational are more likely to read difficult behaviour as a need rather than defiance. That understanding changes how they respond. 6. It strengthens a child's ability to concentrate Security frees up the mental space needed to focus. A child who is not preoccupied with worry can give more attention to the task in front of them. 7. It encourages honest communication Children who feel safe are more likely to say when they are struggling or confused. That honesty allows support to be offered earlier and more accurately. 8. It makes small successes more visible Trusting relationships make it easier to notice and celebrate progress, however small. Those moments of recognition build lasting motivation. 9. It provides a model for relationships with educators A child who experiences trust at home carries that expectation into other relationships. This makes it easier to connect with teachers, mentors, and tutors. 10. It supports resilience through difficult periods When setbacks happen, a secure base helps a child recover more quickly. They know they have somewhere steady to return to. 11. It turns learning into a shared experience When families feel part of their child's learning, education stops being a lonely struggle. Progress becomes something experienced and celebrated together. Taken together, these eleven outcomes show that trust and emotional safety are not a pause in a child's education. They are the ground that real progress grows from. Building relational learning through the Creative Pathway Methodology This understanding sits at the heart of the philosophy behind The RYTC, Education Selection Box, and the guidance in When School Doesn't Fit. Each begins from the belief that a child learns best when they feel safe, connected, and understood, and that the family plays a central role in creating those conditions. The RYTC uses theatre, film, and music to help calm overactive nervous systems, rebuild confidence, and strengthen communication, giving young people and families creative ways to reconnect. Education Selection Box offers academic support, courses, and one-to-one learning shaped around each child, including those who are not currently able to attend school, always recognising that progress depends on how secure a child feels. This helps parents understand why emotional safety matters so much and gives them practical reassurance as they support their child at home. It encourages families to put connection first, trusting that learning will follow once the foundation is in place. Together, this approach treats the family not as a backdrop to education, but as an essential part of it. When home feels safe, learning has somewhere solid to begin. Conclusion Meaningful academic progress rarely starts with a worksheet. It starts with a child who feels safe, trusted, and connected to the people around them. Helen Kenworthy's work through Of Course You Can!™ recognises the family as the first and most powerful source of that safety. Her years of experience have shown that for the brilliantly underestimated, building trust at home can be what finally allows their true ability to shine. Learning is a relationship before it is a result, and when that relationship is strong, progress follows. To explore more about this work and the wider Creative Pathway approach, please visit here. Creative Pathway Methodology; Of Course You Can! serving the brilliantly underestimated. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Helen Kenworthy Helen Kenworthy, Artistic Director Helen Kenworthy’s career embodies the transformative power of the arts, from her early roles in the prestigious West End with Bill Kenwright to her impactful work in regional theatre. As manager of the Oxfordshire Youth Arts Partnership, she created pathways for young people to thrive in the arts, with many going on to successful careers. Now at RYTC Creatives CIC and Give Get Go Education, Helen continues to inspire and mentor the next generation of theatre-makers and community leaders, offering invaluable opportunities for growth and professional development.

Written by Jennifer Stewart, Technology & Productivity Trainer Jennifer Stewart is a Technology and Productivity Trainer and owner of Gateway Productivity, known for patiently helping clients overcome technology frustration and work more efficiently. She has trained individuals and businesses since 2011 and creates accessible learning content through her “Tuesday Tech Training” video series on YouTube. Your smartphone likely contains some of your most valuable information: personal conversations, passwords, financial accounts, health data, photos, and more. Yet many of us download new apps after spending only a few seconds evaluating them. With millions of apps available, finding ones that are both easy to use and safe to trust can feel overwhelming. The good news is that you don't need a degree in cybersecurity to make smarter decisions. By looking beyond app ratings and paying attention to a few key indicators, you can choose apps that support your productivity without compromising your privacy. Look beyond the star rating When most people evaluate an app, they immediately look at the star rating. While ratings can provide useful insight, they rarely tell the full story. A highly rated app may be visually appealing and packed with features, but that doesn't necessarily mean it handles your data responsibly. Instead of focusing only on the rating, spend a few minutes reading recent reviews. Look for comments about privacy concerns, excessive advertising, account issues, or performance problems after recent updates. The mobile app marketplace is enormous. According to Statista, global app downloads continue to reach hundreds of billions annually, making it increasingly important for users to be selective about what they install. Rather than assuming popularity equals safety, take a closer look at the experiences of actual users. Research the developer One of the quickest ways to evaluate an app is to investigate who created it. Trustworthy developers typically provide a professional website, contact information, clear support options, regular updates, and a published privacy policy. Before downloading, search for the developer online. If little information is available or their website appears unprofessional or outdated, you may want to think twice. For apps requesting access to financial information, health data, location tracking, or business accounts, understanding who is behind the software is especially important. Review app permissions carefully Every permission request should make sense based on what the app is designed to do. For example, a navigation app needs location access, a video conferencing app needs camera and microphone access, and a messaging app may need contacts access. However, a simple calculator probably doesn't need your location, contacts, photos, microphone, or camera. Many users grant permissions without fully understanding what they are approving. According to Cisco's latest privacy research, consumers increasingly view privacy as a factor in trust and purchasing decisions, with many willing to take action against organizations they believe do not adequately protect their personal information. When evaluating permissions, ask yourself one simple question: "Does this app truly need this information to perform its intended function?" If the answer is no, there may be a more trustworthy alternative available. Read the privacy policy (at least the important parts) Let's be honest: most people aren't going to read a 20-page privacy policy from beginning to end. However, spending two or three minutes scanning the key sections can reveal a lot about how your information is handled. Look for answers to these questions: What information does the app collect? Why is it collected? Is data shared with third parties? Can you remove your data if you stop using the service? Trustworthy apps are typically transparent about how they use your information and avoid burying important disclosures in confusing legal language. Evaluate the user experience Security and usability are often viewed as separate topics, but in reality, they work together. An app that is difficult to understand can create its own risks. If users struggle to navigate menus, manage settings, or understand notifications, they are more likely to make mistakes. Look for apps that provide clear navigation, simple onboarding, easy-to-find settings, accessible help resources, and minimal distractions. The best applications make both productivity and security simple. If you feel confused, overwhelmed, or frustrated within the first few minutes of using an app, that's often a sign that a better-designed alternative exists. Pay attention to update frequency Apps require ongoing maintenance to stay effective and secure. Developers release updates to address security vulnerabilities, fix software bugs, improve performance, and maintain compatibility with newer devices. A rarely updated app may expose users to unnecessary risk. Choosing apps with active development teams helps reduce potential vulnerabilities. Use official app stores Downloading apps from official app stores remains one of the simplest ways to improve mobile security. Official platforms typically perform security reviews and remove many dangerous applications before they reach users. Unfortunately, some users still install software from third-party websites and unofficial app repositories. Zimperium's 2025 Global Mobile Threat Report shows 23.5% of enterprise mobile devices contain sideloaded applications installed outside official app stores, creating increased security risks. While downloading from an authorized store doesn't guarantee absolute safety, it significantly reduces your chances of encountering malware or malicious software. Watch for red flags Most questionable apps reveal warning signs if you know what to look for. Proceed cautiously if an app requests unusual permissions, displays excessive advertisements, requires unnecessary personal information, creates a sense of urgency, pushes users toward suspicious websites, or makes unrealistic promises. Mobile attacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Smishing (SMS-based phishing attacks) now accounts for more than two-thirds of mobile phishing attempts, highlighting how criminals continue to target smartphone users. When something feels suspicious, trust your instincts. Security is now part of the user experience Not long ago, many consumers viewed security as the responsibility of technology teams and developers. Today, users understand that security directly impacts their daily experience. A poorly secured app can lead to fraud, identity theft, account compromise, and loss of trust. As a result, users are increasingly choosing applications that demonstrate strong security practices. According to Cisco's 2026 Consumer Privacy Survey, 81% of consumers say the way a company treats their personal data reflects how it values them as a customer. As a result, privacy and security have become important factors when deciding which applications deserve a place on our devices. In other words, security is no longer simply a technical requirement. It has become a competitive advantage. Choose apps that earn your trust The best smartphone apps do more than accomplish specific tasks. They respect your time, simplify your experience, and protect your information. Before downloading your next app, take a few extra moments to evaluate who built it, what permissions it requests, how often it is updated, and whether its privacy practices align with your expectations. A little caution upfront can save countless hours of frustration later. Technology should work for you, not create additional stress. Take the next step Take five minutes today to review the apps already installed on your smartphone. Ask yourself: Do I still use this app? Does it need all the permissions I've granted? Has it been updated recently? Do I trust the developer? Is it helping me stay productive or simply creating digital clutter? Small decisions about the apps you choose can have a significant impact on your privacy, security, and peace of mind. Ready to create safer digital habits and get more value from your technology? Schedule a consultation and learn practical strategies for organizing your digital life, improving productivity, and protecting your personal information in an increasingly connected world. Follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Jennifer Stewart Jennifer Stewart, Technology & Productivity Trainer Jennifer Stewart is a Technology and Productivity Trainer and the owner of Gateway Productivity, dedicated to helping individuals and businesses reduce overwhelm and work more efficiently with their digital tools. Since 2011, she has empowered clients to overcome technology frustration through clear, patient and practical training that creates real “lightbulb” moments. Jennifer is a recognized industry leader, an active member of the National Association of Productivity and Organizing Professionals (NAPO), and a national speaker who brings both expertise and approachability to every session. Through her popular “Tuesday Tech Training” video series on YouTube, she continues to make technology simple, accessible, and even enjoyable.

Markéta spent almost a decade feeling like a hypochondriac before she got a name for her pain: PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome). Like so many women, she was told it was incurable and could only be managed. She decided otherwise and made herself a promise to heal fully. Following her inner voice, she spent years studying and testing everything she learned on herself until she did. Markéta Čepová, PCOS Advocate & Author Today, she is the founder of Return to Feminine, the program she wishes she'd had when her symptoms first appeared. She teaches through her own story and creates a container where women come together and, with her guidance, change their lives. Feeling good in her body and mind took Markéta years. What drives her now is knowing that with a proven path, support, and the right tools, it can take another woman weeks or months. In this interview, she shares the obstacles she faced along the way, what returning to femininity means, and why PCOS can be more than a struggle. It can carry an important lesson, and a woman who chooses to learn it can open a new chapter of her life and step into it as a new version of herself. What inspired you to create Return to Feminine, and how did your personal experience with PCOS shape the work you do today? Return to Feminine was inspired by my own journey with PCOS and by how long and lonely it was. My symptoms started when I was 13, but I wasn't diagnosed until I was 21. For eight years, I felt like a hypochondriac. When I finally got a name for it, I was told it was incurable. What followed was figuring out how I could turn my health around on my own, which was often emotionally heavy and lonely. About two or three years after my diagnosis came my biggest breakthrough. I discovered how disconnected I had become from my own femininity. The urge to create something and share what I had learned had come to me a few times before, but after that breakthrough, it became even louder. Still, I was scared to speak about it and didn't know how to deliver my message. With the help of my coach, I finally started acting on that urge. Today, I know that what took me over a decade can take another woman weeks or months. That is what drives my work. Nothing I teach comes from a textbook. I lived it, and I had to make it work in my own busy life, through the doubts and obstacles in my own mind. That's why I don't just hand women information. I share what I've lived through the way a friend would, as someone who has walked the same path and is simply a few steps ahead. That makes change so much easier. Before receiving your PCOS diagnosis, what were the biggest challenges you faced in trying to understand what was happening with your body? The biggest challenge was that no one was looking at me as a whole. I was living with a missing period, daily acne, thinning hair, digestive issues, redness and hot flushes, and constant anxiety. Yet every specialist treated each symptom separately. That experience showed me two things. First, the system rarely sees us as a whole. Second, even in the hands of a specialist focused on a single symptom, it rarely sees us as individuals. To give you a few examples, my hormone results were compared with general reference ranges and declared fine, even though my cycle was missing. My skin, the body's largest organ and one deeply connected to the nervous system, was treated only with topical antibiotics and creams, while the metabolic, hormonal, and nervous system imbalances underneath were left untouched. Gynecologists offered contraception or injections to bring on a period instead of looking for the root causes. Searching on my own wasn't much easier. I only spoke Czech, and it was long before AI. The advice I found was scattered and often contradictory, and it was mostly about what not to do and what to be afraid of. That fear only made my anxiety worse. The fact that it took me so long to get a diagnosis isn't surprising. Up to 70% of women with PCOS remain undiagnosed, and those who do get a diagnosis often wait years for it. According to some studies, diagnosis comes, on average, more than four years after a woman first notices her symptoms, and 47% see three or more health professionals first. At the end of the day, a diagnosis doesn't give you all the answers, but it gives you something to hold on to. Finally, you stop feeling like a hypochondriac. You've shared that your menstrual cycle returned within three months of making lifestyle changes. What were the most important changes during that time? The most important change wasn't the lifestyle change itself. It was the change in my mind. After my diagnosis, I was told PCOS was incurable and could only be managed. I decided not to accept that. For the first time, I cultivated a deep trust in my body and its ability to fully heal. I made myself an absolutely clear promise that I would never give up on fully healing and that I would do everything I could to give my body that chance. That belief is what made the practical changes possible. I changed the way I ate, adjusted my daily routine and sleep, and practiced Dinah Rodrigues hormonal yoga about five times a week. Without the shift in my mindset, I don't think I would have stuck with any of it. Within three months, my period came back. It was a beautiful milestone, but not the finish line. The deeper ease and freedom I feel today came years later, through the inner work. Lifestyle changes can bring your cycle back. Your inner work decides whether you finally feel at ease. Through your own research and experience, what have you come to believe is often missing from conventional approaches to managing PCOS? What's most often missing is the inner world, your mind and your emotional state. Many approaches focus on what you eat and how you move. Those things truly matter, and they can help a lot. But on their own, they address only part of what's really going on inside you. What's left out are your beliefs, your emotions, and your nervous system. When the inner world is left out, a lifestyle change alone may not work fully, and some symptoms, such as anxiety, can persist. I always invite women to remember how they felt in their bodies as little girls, before the symptoms appeared. Even when their period never fully disappeared or has come back, most of them know that feeling of ease isn't fully back yet. When I speak about conventional approaches, I mostly mean the guidance women find outside of doctors' offices. Unfortunately, some women still encounter contraception offered as the only solution. Not everywhere and not from every doctor, but it still happens. I don't even consider that an approach to healing. So my message is simple. Never settle for just managing it. PCOS can be fully healed, including the anxiety and the tension in your body. I'm living proof. What misconceptions about PCOS and natural symptom management would you most like to help women understand? The first misconception hides in the words “symptom management.” So many women believe that keeping their symptoms under control is the best they can hope for. I want them to aim higher because every one of them can heal fully. They should never settle for just managing it. The second is that healing means following a strict diet and giving up gluten and dairy forever. In my work, there's no such rule. The third is that there's one right way. There's no universal recipe, and I like to say that you are the alchemist. I give you a set of tools and explain how and why each one works. You experiment and find the combination that fits your body because not everything works for everyone. Even in my own experience, something that didn't work for me at one point worked beautifully later. The last is that healing has to be hard and take ages. When you fully commit and take the right steps in the right order, big shifts can happen surprisingly fast. Your path isn't about following someone else's rules. It's about cultivating confidence in yourself and finding your own way back to yourself. What inspired you to develop a healing program for women with PCOS, and what did you want it to offer that you struggled to find yourself? I created the program to offer what I didn't have: guidance and someone to talk to about what I was going through. I received information piece by piece and spent years figuring out how to actually live it. Looking back, with the knowledge and experience I have now, I would take the steps in a different order. It would have been faster, with far fewer moments of feeling helpless. Today, the situation is different. Women have access to more information than ever. What they often lack is a way to bring it into their everyday lives, and knowing alone doesn't bring the ease they long for. I also didn't know back then that the whole experience was trying to teach me something. The process of overcoming PCOS required me to transform from within, and that inner shift changed how I show up in the world, my relationships, my work, and my life in general, for the better. So I wanted to create a container where real change can happen, together with women who are going through the same thing. So many women tell me they don't want to fight alone anymore. Neither did I. What can women expect to experience through your program, and what practical tools or insights do you hope they gain? The most important tool is the path itself. Women get a roadmap with the right steps and, above all, the right order, so they can move past mental blocks and the obstacles of everyday life. What I really aim for, though, are skills. They learn to build new habits that actually stick and to read their body's signals. These are skills that stay with them forever. The tools are what help them develop those skills, including guided recordings, somatic practices, and step-by-step guides for creating inner change. I explain everything through storytelling, my own experience, and real examples, so it's easy to understand and apply. They get a clear structure, with room to discover what works for them, and they never have to do it alone. I also see insights as a tool. Sometimes a simple shift in perspective is enough for the same action to bring a completely different result. A woman may keep doing exactly what she did before, yet with a new perspective, the outcome changes. Every woman starts from a different place and moves at her own pace. I guide her and help her discover the healing power that is already within her because she is the one who heals herself. The idea of returning to femininity is central to your philosophy. What does that mean to you, and how has it shaped your own relationship with your body? To me, returning to femininity means coming back to who we naturally are, to our authentic selves. I believe one of the root causes of PCOS is the disconnection from our femininity. By femininity, I don't mean appearance or gender roles. I mean the qualities every woman carries within. Men carry them too, but my work is with women. These qualities include feeling deeply, reflecting, creating, softness, vulnerability, empathy, and devotion. Somewhere along the way, often through experiences in childhood or difficult moments later in life, many of us learned to see these qualities as weakness. Some of us may have suppressed them to protect ourselves. Others kept them but never learned how to live them in a way that doesn't work against us. Returning to femininity also means living in a way that respects the rhythms, cycles, and natural fluctuations of our bodies, and creating our lives from a place of peace and ease instead of constant pressure and pushing. For me, reconnecting with my body became the way back to my femininity. When I was disconnected, I simply didn't listen to my body, and so I didn't cooperate with it because, in a way, I hated it. Restoring a loving relationship with my body was part of my return. As I slowed down and started listening to it with love and curiosity, I learned to interpret the messages it was sending me. Now I know it has its own intelligence. Whenever symptoms appear, it's simply my body's way of showing me that something in me or in my life is out of balance. As you continue developing Return to Feminine and sharing your work on Instagram, what message would you like to leave with women who are still searching for answers about their PCOS? If most of your days revolve around your symptoms and often feel like suffering, trust that despite the hardship, you're exactly where you need to be, even if that idea seems ridiculous to you right now. Never give up on feeling good because healing fully and glowing is meant for you too. If you're currently looking for answers, know that they're already out there. So many women who have overcome PCOS are generously sharing what they've learned. But always keep in mind that answers are only one part. The real change happens when you act on them and experience the results for yourself. Most of all, know this. PCOS can be a gateway to a whole new chapter of your life. When you approach the healing process as a transformation that comes from within, the inner change you create and the skills you build along the way will reach far beyond your physical health. They will change how you feel every day, how much love you feel within you and around you, your relationships, and maybe even your career. One day, you may look back and feel grateful for what PCOS taught you. That's what my whole program is built around. You can turn PCOS into your power. I'd be more than happy to connect with you on Instagram. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Markéta Čepová