Conceived nearly a decade ago, Leslie Benzies' vision of AI, consumer robots, autonomous warfare, surveillance, and powerful technology leaders now feels considerably closer to reality. Without too many spoilers, MindsEye, the near-future-set video game from GTA producer Leslie Benzies, originally conceived nearly ten years ago, contains some chilling realities of today’s world. The game is set in Redrock City, recognizably Vegas with renamed versions of Wynn, Encore, Mandalay Bay, even the Sphere. As I drive my luxury electric sedan (I mean Silva E sedan) down the Redrock Strip, I get the feeling I’ve spent a few hungover days and nights here before. This is a city where technology has changed life. Consumer robots are the norm, and other than the few humans working in the Silva factory, we don’t actually see anyone working. NPC’s walk by complaining about how the robots took their jobs, but they can’t do much about it because surveillance is everywhere, the Police are Copbots, and prison is automated. Crime is impossible for the average citizen. The main character, Jacob Diaz, has a neural implant that’s screwing with his head, an implant made by Marco Silva, a tech trillionaire, who’s got a bit too involved with politics and helped propel a populist mayor to power, whom he’s now having a hard time controlling. Mirroring the real AI giants’ struggle to prevent their tech being used in war, Silva’s now reluctantly selling his to the military. Only trouble is the drones and robots being shipped off to war are carrying a virus that makes them impossible to control. As the first real-world consumer robots roll out into general production and wars are being fought increasingly with unmanned units, one has to ask: how long until MindsEye becomes a reality? I’d guess… it’s a lot closer than we think. The long game Every game begins with an idea. The difficult part isn't having one; it's still believing in it ten years later. When MindsEye was first conceived, generative AI hadn't entered the mainstream. Consumer humanoid robots belonged more to research labs than shop floors. Autonomous vehicles were experimental, not everyday talking points. Over the years that followed, technology – and the expectations surrounding it – changed dramatically. The vision behind MindsEye had to evolve with it. That's the part of game development players rarely see. Building something that doesn't exist yet Ask Leslie Benzies what his job actually is, and he doesn't talk about writing code, directing cutscenes, or designing missions. He talks about holding onto an idea. "I work backwards from the game I want to exist in the world," he says. "The day-to-day is people management; the long-term is vision." It sounds deceptively simple. In reality, it's one of the hardest challenges in modern game development. A game like MindsEye isn't built over months. It's built over years – sometimes close to a decade. During that time engines evolve, hardware changes, audiences shift, and entirely new technologies emerge. Every one of those changes presents a temptation to chase something newer, trendier or commercially safer. Every long development changes. The difficult part is recognising which ideas are worth protecting. "Games take years to make, and the industry is brutal – technically, commercially and creatively," Benzies says. "You need the ability to hold a vision in your head for a very long time and keep making decisions that serve it." That isn't about refusing to change. It's about making hundreds of difficult decisions without losing sight of the one idea that made the project worth starting in the first place. Leadership means letting go Popular culture loves the myth of the lone creative genius. Modern game development works almost entirely the opposite way. "I hire people who are better than me at things, and then I listen to them," Benzies says. "The moment you think you know everything in this industry is the moment you start falling behind." It's a philosophy that becomes increasingly important as teams grow. No creative director sees every animation, writes every line of dialogue, or balances every mechanic. Leadership becomes less about making every decision and more about creating an environment where good decisions consistently happen without you. Since 2024, Benzies has shared that responsibility with co-CEO Mark Gerhard, whose background leading RuneScape developer Jagex brought a complementary perspective focused on operations, technology, and long-term player communities. "Leslie holds the creative bar," Gerhard says. "My job is to build the machine that lets the team clear it – and to make sure we are listening to players at every step." It's an approach built on trust. Creative vision may begin with one person. Delivering it never does. When vision meets reality Every ambitious project eventually collides with reality. For MindsEye, that moment came in 2025. The launch didn't fully meet the studio's own expectations. It was the kind of moment that forces difficult questions—not only about what needed fixing, but about which parts of the original vision were worth holding onto and which needed to evolve. Build A Rocket Boy's answer wasn't to start over. It was to keep building. Player feedback became another design input. Major updates followed. Systems were refined. New content arrived. The destination hadn't changed. Only the route. Looking back, the launch feels less like the end of development than the point where players themselves became part of it. Thinking in years, not weeks The games industry often judges success by launch weekends, review scores and quarterly sales. Developers rarely have that luxury. The projects that ultimately matter are measured in years. That long-term thinking continues to shape MindsEye today through new story content, expanding Arcadia creation tools and multiplayer experiences designed to keep the world evolving beyond its original campaign. Whether every decision succeeds is almost beside the point. The more interesting question is whether a project can continue adapting without losing sight of why it existed in the first place. For Benzies, that's always been the real measure. "A game that people are still playing and talking about years after it launched. The real measure is whether you made something that genuinely meant something to people." Players experience a game once. Developers experience it thousands of times – one decision after another, spread across years. They live every compromise. Every rethink. Every difficult decision to stay the course – or change it. That's the part players almost never see. Perhaps that's why the hardest part of making MindsEye was never building the game itself. It was believing in the same idea long enough to discover what it could become.

Starting something new gets harder once you have experience. When you are young, being a beginner is expected. You ask basic questions. You make mistakes. Someone shows you what to do, and you try again. Later, after years of building confidence and professional experience, putting yourself back in that position can feel different. Francisco Tonarely is doing exactly that. The Miami native is building a career in enterprise technology sales, an industry that brings him closer to his interests in technology, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation. It also puts him in an environment where there is still a great deal he does not know. Tonarely does not see that as a weakness. He sees it as part of the reason he wanted the challenge. “I believe the most successful people are constantly learning, remain coachable, and are willing to adapt as markets, technology, and businesses evolve,” he says. That belief did not begin with technology. It started much earlier, on a lacrosse field. Learning how to be coached Tonarely grew up in Miami, Florida, in a close-knit family. He attended Gulliver Preparatory School and graduated in 2017. Lacrosse was a major part of those years, and he later continued playing competitively at Bard College. Playing sports for that long meant spending a lot of time being coached. There were obvious lessons about teamwork and competition, but one of the more lasting lessons was learning how to respond when someone pointed out what needed to improve. Feedback is easier to appreciate when things are going well. It is harder when you are frustrated, when you disagree, or when you thought you had performed better than someone else did. Sports do not give you much choice. You can ignore the feedback, or you can decide what to do with it. Tonarely gradually came to see losses in much the same way. “I often consider some of my biggest losses to be my biggest wins because they have taught me the most, pushed me to grow, and helped shape who I am today,” he says. It is an idea that sounds simple until you actually have to live through the loss. For Tonarely, one of those periods came early in adulthood when he lost an important mentor. He was also trying to establish himself professionally at the time. The experience changed his perspective on what he could control. “I focused on learning as much as possible, earning more responsibility, and continually improving,” he says. There was no way to change what had happened. There was, however, a choice about what happened next. Moving toward something new As Tonarely's career developed, so did his interest in technology. Artificial intelligence was becoming a larger part of business conversations. Companies were thinking differently about their technology environments, digital transformation, and the systems they depended on to operate. Tonarely found himself wanting to understand more. That curiosity eventually led him toward enterprise technology sales and his role as a Business Development Representative with Ardoq. The move presented a familiar feeling. He was a beginner again. There was new terminology to learn. He had technical concepts he hadn't spent years working with. He also had to develop a different way of communicating with businesses and potential customers. A certain amount of humility is required to admit that you do not know something, particularly in a professional setting. People naturally want to appear capable. Tonarely is no different. The question is what happens after you encounter something you do not understand. Do you avoid the subject because you do not want to expose the gap? Do you pretend to understand more than you do? Or do you ask another question? For Tonarely, the last option has become increasingly important. Curiosity works better when ego gets out of the way Tonarely considers curiosity one of the most useful qualities someone can bring into technology sales. Part of that comes from the industry itself. Enterprise technology changes quickly, and AI is making that pace even more obvious. It is difficult to imagine anyone reaching a point where there is nothing left to learn. The other part comes from the nature of sales. A customer may describe a problem, but that does not mean the first explanation tells the whole story. Understanding what is really happening requires listening long enough to get beyond the obvious answer. “You need to be a great listener, build genuine relationships, and understand the challenges your customers are trying to solve,” Tonarely says. That sounds straightforward. In practice, it requires restraint. It can be tempting to hear something familiar and immediately start thinking about what to say next. Tonarely believes curiosity requires doing the opposite. It means staying with the conversation long enough to understand the other person's perspective. Sometimes that means asking a question that feels basic. Sometimes it means discovering that your first assumption was wrong. Neither is particularly comfortable. Both are part of learning. Becoming the coach changed his perspective Tonarely's life has taken an interesting turn. After years of being coached in lacrosse, he now works with younger players as a youth coach. Standing on the other side has changed how he thinks about development. A coach can give two players the same instruction and get completely different results. One player understands immediately. Another needs the idea explained differently. Someone else may understand what to do but lack the confidence to actually do it during a game. That means coaching can't be only about giving answers. A coach has to watch, listen, and adjust. Tonarely has found that lesson increasingly relevant away from sports. Good communication is not about proving how much you know. It is about figuring out what the person in front of you needs in order to move forward. The experience has also reminded him that improvement is often difficult to see while it is happening. A player can spend weeks working on something before it finally appears naturally during a game. Careers can develop the same way. Staying coachable Tonarely is still at the beginning of his journey in enterprise technology. He understands some areas and wants to understand many more. He is interested in AI, digital transformation, enterprise architecture, technology sales, and how businesses make sense of increasingly complicated technology environments. He does not know exactly where those interests will eventually take him. For now, he is comfortable with that. Lacrosse taught him how to receive coaching. Becoming a coach taught him how differently people learn. Difficult experiences taught him that setbacks can either stop progress or become part of it. Now he is carrying those lessons into a field where being willing to learn may matter more than arriving with every answer. Tonarely still wants to succeed. He still wants to become better at what he does and take on greater challenges. He has simply become less interested in pretending that growth happens because someone already knows what they are doing. Sometimes it begins with admitting that you do not. Then you ask the next question.

Success is supposed to make running a business easier. In practice, growth often creates a new collection of problems. A founder who once made five meaningful decisions a week may suddenly face five before lunch. More employees create more opinions. More customers create competing priorities. More data creates additional questions. Leaders who built their companies by personally solving problems can eventually become the very bottleneck slowing those companies down. Otto Bohon has experienced business from several sides of the table. He started working in his family's Tucson restaurant business at nine years old and was learning payroll by twelve. He later earned a bachelor's degree in Psychology and an MBA with concentrations in Finance and Marketing. His career has included banking, entrepreneurship, financial services, executive operations, and consulting. Those experiences shaped an approach to decision-making that is less about having perfect answers and more about knowing what deserves attention. "The older I've gotten, the less impressed I am by someone who can make a fast decision," Bohon says. "I'm more interested in whether they identified the right problem before making it." More information does not always produce better decisions Modern executives have access to an extraordinary amount of information. Dashboards can track sales, customer activity, employee performance, marketing results, and dozens of other measures. Bohon does not believe more information automatically produces better judgment. "You can stare at 40 metrics and still miss the one thing that's actually causing the problem," he says. "I've been in situations where everyone wanted another report, and the useful answer came from talking to the person doing the job every day." His psychology background has influenced that approach. Numbers can show what happened, but understanding why it happened often requires talking to people. When entering an unfamiliar operation, Bohon likes to compare what leadership believes happens with what employees say actually happens. The gap can reveal problems that reports miss. "If three executives tell me a process works one way and the person actually doing it shows me six workarounds they use every morning, I'm paying attention to the workarounds," he says. Knowing when a problem is actually a pattern One bad week does not necessarily require a new strategy. Bohon believes leaders sometimes react too quickly because visible action feels productive. A customer complaint triggers a new policy. One missed target creates another meeting. A temporary slowdown leads to a new layer of oversight. Soon the company has accumulated solutions to problems that no longer exist. "I've seen businesses build an entire process around one unusual event," he says. "Six months later, employees are still completing extra steps because nobody went back and asked whether the original problem was even happening anymore." His preferred approach is to look for repetition. If the same breakdown happens across employees, departments, or customers, the problem is more likely structural. If it happens once under unusual circumstances, changing the entire system may create more trouble than it solves. That distinction becomes increasingly important as organizations grow. Leaders can become their own biggest bottleneck Founders often build businesses by becoming exceptionally good at solving problems. That ability can become a liability when the organization reaches a certain size. Employees learn that asking the founder is faster than making a decision themselves. Managers begin escalating routine issues. Eventually, the founder spends the day approving work others should own. Bohon believes the warning sign is simple. "If you're answering the same question for the fifth time, answering it a sixth time isn't leadership," he says. "Something needs to be documented, delegated, or trained." Delegation, however, requires more than handing someone a task. People need to understand the boundaries of their authority. A manager might be allowed to resolve customer problems below a certain threshold without executive approval. A department head might control hiring within an approved budget. Teams might receive clear rules about which decisions require escalation. The goal is not to remove leadership from decisions. It is to reserve leadership attention for decisions that actually require it. Pressure reveals whether a system works Some of Bohon's earliest lessons about pressure came from restaurants. A restaurant during a rush provides immediate feedback. Orders arrive whether the team is ready or not. Customers expect consistent service. One weak handoff can affect the kitchen, servers, and guests within minutes. "You learn quickly that the middle of a dinner rush is a terrible time to invent your process," he says. "The preparation either happened beforehand or everybody feels it." Competitive sports and martial arts reinforced a similar lesson. Preparation creates options when circumstances change. Business leaders cannot predict every problem, but they can establish clear responsibilities and communication before pressure arrives. When something unexpected happens, Bohon's first instinct is to simplify rather than add complexity. "What is the actual problem? Who owns it? What decision has to happen next? Those three questions can clear a surprising amount of noise," he says. Disagreement is useful when the rules are clear Experienced executives will not always agree. Bohon sees disagreement as useful when everyone understands how the final decision will be made. Problems begin when organizations confuse collaboration with unanimous consent. A leader should hear competing arguments, identify the assumptions behind them, and decide who ultimately owns the call. "I want someone in the room who disagrees with me," he says. "What I don't want is a decision getting reopened every three days because somebody didn't like the answer." That requires a culture where challenging an idea is different from challenging someone's authority. Leaders also need enough self-awareness to recognize when ego has entered the conversation. Bohon uses a simple test: would he make the same decision if someone else had originally suggested it? "If the answer changes because my name isn't attached to the idea, that's a problem," he says. Good leaders know when to leave things alone Consultants are often expected to arrive and immediately change things. Bohon takes a different view. When entering an established organization, he first wants to understand why existing processes developed. Some procedures may look inefficient but exist for a valid reason. Experienced employees may know constraints that are invisible from the executive level. "I never want to walk in on Monday and start mo ving furniture because I was hired to improve something," he says. "First I want to know why the furniture is where it is." That patience does not mean avoiding change. It means understanding the cost and purpose of change before introducing it. The same principle applies to technology. New software can improve a strong process, but it cannot rescue a process nobody understands. A bad outcome does not always mean a bad decision One of the harder lessons in leadership is separating decision quality from outcome quality. A thoughtful decision can produce a poor result because circumstances change. A reckless decision can occasionally produce a great result through luck. Bohon believes leaders should review what they knew when they made the decision rather than judging themselves entirely with hindsight. "Ask whether you used the information available, challenged your assumptions, and understood the downside," he says. "If you did those things and the result still went against you, learn from it. Don't rewrite history and pretend you should have known something nobody knew." That mindset makes it easier to admit mistakes without fearing the next decision. The three questions leaders should ask For executives facing an important decision, Bohon returns to three questions. First, what problem are we actually solving? Second, who should own the decision? Third, what happens if we are wrong? The questions are simple because the job is not to make decision-making look sophisticated. The job is to make good decisions repeatable. That may be the larger lesson from Bohon's path through restaurants, banking, entrepreneurship, and operations. Experience does not give leaders perfect instincts. It gives them a better process for questioning those instincts. "Confidence isn't believing you're always right," he says. "For me, it's knowing I can make the best decision with what I have, own the result, and change course when the facts tell me I should." As companies become larger, that distinction matters. The leader who insists on having every answer eventually limits the organization to what one person can know. The leader who builds good judgment throughout the company creates something far more scalable: a team that knows how to think when the answer is not obvious.

Written by Dr. Clare Allen, Executive Leadership Coach Dr. Clare Allen is a 7x award-winning CEO blending leadership and metaphysics through her Identity Anchoring Methodology, helping leaders move beyond quick fixes to become strategic architects of business and life, equipped for today’s world. On a mission to create 1 million profound identity shifts. I first read Think and Grow Rich in my twenties, in the way most ambitious people do, hungry for a formula. Napoleon Hill had interviewed 500 of the most successful men of his era and distilled it into thirteen steps: desire, faith, persistence, a "magnetized" mind that pulls opportunity toward it. Nearly 100 million copies later, it is still the book handed to every new manager, every founder, every person who has just decided they want more. I still recommend it. But I no longer teach it the way it was written. It wasn't written for the leaders sitting across from me. Hill's 500 men were emerging from the Great Depression. Financial survival was the goal, and every principle in the book was built to serve it. Almost a century later, the executives I work with, mostly women, mostly running organisations in community, government and health, aren't short on drive or discipline. They are exhausted from performing a version of themselves that doesn't quite fit. That isn't a "think positive" problem. It needs a different key. That gap is what led me to design the Identity Anchoring™ methodology, a five-stage framework built on neuroscience, Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP), and thirty years of my own experience as a CEO: Awareness, Anchor, Embody, Integrate, and Expand & Rise. I built it because I kept meeting leaders who couldn't explain why they felt stuck, like something was missing, even while ticking every box success was supposed to require. Almost always, the answer was the same. They had been performing for so long they'd lost track of who they were underneath it. Here are the three keys within that methodology that changed how I coach belief. Key one: Belief generates reality, not just attracts it Hill's central image was magnetism, a mind so charged with desire that it draws matching circumstances toward it. It's a beautiful metaphor, and it's also, subtly, a passive one. You charge the magnet, then you wait for the world to arrange itself around you. I ask my clients a different question, "What if you stopped waiting to be pulled toward your next opportunity and started generating it from where you already stand?" That's the shift at the centre of Identity Anchoring™, the locus of control moves entirely inward. An anchored leader doesn't attract authority from the room. They walk in already carrying it, and the room responds to what's already true. It sounds like a small distinction. In practice, it's the difference between a leader who needs the meeting to go well to feel legitimate, and one whose legitimacy was never up for negotiation in the first place. Key two: You can't talk yourself into a new identity, you have to rewire it Hill's engine room was auto-suggestion, repeating a goal to yourself until you'd effectively tricked your subconscious into believing it was already real. It was the best tool available in 1937. It also has a cost he never accounted for. When you're consciously "deceiving" your own mind, some part of you knows the gap between the story and the truth. That gap is cognitive dissonance, and it's exhausting to hold. This is where the science has genuinely moved on. Neuroplasticity tells us the brain isn't a fixed structure you talk your way around. It's a living system that physically reorganises itself around repeated thought and experience. Using neuroplasticity principles alongside NLP and neuroscience tools, I work with leaders to build new neural pathways rather than paper over old ones. It's slower than a mantra. It's also the difference between change that holds under pressure and change that collapses the first time someone challenges you in a boardroom. The practical version of this is simple–ten focused days of repetition can start laying a new pathway. Not because you've convinced yourself of something, but because you've practised it into your nervous system. Key three: The real prize isn't the riches, it's the joy Hill's finish line was financial independence, full stop. It was an entirely reasonable goal for a generation with no safety net. If your model of success ends at the bank balance, though, it will eventually ask you to sacrifice everything else to get there. I've sat with too many high-performing women who hit every target Hill would have recognised as success and felt nothing but depletion when they got there. Success without joy isn't success. It's survival. I say this to clients often, because it reframes the whole exercise. The goal isn't to accumulate until you can finally rest. It's to build a way of leading you can sustain without quietly falling apart inside it, what I call the Nourished Leader, someone whose wellbeing isn't the reward for success, but the infrastructure underneath it. The master key, re-equipped Hill called belief the "master key" to achievement, and he wasn't wrong. What's changed is everything downstream of that belief, who it's built for, what powers it, and what it's in service of. Identity Anchoring™ doesn't retire Hill's insight. It takes the master key and re-equips it with neuroscience instead of willpower, generation instead of attraction, and joy instead of survival. The leaders I work with don't need more desire. They had that before they walked in the door. What they needed was permission to stop performing it, and a method that could make the shift permanent, not just believed. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Dr. Clare Allen Dr. Clare Allen, Executive Leadership Coach Dr. Clare Allen is a 7x award-winning CEO and now a sought-after leadership coach who blends evidence-based leadership development with metaphysics through her Identity Anchoring Methodology. With more than 30 years of executive experience, she helps leaders move beyond quick fixes and create profound, lasting identity shifts, so they lead with clarity, confidence, and presence in today’s world. Clare is on a mission to create 1 million profound identity shifts for leaders through coaching, programs, and thought leadership.

Written by Elizabeth Tsekouras, Education and Career Coach Liz Tsekouras is a successful education and career coach with a background in Sociology and Psychology. Her specialism is in neurodiverse coaching, where she provides tailored guidance to clients to improve their academic/career performance, confidence, and wellbeing. In today’s workplace, self-improvement has quietly shifted from a personal choice to an unspoken expectation. Employees are encouraged to optimise their habits, upgrade their mindset, refine their productivity, and continually be better. Social media amplifies this pressure with endless routines, hacks, and performance advice. Even wellbeing has become something to optimise. But behind this cultural push toward constant improvement lies a growing mental health concern. Many people, especially neurodivergent individuals, are experiencing exhaustion, anxiety, and emotional overload not because they lack motivation, but because they are overwhelmed by the demand to continually evolve. Self-improvement used to be about growth. Now it often feels like self-pressure. The hidden mental health impact The expectation to always improve creates several psychological challenges. Chronic comparison leads to persistent stress and a sense of inadequacy. Perfectionism becomes disguised as high performance, pushing individuals to maintain unrealistic standards. Emotional exhaustion builds as people try to upgrade multiple areas of their lives simultaneously, including productivity, communication, emotional regulation, confidence, and resilience. When improvement becomes a requirement, people begin to lose sight of who they are. Identity becomes shaped by external expectations rather than authentic strengths. When individuals inevitably fall short of constant optimisation, they often blame themselves, fuelling a damaging cycle of shame and self-criticism. A more sustainable approach Coaching offers an alternative to the pressure driven model of self-improvement. Sustainable growth focuses on nervous system regulation, authenticity, and realistic expectations. It shifts development from perfection to progress, comparison to individualisation, and pressure to permission. Five coaching shifts that reduce pressure The most powerful mental health shift is simple. You do not need to be better every day. You need to be well. A more sustainable approach to growth requires intentional shifts: From self-support to self-support, development becomes supportive rather than demanding. From perfection to progress, small, meaningful steps replace unrealistic leaps. From comparison to individualisation, growth aligns with personal strengths, not external standards. From pressure to permission, people are allowed to rest, pause, and be human. From “fixing yourself” to understanding yourself, self-awareness replaces self-criticism. With wellbeing, genuine growth becomes possible without sacrificing mental health in the process. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Elizabeth Tsekouras Elizabeth Tsekouras, Education and Career Coach Liz Tsekouras is a dedicated coach and specialist neurodiverse educator who draws on over a decade of experience to help individuals build confidence, strengthen their learning skills, and navigate challenges with clarity and purpose. She provides personalised coaching that empowers clients to harness their abilities, develop effective strategies, and achieve meaningful academic, professional, and personal growth.

Written by René Caruso, Metabolic Health Specialist, Peptide Consultant René Caruso is a Metabolic Health and Longevity Strategist, speaker, author, and peptide-certified consultant known for translating complex health strategies into practical, real-world solutions for clients and clinicians. If you’ve followed countless plans and still don’t trust yourself around food, the problem may not be a lack of knowledge or discipline. In this article, metabolic health strategist René Caruso explains how rigid dieting can weaken confidence, why action must come before belief, and how small, repeatable wins can help you build a healthier relationship with food and yourself. What is self-trust? When people hear the word confidence, they often think of self-esteem, how you feel about yourself. But there’s another kind of confidence that matters enormously when you’re trying to change your health. Psychologist Albert Bandura called it self-efficacy, the belief that you can perform a specific action in a specific situation. That distinction matters. You can be highly capable in your career, dependable in your relationships, and confident in almost every part of life, yet still feel completely unsure of yourself around food. You may trust yourself to lead a meeting but not to walk into a restaurant without abandoning your goals. You may know exactly what a balanced meal looks like but doubt that you can choose one when you’re tired, stressed, traveling, or disappointed by the scale. Health-related self-trust isn’t the belief that you’ll eat perfectly, never miss a workout, or always feel motivated. It’s the belief that you can make a supportive choice, adapt when life changes, and return to your habits without punishment when you veer off course. That’s a much more useful form of confidence because it’s grounded in real behavior, not wishful thinking. How diets weaken trust Most diets begin with a promise–this time will be different. Then they hand you a plan that only works under ideal conditions. You follow it carefully for a while. Eventually, there’s a dinner out, a stressful week, a holiday, an injury, or simply a day when you can’t maintain the rules. The plan breaks down, but instead of questioning the plan, you question yourself. Repeat that cycle often enough, and every restart becomes another piece of evidence against you. You stop saying, “That approach didn’t fit my life,” and start saying, “I can never stick with anything.” A temporary behavior becomes an identity. That’s how dieting can quietly erode self-trust. I understand this personally. I spent years dealing with disordered eating, restriction, rules, and the belief that more discipline would finally make food feel easy. I was informed. I was determined. I was also exhausted. The turning point wasn’t learning one more nutrition fact. It was rebuilding the ability to respond to my body without turning every choice into a test of character. This is also why I wrote about the starting-over cycle and the missing piece in sustainable health. If the framework requires perfection, it will keep producing shame instead of skill. Knowledge isn’t enough Most of the people I work with don’t have an information problem. They already know that protein matters, sleep matters, movement matters, and ultra-processed food shouldn’t be the foundation of a healthy diet. Many can explain nutrition in remarkable detail. What they don’t have is enough lived evidence that they can apply what they know consistently in their actual life. Research supports the importance of that distinction. In a behavioral weight-loss study, eating and physical-activity self-efficacy before and during the intervention were associated with changes in dietary intake, activity, and weight. The point isn’t that confidence magically creates a result. The point is that belief in your ability to carry out the behavior affects whether you begin, how much effort you give, and whether you keep going when the process becomes inconvenient. Knowledge can tell you what to do. Self-trust helps you do it on the Tuesday when your meetings run late, your energy is low, and takeout is calling your name. Sustainable health requires both. "Confidence doesn’t arrive before the action. It’s built from evidence that you can act." Action comes first Many people wait to feel ready before they change. They want motivation, certainty, or a burst of confidence first. In practice, those feelings are unreliable. Confidence is usually the result of action, not the prerequisite for it. You do something difficult but manageable, discover that you can do it, and your belief begins to catch up with your behavior. This is where many health plans make a critical mistake. They ask you to prove everything at once. Eat perfectly. Train five days a week. Give up every food you enjoy. Sleep eight hours. Meal prep on Sunday. Drink more water. Track every number. That may create an impressive first week, but it creates terrible conditions for building trust because there are too many ways to fail. A better starting point is one promise that matters and that you can keep. It might be preparing a protein-centered breakfast before you open your email four mornings this week. It might be taking a ten-minute walk after dinner three nights. It might be packing lunch twice instead of promising that you’ll never order takeout again. The action should be meaningful but small enough that it can survive a normal week. Small wins build proof We tend to discount ordinary success. A missed workout can occupy our mind all day, while the four workouts we completed barely register. One meal that didn’t go as planned becomes evidence that we’re failing, while dozens of supportive decisions disappear into the background. If you want to rebuild self-trust, you have to become more accurate about the evidence. At the end of the day, ask yourself three simple questions. What promise did I keep? Where did I recover more quickly than I used to? What made the next supportive choice easier? This isn’t empty positive thinking. It’s a more honest accounting system. You’re training yourself to notice capability, not only mistakes. Over time, these small wins compound. You’re no longer trying to convince yourself with an affirmation that you’re “good at healthy eating.” You’ve got evidence that you can prepare breakfast, order a meal that supports your goals, stop eating when you’re satisfied, or return to your normal routine after a celebration. That kind of confidence is harder to shake because you earned it. Recovery is the skill The most important promise isn’t that you’ll never make an unplanned choice. It’s that you won’t turn one choice into a week of self-punishment. Most people don’t lose momentum because of one dinner, one dessert, or one missed workout. They lose it because of the story they attach to that moment. A quick recovery protects self-trust. Eat normally at the next meal. Don’t skip food to compensate. Don’t add a punishing workout. Look at what contributed to the choice. Were you underfed, overtired, emotionally depleted, unprepared, or in an environment that made the less supportive option the easiest one? Then adjust the system instead of attacking yourself. Consistency doesn’t mean leaving the path. It means shortening the distance between leaving and returning. Every calm return becomes another mastery experience, proof that a less-than-perfect moment no longer has the power to take you out of the game. Choose mastery over approval There are two very different ways to pursue health. One is driven by approval, the number on the scale, the compliment, the clothing size, the before-and-after photo, or the feeling that your body finally makes you acceptable. Those outcomes can be motivating for a while, but they’re fragile. When the scale stalls or the praise stops, the reason to continue disappears. The other approach is mastery. You become interested in learning how your body responds. You get better at reading labels, planning for travel, building a meal, recognizing true hunger, lifting with good form, protecting sleep, and choosing foods that help you feel clear and energized. The satisfaction comes partly from the result, but also from becoming skilled. Mastery gives you more ways to succeed. Even when body weight isn’t changing, your strength may be improving. Your energy may be steadier. You may be cooking more often, eating more protein, sleeping better, or recovering faster after an off-plan meal. Progress becomes broader, more honest, and much harder for one number to erase. Let your environment help I genuinely love grocery shopping. I know that makes me a little unusual. With local clients, grocery-store visits are sometimes part of our work together because that’s where health decisions become real. We read ingredient labels, compare options, look for unwanted additives, and find alternatives that fit the client’s goals and budget. We aren’t chasing a perfect cart. We’re reducing the number of battles the client has to fight later in the week. Your environment includes more than your pantry. It includes your calendar, your commute, your workplace, the people you eat with, the delivery apps on your phone, and the food that’s easiest to reach when you’re tired. A plan supported by those surroundings requires far less heroic resistance than a plan that argues with your life all day. This is also where a simple if-then plan can help. The National Cancer Institute describes implementation intentions as linking a specific situation with a specific response. If my late meeting runs past dinner, then I’ll use the prepared meal in the refrigerator. If I’m ordering at a restaurant, then I’ll choose my protein first and build around it. You’re making the decision before the difficult moment arrives. Use believable language The way you speak to yourself matters, but only if the language is believable. Telling yourself, “I never struggle with food,” won’t help when your experience says otherwise. A more useful statement is, “I know how to make one supportive choice at the next meal,” or, “One decision doesn’t erase the work I’ve already done.” Those statements are powerful because they can be verified through action. Each time you follow through, the words become more credible. Eventually, the voice in your head changes from a critic waiting for failure to a coach directing the next useful move. Many of us inherited an inner voice shaped by early caregivers, diet culture, coaches, partners, or years of comparison. You may not have chosen that voice, but you can decide whether it remains in charge. Rebuilding self-trust means learning to speak to yourself in a way that produces responsibility without shame. Test it for seven days For the next seven days, choose one health action you want to trust yourself to perform. Make it specific enough that you can clearly say whether you did it. Decide when and where it will happen. Keep the challenge small enough to survive a busy day, but meaningful enough that it supports your health. Then record the evidence. A simple check mark is enough. If you miss the action, don’t restart next Monday. Resume at the next planned opportunity and ask what would make the behavior easier. At the end of the week, review what worked before increasing the challenge. The goal of this experiment isn’t to transform your body in seven days. It’s to prove that your word to yourself can mean something again. Once that trust begins to return, larger changes become far more possible. Health confidence compounds Self-trust isn’t a personality trait that some people have, and others don’t. It’s built through kept promises, useful skills, honest reflection, and repeated recovery. It grows when your plan fits your life and when your definition of success is wider than a number on the scale. You don’t need to feel completely confident before you begin. You need one action you can repeat, one environment you can improve, and one opportunity to return without punishment. Do that often enough and the story changes. You stop seeing yourself as someone who always fails and start seeing yourself as someone who knows how to respond. Your body doesn’t need another perfection-based plan. It needs a relationship built on understanding, consistency, and trust. That’s how health stops feeling like a battle and starts becoming a way of life. Build health you trust If you’re tired of knowing what to do but not trusting yourself to follow through, René helps clients identify the metabolic, nutritional, behavioral, and real-life barriers keeping them stuck. Together, you build a health strategy that works in your actual life, not only under ideal conditions. Visit here to learn more or schedule a conversation. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from René Caruso René Caruso, Metabolic Health Specialist, Peptide Consultant René Caruso is a Metabolic Health and Longevity Strategist, speaker, author, and peptide-certified consultant with over 30 years of experience in nutrition, metabolic health, and behavior change. After overcoming decades of disordered eating and rebuilding her own relationship with food, René has dedicated her work to helping others restore energy, improve body composition, and find peace with food. She works with individuals, clinics, and wellness providers to translate complex health strategies into practical, sustainable programs that work in real life. Her mission is to help people cut through the noise, understand their body, and create health that finally feels doable. Sources: American Psychological Association. Self-efficacy: The theory at the heart of human agency. Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191–215. Nezami, B. T., et al. (2016). The effect of self-efficacy on behavior and weight in a behavioral weight-loss intervention. Health Psychology. National Cancer Institute. Implementation intentions.

Darren Tebbenham lectured in sport and exercise psychology before deciding the industry had the problem backward. Eat less, move more, choose low-fat–he questions all of it. Now The Diabetes Coach, he helps people prevent and reverse type 2 diabetes–the point where the familiar cycle of losing weight and regaining it stops being disheartening and becomes a disease getting closer. He has written two books on it and taught his approach to more than 3,000 health professionals across 30+ countries. Darren Tebbenham, Metabolic & Mental Health Expert He is equally blunt about corporate wellbeing, apps nobody opens, webinars nobody attends, all of it measured in sign-ups rather than outcomes. His alternative is measurement: more than 160 BodyScans in a single morning at NFU Mutual, then an honest conversation with staff about what their own numbers meant. Here he argues that metabolic health is mental health, and that lasting change starts from the inside out. Your message is that "metabolic health is mental health." What led you to connect those two ideas so closely? Watching the same thing happen over and over. Someone changes what they eat, starts lifting, gets their blood sugar steady, and comes back three weeks later saying the fog has lifted and they're not snapping at their kids. Nobody promised them that. It just happens. I came at it from psychology, so my instinct was always that the mind drove the body. It took me years of coaching to accept the traffic runs both ways, and heavily. Your brain runs on glucose and is exquisitely sensitive to how well you handle it. Mood, focus, resilience, motivation, all downstream of metabolism. We've built an entire wellbeing industry around mindfulness apps while ignoring that half the workforce is on a blood sugar rollercoaster from 7 am. You cannot think your way out of a physiological problem. You left academia because you believed knowledge alone rarely changes behaviour. What did the real world teach you that the classroom could not? That I was answering a question nobody was asking. In a lecture theatre you assume the gap is knowledge. Fill it, and behaviour follows. Then you stand on a gym floor and meet a woman who can tell you the glycaemic index of everything in her cupboard and is heavier than she's ever been. The information wasn't missing. It was never the problem. What the real world teaches you is that people don't fail on the plan. They fail on Tuesday, when the plan meets a bad night's sleep, a birthday cake, and someone else's crisis. Nobody in academia was studying Tuesday. You've recently narrowed your focus to diabetes specifically. Why now? Frustration, if I'm honest. I've spent twenty years watching people lose weight and put it straight back on. For most people, that cycle is disheartening. For someone insulin resistant, it's something else entirely. It's a disease getting closer. Same failure, completely different stakes. More than one in five UK adults now lives with diabetes or prediabetes. Millions have been handed a leaflet and told to lose a bit of weight by people who genuinely care but have twelve minutes and no mechanism to offer. Meanwhile, I'd been pointing everything I know at people who wanted to look better in a dress. At some point that becomes indefensible. So the work sits under The Diabetes Coach now, preventing and reversing type 2, not managing it. Your Inside-Out Transformation framework starts with identity before habits. Why does that order make such a difference? Because habits built on top of the wrong identity are a rented house. They stand up beautifully until something shakes them. If you think of yourself as someone who's trying to eat well, every meal is a test you can fail. If you think of yourself as someone who eats well, most meals aren't decisions at all. Same behaviour, completely different load-bearing structure. It's also why "all-or-nothing" is so destructive. When the plan requires perfection, the first ordinary human moment doesn't dent it, it ends it, because you've relabelled yourself as "off it". Change the identity first and a bad Tuesday is just a bad Tuesday. Everyone starts with habits because habits are teachable and identity feels woolly. It's the wrong way round. Mental health is often treated separately from physical health. What needs to change in healthcare and workplaces? In healthcare, an honest conversation about direction of travel. We're superb at treating symptoms and largely uninterested in root cause. Someone gets medication for blood pressure, statins for cholesterol, an antidepressant for mood, three prescriptions for what is very often one underlying problem, and nobody joins the dots. In workplaces, it's simpler and more fixable, stop measuring wellbeing by sign-ups. Every organisation I meet can tell me how many people downloaded the app. None can tell me whether anyone got healthier. Measure something real. Then you have a baseline, an obligation and, for the first time, a way of knowing if any of it worked. After training more than 3,000 health professionals, what separates coaches who create lasting transformation from those who simply share good advice? The good ones are comfortable being quiet. Average coaches perform expertise, they explain, prescribe, demonstrate how much they know. It feels like value, and it changes nothing. The ones who get results ask better questions and then shut up long enough to hear the answer. The other difference is what they do with failure. Most coaches treat a missed week as a discipline problem, which lands as blame and makes the next week worse. Good ones treat it as information, something in the design didn't survive contact with this person's actual life. Fix the design, not the person. BodyScan assessments give people measurable insights. What conversations do those results usually start? Better ones than I expect, every time. The scale is the crudest instrument in the building, and we've built an entire industry around it. A BodyScan shows what it can't, whether you're carrying muscle or quietly losing it, where the fat actually sits, what your metabolism is doing. Two people at identical weight can have completely different risk. At NFU Mutual, we ran more than 160 scans in a single morning and then stood up and talked to staff about their own numbers. The room changes when it's personal. Nobody attends a wellbeing webinar, everybody queues to find out what's happening inside their own body. The conversation shifts from willpower to biology, which is the moment people stop feeling like failures and start moving. Where do you stand on Mounjaro, Ozempic and the rest? Neither for nor against. That's between a patient and their prescriber, and I don't prescribe. But I'll be direct about what they are. A glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) shrinks your appetite. It doesn't change your relationship with food, it doesn't protect your muscle, and it doesn't build a single habit for the day you stop. It's a window, not a fix. Used alongside the right dietary change and proper resistance training, they can be genuinely transformative. Used instead of changing anything, the weight comes back and often takes muscle with it, so you end up lighter, weaker, and more insulin resistant than when you started. Ninety days to break the grip of cravings is one thing. A prescription as a permanent substitute for skill is another. When someone has tried countless diets without lasting success, where do you encourage them to begin? By letting themselves off the hook, and I mean that practically rather than as comfort. They've been told to eat less and move more. For someone insulin resistant, that's the one instruction that can't work. High insulin physically blocks fat release, so they cut harder, nothing moves, and they conclude the problem is them. It was never willpower. It was a hormone, and nobody told them which one. So we start with measurement, not motivation. Five markers you can check at home in two minutes: waist against height, what a doctor's already said, whether you're on blood pressure or cholesterol medication, and whether the weight goes down, comes back, and is now stuck. Understanding why it's been happening does more for someone's motivation than any pep talk I've ever given. You return to the idea that change starts from the inside out. How has that shaped your own life? It's made me suspicious of my own discipline. I used to think I was a disciplined person. I'm not especially. What I have is an environment and an identity that make the right thing ordinary, and on the occasions I've let those slip, my supposed discipline evaporated exactly like everyone else's. That's been humbling and useful. It's very hard to lecture someone about willpower once you've watched your own fail under mildly difficult conditions. What are you building now? Three things that are really one. The Diabetes Coach, a ten-week online programme combining nutrition coaching, live strength training and the accountability that makes it hold. The first week is free. Alongside it, my colleague Allison Rumgay runs The Women's Strength Coach, the same programme through the lens of menopause and women's strength, which is a genuinely different physiological problem and deserves its own front door. Through Gloo Fitness, we take the whole thing into workplaces, scan the workforce, tell them what it means, then give them somewhere to go. Both my books, on the biology and the psychology of weight loss, are free to download here. If every leader understood one thing about metabolism, mental health and performance, what would it be? That the mental health, energy and productivity of their people have a physical foundation, and unlike almost everything else on the wellbeing budget, it can be measured. Scan a hundred employees, and you'll find people who have no idea they're walking towards type 2 diabetes. Not one of them will hear it from a mindfulness app. Measure it. Understand it. Change it. That's the whole job. Visit my website for more info! Read more from Darren Tebbenham

An accounting practice built on expertise, specialist knowledge, and a commitment to helping businesses grow has been recognised for its impact and potential. VCK Accounting Services Ltd has been recognised as a Rising Star at the UK Business Awards, marking a significant milestone for the growing accounting practice and highlighting its continued development within the UK business landscape. Founded and led by Chartered Certified Accountant Vicky, VCK Accounting Services Ltd has built its reputation around providing practical, reliable, and commercially focused accounting support to small and medium-sized businesses. The Rising Star recognition celebrates the journey of a firm that has developed with a clear purpose: to help business owners gain greater financial clarity, strengthen their systems, remain compliant, and ultimately build more sustainable businesses. Building an accounting practice with a difference VCK Accounting Services Ltd was established with the understanding that business owners need more than someone to prepare their accounts. For many entrepreneurs, accounting can feel like a function that happens in the background, something that needs to be completed for compliance purposes. VCK Accounting Services Ltd takes a different approach, positioning accounting as an important tool for understanding and growing a business. The practice works closely with business owners across a range of industries, with particular expertise in the healthcare sector. Its specialist client base includes businesses operating within areas such as domiciliary care, children’s homes, and dentistry. This sector expertise enables VCK Accounting Services Ltd to understand the unique financial and operational challenges faced by healthcare business owners. From payroll and bookkeeping to accounts, corporation tax, self-assessment, and financial guidance, the firm provides services designed to give business owners greater control and confidence. Supporting businesses beyond the numbers At the heart of VCK Accounting Services Ltd is a commitment to making financial information understandable and useful. The firm recognises that business owners need to understand what their numbers are telling them. Profitability, cash flow, tax liabilities, payroll costs, expenses, and business performance all play a role in determining whether a business is financially healthy and positioned for growth. VCK Accounting Services Ltd therefore aims to bridge the gap between accounting information and business decision-making. Its work is centred around helping clients understand their financial position, identify potential issues, establish effective systems, and make informed decisions about the future of their businesses. This approach has helped the practice establish strong relationships with its clients and develop a reputation for combining technical accounting expertise with a practical understanding of business. A specialist focus on healthcare businesses One of the firm’s defining strengths is its specialist knowledge of the healthcare sector. Healthcare businesses operate within complex environments, often balancing staffing costs, payroll, regulatory requirements, property expenses, cash-flow pressures, and contracts with local authorities. VCK Accounting Services Ltd has developed an understanding of these challenges and provides tailored accounting support designed around the realities of running these businesses. The firm’s experience within the sector allows it to have conversations that go beyond the traditional accountant-client relationship, helping business owners consider not only their immediate accounting obligations but also the financial implications of their wider business decisions. What the Rising Star recognition means Being named a Rising Star at the UK Business Awards represents an important achievement for VCK Accounting Services Ltd. The recognition acknowledges the firm’s growth, its approach to client service, its specialist expertise, and the potential for continued development. For the team behind VCK Accounting Services Ltd, the award is also an opportunity to reflect on how far the practice has come. “What started as a vision to support and empower businesses has grown into something truly special,” says Vicky. “This recognition is a testament to the dedication behind VCK Accounting Services Ltd, the trust our clients place in us, and our commitment to helping businesses thrive.” The award also represents the collective contribution of everyone connected to the practice, from its clients and team members to the professional network and supporters who have helped the firm develop along the way.

Vicky, Chartered Certified Accountant, author, entrepreneur, and Founder and Director of VCK Accounting Services Ltd, has been recognised at the Zimbabwe Women in Business Forum Awards, receiving an award celebrating her contribution as an entrepreneur and author. The award, presented on Saturday, 13 December, marked a meaningful moment in Vicky’s entrepreneurial journey and recognised the work she has built through both her accounting practice and her growing platform as an author and as an accountant. For Vicky, the recognition represents far more than an award. It is a reflection of the journey behind the scenes, the years of building a business, serving clients, navigating the realities of entrepreneurship, and creating opportunities to educate and empower other business owners. A recognition of the journey Receiving recognition from the Zimbabwe Women in Business Forum holds particular significance because the awards bring together women who are making an impact across different industries and areas of business. For Vicky, being recognised alongside accomplished women from diverse backgrounds provided an opportunity to reflect on her own journey and the importance of celebrating women who are building businesses, creating opportunities, and contributing to their communities. “It was a true honour to receive this award,” says Vicky. “Being recognised for my work as an author and entrepreneur, while building and leading my own accounting practice, means a great deal to me. Entrepreneurship requires commitment, resilience, and a willingness to keep moving forward, even when the journey is challenging.” The recognition also serves as an encouragement to continue pursuing the bigger vision behind her work. Celebrating women in business The Zimbabwe Women in Business Forum Awards provided a platform to celebrate women who are making meaningful contributions through their businesses, careers, leadership, and entrepreneurial journeys. For Vicky, one of the most rewarding aspects of the occasion was seeing so many remarkable women recognised for their achievements. She expressed her gratitude to the Zimbabwe Women in Business Forum and the organisers for creating a platform that celebrates women’s accomplishments and provides an opportunity for entrepreneurs to connect, inspire one another, and acknowledge the work that often happens behind the scenes. “Congratulations to all the incredible women who were celebrated,” says Vicky. “Every award represents a story, a journey, and countless hours of work that may not always be visible. It was wonderful to be in a room celebrating women who are making a difference.” Looking ahead While awards provide an opportunity to celebrate milestones, Vicky sees this recognition as part of a much larger journey. From building an award-winning accounting practice to becoming a published author and supporting entrepreneurs with the knowledge behind their numbers, her journey continues to be defined by one central purpose: helping businesses understand their potential and giving their owners the financial clarity to build something that lasts. The Zimbabwe Women in Business Forum recognition is therefore not simply another accolade. It is a milestone in a journey that continues to grow and a reminder of what can be achieved when vision, expertise, and determination come together.

Written by Carolina Alay, Founder & Executive Director Blue Minds is a company dedicated to providing exceptional Applied Behavior Analysis services to neurodivergent children ages 0-12 specilizing in Autism and related conditions. They empower caregivers with essential science-based tools to support confident and compassionate parenting. Whether you’re a parent trying to get out the door, a teacher guiding a classroom transition, or a caregiver supporting a child in a public space, you’ve felt that moment when cooperation suddenly disappears. A parent asks a child to do something simple, like put on shoes, clean up toys, or come to the table, and suddenly the air thickens. The child freezes, protests, melts down, or simply refuses. The parent feels the tension rising in their own body. Here we go again. Most parents respond with one of two instincts, push harder (“I said now!”) or back off (“Fine, I’ll do it myself.”) A simple request becomes a battle. A routine task becomes a meltdown. A transition becomes a shutdown. Most people assume the child is defiant. But what if the problem isn’t the child’s behavior? What if it’s the momentum behind the interaction? Behavioral science and decades of research tell a different story. There’s a concept called behavior momentum, and although it’s widely used in clinical settings, almost no one talks about it in everyday parenting or education. Yet it’s one of the most powerful tools we have. What behavior momentum means Behavior momentum comes from the work of behavioral scientists like Nevin (1988), who described behavior as having “strength.” It refers to the idea that once a person is already succeeding, they’re more likely to keep succeeding. Just like physical momentum, behavior builds speed and ease when it’s already moving in the right direction. Once a person is already cooperating, they’re more likely to keep cooperating. In Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), we call this the High-Probability Sequence. You start with easy, doable actions the child almost always says yes to. These “easy wins” build momentum, confidence, and regulation. Then you introduce the harder request. In parenting terms, a child who is already cooperating is far more likely to keep cooperating. The sequence of your requests matters more than the request itself. If you start with something hard, you trigger resistance. If you start with something easy, you trigger momentum. This is why some mornings feel smooth, and others feel like a battlefield, even when the tasks are the same. Why this matters for parents, teachers, and caregivers Caregivers accidentally kill momentum because they often begin with the hardest demand, “Clean your room,” “put all your toys away,” or “come take a shower.” These are big, multi-step, emotionally loaded tasks. They require regulation, planning, and flexibility, skills children are still developing. Starting with a hard task is like asking someone to sprint before they’ve even stood up. Children don’t resist because they’re bad. They resist because the task feels too big, boring, long, or new, or because the transition feels too fast. Their nervous system may not be ready, they may not feel successful yet, or they may be overwhelmed by the demand. But it’s not defiance, it’s a lack of momentum. Behavioral momentum solves this by creating a pathway to cooperation rather than confrontation. The reframe that changes everything Instead of starting with the hardest thing, you start with three easy wins. This is called the High-Probability Sequence, a series of simple, doable actions that build cooperation before you introduce the harder request. It looks like this: “Can you hand me that block?” “Can you put this toy in the bin?” “Can you give me a high-five?” “Awesome, now let’s put away the rest of the toys together.” When the sequence is used correctly, the child experiences success, connection, predictability, dopamine, regulation, and confidence. By the time you reach the harder task, the child is already in a cooperative state. You didn’t force compliance. You created behavior momentum. Examples across different settings At home: The morning routine battle The hard task might be, “Put on your shoes so we can leave.” Instead, build momentum by saying, “Can you hand me your water bottle?” followed by, “Can you put your backpack by the door?” and “Can you give me a high-five?” Then you can say, “Awesome, now let’s put on your shoes together.” You’re not avoiding the task. You’re preparing the brain for it. In school: Classroom transition The hard task might be, “Everyone, sit down and start your math worksheet.” Teachers can build momentum by saying, “Grab your pencil,” followed by, “Write your name at the top,” and “Circle the first problem.” Then they can say, “Great, now let’s start the worksheet.” This reduces transition anxiety, task avoidance, disruptive behavior, and teacher frustration. On the other hand, it increases engagement, confidence, regulation, classroom flow, and participation. It works especially well with students who constantly seek attention, as it provides lots of positive attention. In community settings: Public outings The hard task might be, “It’s time to leave the playground.” Instead, you might say, “Let’s count to ten,” followed by, “Help me pick one toy to bring home,” and “Let’s race to the gate.” Then you can say, “Perfect, now let’s get in the car.” This works beautifully for parks, birthday parties, grocery stores, therapy centers, and summer camps. Momentum helps children shift from “I don’t want to stop” to “I’m already doing something with you.” Why behavior momentum works (the science in 30 seconds) Researchers such as Skinner, Nevin, Cooper, Heron, and Heward have shown that success releases dopamine, a chemical associated with motivation. Therefore, small successes can help reinforce motivation. Predictability also plays an important role because the brain relaxes when it knows what’s coming, and predictable sequences can reduce anxiety. With that, easy tasks and small wins can help regulate the nervous system, and the connection you create with the child may increase cooperation while reducing the emotional load. The high-P sequence increases trust. This is important because the child feels guided instead of pressured. A confident child is a cooperative child. In other words, children do better when they feel like they can do better. If the child thinks, “I can do this,” their internal narrative changes and their self-image improves. This isn’t “soft parenting”, it’s strategic parenting If this concept leaves you thinking that this is permissive parenting, think about it as strategic parenting. You’re still getting the task done, but in a way that builds resilience instead of resistance. Behavior momentum doesn’t remove expectations. It removes unnecessary battles and teaches children that they can be independent and supported at the same time. Adults also learn that they don’t need to escalate, that they can guide instead of fight, and that they can create success instead of demanding it. This is leadership at home, in classrooms, and in communities. How to use behavior momentum today: A 5-step guide anyone can use Identify the hard task: What usually triggers pushback? Homework, bedtime, transitions, cleaning, or leaving a fun activity. Break it into micro-steps: Think of 5 to 10 second actions. Start with 2 to 3 easy wins: Choose actions the child almost always says yes to. Celebrate each success: Use short, warm, specific praise, such as “Nice job!” “Love how you did that.” or “You’re on a roll.” Slide in the hard task once momentum is strong: Introduce it not as a surprise, but as the next logical step. If you found behavior momentum helpful, imagine what could happen when you learn a full toolbox of practical, brain-based strategies like this one. At Blue Minds LLC, we teach families, educators, caregivers, and community helpers how to support children through science-backed, compassionate approaches that work in real life, at home, in school, and out in the community. Visit our website to explore resources, workshops, and caregiver coaching. Schedule a free consultation about your child’s needs or your classroom challenges via email. We believe every adult deserves access to tools that make life easier, and every child deserves adults who understand how their brain works. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Carolina Alay Carolina Alay, Founder & Executive Director Blue Minds was founded in 2014 in response to a growing community need for high-quality Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) services delivered in natural settings. From the start, it embraced a holistic model that actively involved parents, grandparents, teachers, and other professionals in each child's plan. Blue Minds has shown that meaningful change happens when natural connections grow in a safe, compassionate environment, grounded in respectful, guilt-free discipline practices. The organization has received multiple awards for its work in inclusion and advocacy.

Written by Daniela Aneva, Executive and Team Coach Daniela Aneva is widely recognized for helping leaders and teams perform at their best. She’s an executive and team coach, an organizational development (OD) consultant, and a small business owner, known for practical, people-centered work that drives real behavior change and measurable results. Ask most senior leaders whether psychological safety matters in their organization, and they will say yes. Ask whether their teams feel genuinely safe to speak, to surface problems, challenge assumptions, admit mistakes, and disagree with authority, and the answer becomes far more complicated. Psychological safety is one of the most cited concepts in organizational development and one of the least well implemented. The reason is structural, we treat it as a behavioral disposition when it is, in fact, a systemic condition. Amy Edmondson's landmark research established that psychological safety, the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking, is the single strongest predictor of team learning and performance. Google's Project Aristotle, studying hundreds of internal teams, arrived at the same conclusion. What neither finding fully addressed is how psychological safety travels, or fails to travel, across the boundaries between teams, and how the broader system either enables or systematically undermines it. That is the territory this article explores. Why safety is a system property, not a team property The conventional model of psychological safety treats it as something a manager creates within their team. The manager is curious rather than defensive. She invites challenge. She does not punish honest mistakes. The team, in response, becomes more candid. This model is accurate as far as it goes, but it stops at the team boundary, and in complex organizations, the team boundary is not where safety lives or dies. Consider what happens when a team with strong internal psychological safety sends its representative to a cross-functional governance meeting dominated by a leader who operates by intimidation. The representative returns carrying the anxiety of that encounter, and that anxiety seeps back into the team's culture. Or consider the team whose internal norms encourage candor, but whose escalation processes make it dangerous to surface bad news upward. The team learns to be honest internally and performative externally. Over time, internal safety erodes too, because people understand, implicitly, that their honest assessments will eventually have to survive a system that does not reward them. Psychological safety, at the systemic level, is the degree to which the entire organizational environment, not just individual teams, consistently signals that speaking truth is more valued than managing appearances. Creating it requires intervention at multiple levels simultaneously. The four levels of systemic safety work Individual leader modeling: Leaders who demonstrate vulnerability, acknowledge what they do not know, and respond to challenge with genuine curiosity rather than defensiveness set a tone that cascades. This is the most visible level and the one most often addressed in leadership development. It is necessary but not sufficient. Team norms and rituals: Explicit agreements about how the team will handle disagreement, mistakes, and difficult feedback are most effective when co-created by the team rather than imposed, when they are revisited regularly rather than set and forgotten, and when they are tested, deliberately and gently, by leaders who notice when a norm is being bypassed under pressure. Cross-boundary structures: The forums, processes, and rituals that govern how teams interact with each other and with senior leadership send powerful signals. Retrospectives that genuinely surface systemic problems, not just individual team performance. Inter-team dialogues designed for honest inquiry. Escalation channels that do not punish the bearer of difficult news. These structures send systemic signals about whether candor is actually valued, or merely declared. Organizational consequence systems: The deepest and most durable level is the consequence system. Who gets promoted? Who gets sidelined? What happens, in practice, to the person who raised an uncomfortable truth three years ago? Employees have long memories and sophisticated pattern recognition. If the consequence system rewards political astuteness over honest contribution, no amount of leadership modeling or team ritual will create genuine safety. This is where culture is truly set, not in values statements, but in decisions. "Safety that stops at the team boundary is safety in name only. The system will always find a way to teach people what is actually true." Practical interventions for systemic safety Conduct a safety audit systemically Most engagement surveys ask whether people feel safe. Few ask where safety breaks down and why. A systemic safety audit goes further, it maps the moments, forums, and relationships where candor reliably disappears. Is it in all-hands meetings? In cross-functional project reviews? When certain leaders are in the room? When certain topics arise? The pattern of disappearance is more informative than the aggregate score because it reveals the specific structural or relational conditions that are generating unsafe signals in an otherwise well-intentioned system. Design for productive disagreement One of the most reliable safety signals in an organizational system is whether disagreement is normalized and productive, or whether it is treated as friction to be minimized. Teams can be coached to develop explicit disagreement protocols, structured approaches to surfacing and working with differing perspectives that make it procedurally clear that challenge is welcome. The Thinking Environment framework, developed by Nancy Kline, offers one model. Structured debate formats, devil's advocate roles, and pre-mortems are others. What matters is that the team has a form, so that disagreement does not have to be improvised in the moment of tension, when the pull toward compliance is strongest. Create cross-boundary truth-telling forums Many organizations have retrospectives within teams. Far fewer have genuine forums where teams can tell each other, and tell senior leadership, what is actually happening at the interfaces. Where is the handoff breaking down? Where is the system asking teams to do contradictory things? Where are the unspoken conflicts that everyone navigates privately? Building these forums, and designing them carefully so they produce insight rather than performance, is one of the highest-leverage investments a systemic team coaching program can make. Attend to the aftermath of candor The moment that defines a safety culture is not when someone speaks a difficult truth. It is what happens next. When a team member flags a serious problem in a leadership meeting and the response, however unintentionally, closes down rather than opens up, that moment is remembered and shared far more widely than any values statement about transparency. Coaching leaders to notice and actively manage the aftermath of candor, to visibly honor the contribution, to follow through on what was raised, and to ensure the messenger is not penalized, is not soft work. It is the most strategic safety investment available. Safety as practice, not destination Psychological safety is not a state organizations achieve and then maintain. It is a practice they engage in continuously because the pressures that erode safety, performance anxiety, competitive threat, leadership transitions, and organizational change, are also continuous. The systemic team coaching lens adds a crucial dimension, safety is not just what happens inside teams, but what the whole system teaches people about the cost and value of honesty. Organizations that treat safety as a systemic practice, attending to all four levels consistently and over time, do not just improve team performance metrics. They become places where the best thinking happens in the room, rather than in the corridor afterward. That is the organizational condition that makes everything else possible. Follow me on Facebook, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Daniela Aneva Daniela Aneva, Executive and Team Coach Daniela Aneva is an international executive and team coach, coaching supervisor, professional speaker, and author. With over 25 years of executive experience in multinational organizations, Daniela has supported the growth of more than 5,000 leaders and teams across the globe. She is a council member at Forbes, a mentor at Rice University’s Doerr Institute, and has co-authored books with Brian Tracy, Jonathan Passmore, and contributed to Team of Teams by Peter Hawkins and Catherine Carr.

Written by Helen Kenworthy, Artistic Director Helen champions the arts as a tool for change. Now, as CEO of RYTC Creatives CIC and Give Get Go Education, she mentors young people, creates pathways for them to thrive in the arts, and helps launch successful careers. There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a young person who has decided that education is not for them. It is not defiance, and it is rarely laziness. It is the settled conclusion of a learner who has tried, more than once, to fit into a system that was never built with them in mind and who has stopped expecting anything different. For students in Alternative Provision, that conclusion often arrives long before anyone thinks to ask what might change it. Helen Kenworthy has spent her career refusing to accept that conclusion as final. Her work through Of Course You Can!™ is built on a simple but demanding belief, access to education is not a privilege reserved for learners who fit a standard mould, but a right that must be actively designed for every learner who does not. Making education accessible is not about lowering expectations. It is about removing the barriers that were never the young person's fault to begin with. Why Alternative Provision needs a different kind of access Alternative Provision exists because mainstream education, for all its strengths, does not work for every young person. Many students arrive in Alternative Provision (AP) settings carrying a history of exclusion, missed learning, unmet needs, or environments that could not accommodate the way they think, feel, or communicate. By the time they reach a setting designed to support them differently, many have already internalised the belief that education itself is the problem, rather than the way it was delivered to them. Accessibility in this context means far more than ramps and reasonable adjustments, though those matter too. It means rethinking pace, format, environment, relationships, and expectations so that a young person's differences are treated as information rather than obstacles. Helen Kenworthy's mission begins with this reframing, understanding that a learner who has struggled in mainstream settings has not failed at learning. The system simply has not yet learned how to reach them. This distinction matters because it changes where responsibility sits. If a young person is assumed to be the problem, the response is usually to manage or contain them. If the environment is understood as the variable that needs adjusting, the response becomes creative, collaborative, and far more likely to succeed. Helen's work consistently starts from the second position, treating every barrier a young person meets as a design question rather than a personal failing. What accessible, fun, and inclusive learning really means Accessible learning is often mistaken for simplified learning, as though making something reachable requires making it smaller. Helen's approach rejects that assumption entirely. Genuine accessibility means keeping ambition and rigour intact while changing the route a young person takes to reach it, offering multiple ways in, multiple ways to demonstrate understanding, and multiple paces at which growth is allowed to happen. Fun is not incidental to this either. It is strategic. Young people who have experienced education as a source of failure or shame are far more likely to re-engage when learning feels playful, creative, and low-stakes because joy lowers the emotional barriers that fear and past failure have built up. Inclusion, meanwhile, is not a single adjustment made once, but an ongoing practice of noticing who is not yet fully able to participate and asking what needs to change so that they can. This is where child-centred scaffolding becomes essential. It does not remove challenge, complete the work for the learner, or hold them permanently at an easier level. It provides temporary structure that makes a meaningful first step possible. An adult might model the beginning, reduce the number of instructions visible at once, offer a visual example, rehearse an answer verbally, or work alongside the young person before gradually stepping back. The destination remains ambitious, what changes is the support available along the route. Signs a learning environment isn't working for a young person Recognising when a learning environment has stopped working is the first step towards making it accessible again. Educators, parents, and practitioners working alongside young people in Alternative Provision often notice some of the following patterns before a young person is able to name what is happening for themselves: Avoiding or refusing tasks that once felt manageable without an obvious trigger Describing themselves as stupid, behind, or not a school person Showing physical signs of stress before or during structured learning time Disengaging the moment instructions include several steps at once Rushing through work to finish rather than to understand Being reluctant to ask for help even when visibly stuck Engaging only when learning is entirely self-directed or only when it is entirely structured Showing a noticeable gap between what they can do verbally and what they produce in writing None of these signs point to a lack of ability. They point to a mismatch between how a young person learns and how learning is currently being asked of them, and that mismatch is exactly what accessible design sets out to close. Helen Kenworthy's role as an advocate for access Helen's role within Alternative Provision settings is best understood as that of an advocate first and an educator second, though the two are rarely separate in practice. She works to ensure that access is treated as a design principle from the outset of a lesson or programme, rather than as an accommodation added after a young person has already struggled. This advocacy extends beyond the individual learner to the wider system around them. Helen works with educators, practitioners, and settings to challenge assumptions about what accessible learning should look like, encouraging a shift from asking whether a young person can keep up to asking whether the environment has been built to allow them to participate. That advocacy is reflected across Helen’s connected educational pathways. Education Selection Box supports academic learning through personalised and creative approaches. The RYTC uses the arts to strengthen confidence, communication, positive mental health, and self-expression. Give Get Go Education develops training, practical experience, and pathways towards adult and professional futures. The route may differ, but the principle remains the same, start with the young person in front of you, identify what is preventing participation, and build a bridge that allows ability to become visible. Key qualities of truly accessible learning Across Helen's work, several qualities consistently distinguish learning environments that are genuinely accessible from those that only appear to be: Flexibility: Offering more than one route to the same learning outcome Clarity: Communicating instructions and expectations without unnecessary complexity Choice: Allowing young people some control over how and when they engage Playfulness: Using creativity and enjoyment as a genuine route into learning, not as a reward for finishing it Responsiveness: Adjusting pace and format in the moment based on how a young person is actually experiencing a task Consistency: Maintaining predictable routines that help young people feel safe enough to take risks Strength-based framing: starting from what a young person can already do rather than what they cannot None of these qualities works in isolation. They function as a system, each one reinforcing the others, so that a young person experiences accessibility not as a single accommodation but as the consistent character of the whole environment around them. Why this matters for the brilliantly underestimated Many students in Alternative Provision have spent years being defined by the parts of education that did not work for them. Attendance records, behaviour logs, and gaps in attainment often tell a story that has very little to do with what these young people are actually capable of and a great deal to do with environments that were never designed with them in mind. Helen Kenworthy's mission through Of Course You Can!™ begins from a different premise. It asks not whether a young person is ready for education, but whether education has been made ready for them. For the brilliantly underestimated, that shift in starting point can be the difference between a young person who continues to disengage and one who finally discovers what they are capable of when the barriers are removed. Being child-centred does not mean allowing a young person to avoid every difficult experience. It means making difficulty purposeful, proportionate, and supported. The aim is not comfort without growth, but safety strong enough to make growth possible. This protects ambition while ensuring that expectations are attached to a route the learner can genuinely access. 11 ways accessible learning transforms outcomes for students in Alternative Provision Accessible learning is not defined by one strategy, adjustment, or teaching style. Its impact is seen in the way a young person begins to feel about themselves, their abilities, and their place within education. When learning is designed around the individual, barriers begin to soften, trust has space to grow, and students are given genuine opportunities to succeed without having to hide or change who they are. For students in Alternative Provision, these changes can be especially significant. Many have experienced learning as something that exposes difficulty rather than builds possibility. A truly accessible environment offers a different experience, one where support, creativity, choice, and appropriate challenge work together to help the learner reconnect with education. The following eleven outcomes show how accessible learning can transform not only a young person’s educational experience but also their confidence, motivation, independence, and belief in what may be possible for their future. It removes shame from the learning process: When tasks are designed with multiple routes to success, young people are far less likely to associate struggle with failure. This alone can undo years of negative associations with the classroom. It restores a sense of choice and agency: Offering genuine options in how a young person engages with learning gives them back a measure of control that many have lost through repeated experiences of being told what to do and how to do it. Choice, even in small forms, rebuilds motivation from the inside out. It meets communication differences with understanding, not correction: Accessible learning treats different communication styles as valid rather than deficient, adjusting instruction instead of expecting the young person to adjust first. This reduces the anxiety that so often accompanies communication in formal learning settings. It uses play and creativity to lower emotional barriers: Fun is not a distraction from learning, it is often the doorway into it, particularly for young people who associate formal education with failure. A playful task can achieve engagement that a worksheet never could. It allows pace to be genuinely individual: Accessible environments do not assume every learner should move through content at the same speed. Slowing down where needed and moving quickly where a young person is ready keeps both confidence and challenge intact. It builds trust between the learner and the setting: When a young person experiences a learning environment that consistently adapts to meet them, trust begins to grow, often for the first time in their educational experience. That trust becomes the foundation for every further step of progress. It reframes difficulty as information rather than failure: Where a young person struggles becomes useful data about what needs to change, rather than evidence that they are not capable. This reframing changes how both the learner and the adults around them respond to setbacks. It widens what success is allowed to look like: Accessible learning recognises that success can be demonstrated in many forms, not only those that traditional assessment tends to reward. This allows young people to show what they know in ways that genuinely reflect their understanding. It gives young people evidence that education can work for them: Perhaps most importantly, accessible learning offers proof, not just reassurance, that a young person can succeed within an educational setting. That evidence, once gathered, is difficult for a young person to unlearn. It changes how adults around the young person respond to setbacks: When a whole setting adopts accessible practices, staff begin to interpret struggle as useful information rather than a discipline issue. This shift in adult response often does as much for a young person's confidence as any single lesson. It creates momentum that carries beyond any single subject: A young person who experiences genuine success in one accessible lesson often approaches the next subject with more willingness to try. Over time, this momentum builds into a broader, more resilient relationship with learning itself. Conclusion Accessible learning is not a simplified version of education. It is education designed properly, with every learner in mind rather than only those the system was originally built for. For students in Alternative Provision, that distinction can be the difference between a young person who continues to see themselves as failing at school and one who begins, often for the first time, to see themselves as capable. Helen Kenworthy's mission through Of Course You Can!™ is built on the conviction that this shift is possible for every young person, not only those who happen to fit conventional expectations of what a learner should look like. Making education inclusive, fun, and genuinely accessible is not an act of generosity. It is an act of correction, giving young people the education they were always entitled to. To explore more about accessible learning and the wider work supporting young people in Alternative Provision, visit here. 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.