Written by Kate Zappitelli, Alignment Institute Chair & Principal Consultant Kate Zappitelli is an executive team alignment expert and ICF-accredited coach. As Chair of the Alignment Institute powered by Karrikins Group, she helps leaders and leadership teams turn agreement into alignment so strategy becomes action. When I start coaching a new client, I often learn that one of their direct reporting relationships is strained. It can be someone they report to, or it can be someone who reports to them. Either way, the cost of unhealthy reporting relationships is high. It impacts morale, culture, progress on shared goals, and, in the worst cases, can stall a company’s growth or drive people to leave the organization. Reporting relationships can be hard to navigate. Positional power influences the way people react and respond to each other. Management and communication styles differ. Expectations are not necessarily clarified and reinforced. Assumptions are not openly expressed. In some cases, trust has been broken, and there is an undercurrent of resentment or frustration that hasn’t been dealt with directly. In most cases, managers and their direct reports don’t spend time talking about how they want to work together. Instead, they often get increasingly frustrated, lash out at each other over email, avoid each other, or tell other people how bad the relationship is. Avoiding these conversations is understandable. It can be difficult to tell a manager that their communication leaves you feeling dismissed or to tell a direct report that their work is not meeting expectations. Being intentional and spending time figuring out how to have a productive working relationship is good for people and for the organization. It can be helpful to partner with someone who is neutral and who can facilitate the conversation, but regardless of whether you have support, there are practical ways you can begin improving the relationship. 3 practical ways to improve reporting relationships 1. Define roles and expectations When I’ve facilitated conversations between managers and their direct reports or between peer leaders who are struggling, I start by asking them what they believe about the roles they play and what they expect from each other. Roles are defined through a combination of technical job descriptions and “in real life” necessities. Areas of confusion, concern, or friction typically include decision rights, span of control, prioritization, interaction style, routines, and assumptions. Gaining a shared understanding of how roles are defined and experienced is an important first step in clarifying what you expect from each other. During one conversation about roles, it became clear that the direct report believed their job was to wait for tasks to be assigned, after which they would complete each task exactly as stated and send it back to their manager with full confidence that they were meeting expectations. In contrast, the manager expected the direct report to proactively look for assignments, anticipate the next step, and schedule follow-up conversations with other team members to complete the tasks. Clearly, both people had very different views on what the role entailed, and their unstated assumptions created friction and frustration. Asking questions such as, “What do you look for in someone who is great at this role? What kind of initiative makes people successful in this role? What can we stop, start, or transition about the role to help us do better together?” can help shift the energy toward a more collaborative experience of working together. Sharing assumptions and expectations is time well spent, and it needs to go both ways, both people need to share their thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions about the role they have and the role the other person has. 2. Identify habits that no longer serve Not only can roles and expectations be unclear, but bad habits can also hold people back from working together productively. With another client I worked with, the manager and their direct report had a habit of only sending emails back and forth instead of having conversations. This habit led to misinterpretations, email overload, and inefficiencies. The manager spent a lot of time responding to emails that could have been resolved in a 15-minute phone call. This habit was frustrating for the manager and the direct report because they both felt like their time was wasted and that the work was not being accomplished in a timely manner. Identifying that this habit was blocking productivity helped both people come up with a better solution for their communication. They determined that a weekly check-in call was needed for high-priority projects and that if a topic warranted a conversation, a 15-minute call would be scheduled. As the direct report, it takes courage to be vulnerable when it may feel like your job is on the line. As the manager, it takes courage to have honest conversations with your direct report when you may feel like their work output is not meeting your expectations. As a leader, it may be challenging to hear feedback that your actions are having a negative impact. When the relationship is strained, both people spend energy managing tension instead of advancing the work. Asking questions such as, “Which recurring interaction creates the most friction? What communication channel, cadence, or meeting norm should we change?” will begin to shift how each person shows up. Our habits define us. When we can identify the habits that no longer serve us in our working relationships, we can pivot and find new ways of working together. 3. Recognize you have choices As the saying goes, it takes two to tango. Like any relationship, both people need to be engaged and willing to change how they are showing up for the relationship to improve. As an individual, you always have choices. You can continue to be frustrated. You can look in the mirror and reflect on how you are showing up and what you need to do differently. You can ask for support from someone who is neutral. You can schedule time with your colleague to directly address the challenge. Not everyone wants to have these kinds of conversations because it can feel easier to sweep issues under the rug and hope they go away. Often, when issues are avoided, they get bigger. As we like to say at Karrikins Group, ambiguity protects the status quo. When things are left unsaid, change is unlikely. Ask yourself, “What is one behavior I can change this week, regardless of what the other person does?” Recognizing that you are not a victim of circumstances and that you have choices in how you work with your colleagues requires radical personal accountability for your own actions. Taking control and being motivated to address your challenges directly takes courage and hard work. There is no magic fairy dust, it takes a willingness to share what is holding you back, time to have potentially hard conversations, and the fortitude to show up every day and try again. I know it can be hard, but it is possible to find a path forward together in most cases. It just doesn’t happen because people aren’t willing to have hard conversations, they’d rather be unhappy than take a risk. But when you step into that courageous space, you unlock the potential for yourself and your colleague. If the conversations prove to be unsuccessful, then you know you need to think about changing your situation. Productive reporting relationships require diligence Productive reporting relationships do not happen by accident. They are built through clear expectations, intentional habits, and the willingness to address tension before it becomes entrenched. If one of your key working relationships feels strained, do not wait for the next missed deadline, difficult email, or escalation. Start with one conversation: What do we each need in order to work well together? If you want a partner to help facilitate a challenging conversation and unlock the full potential of your reporting relationship, I would love to connect. Book a call today. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Kate Zappitelli Kate Zappitelli, Alignment Institute Chair & Principal Consultant Kate Zappitelli helps frustrated leaders who know they can do more, better with their teams if they are aligned to work together. As a Principal at Karrikins Group and Chair of the Alignment Institute, she partners with leaders and leadership teams on alignment, transformation, strategy, and culture. Our proven methodologies and frameworks are grounded in social science, expertise, and first-hand experiences to help teams get unstuck. Our mission is to make 'how' matter.

Written by Leonard Shen, Doctor of Chinese Energetic Medicine & Buddhist Lama Len Shen is a Doctor of Medical Qi Gong, Buddhist Lama, Christian mystical priest, Harvard-trained litigator, Fortune 100 corporate executive, and on the Board of homeless shelters and technology startups. Founder of California Qigong, he teaches Qi Gong online and uses sophisticated medical Qi Gong protocols to promote healing. Is Western medicine not working for you? Do you feel disempowered by your doctors, helplessly being sent to test after test, scan after scan? Are you being prescribed pharmaceutical drugs with side effects, and then prescribed more drugs to fix those side effects? “Isn’t there more out there to help me get healthy?” What about Energy Healing? The “Mother of all Healing” modalities in many indigenous cultures, today Energy Healing is relegated by mainstream medicine to “woo woo” New Age fringe practitioners, turned to only as a last resort. Indeed, energy healing is largely unregulated, with no established standards of safe and effective practices. So, results have been varied at best. Medical Qi Gong: A 4,000-year-old healing practice finally being recognized in the U.S In China, one of the most sophisticated Energy Healing practices in the world has been refined into a true medical science. Unbeknownst to most physicians in the West, over the last 4,000 years, the Chinese have developed Medical Qi Gong (MQG) to a high level of detail and skill. The significance of MQG has begun to be recognized in the United States. In May 2026, Harvard Medical School hosted its second conference on this topic in three years, titled “The Science of Tai Chi and Qi Gong as Whole Person Health,” where hundreds of physicians, academics, and practitioners from 65 countries shared research about what has long been known and practiced in the East as a powerful system for healing.[1] Earlier this year, after years of studying Medical Qi Gong, the U.S. Veterans Administration announced that qualified MQG practitioners will be authorized to treat, not just teach, millions of VA patients around the country. The VA has worked with the National Qi Gong Association to facilitate the qualification of Qi Gong practitioners for this enormous market of needy patients.[2] Here below is the first in a series of articles introducing the science of Medical Qi Gong, which has brought the science of Energy Healing to a high level of sophistication, both in the practitioner and in their patients.[3] What is Qi Gong, and is it an effective healing modality? The author generates life force energy (“Chi”) using Qi Gong Qi Gong means “Energy Work” in Mandarin Chinese. Similar to Tai Chi, Qi Gong entails gentle movements, sound vibration, breathing techniques, visualization, and relaxation to open the energy highways or “meridians” in the body and allow a freer flow of energy. With open meridians, clots of stagnant and negative energy can be cleared from the body, deficient areas can be revitalized with Life Force Energy (“Chi”), and a healthy overall energy pattern can be re-established. When the energy matrix of the body is healthy, the tissue will grow accordingly, like young vines following a trellis. Qi Gong is practiced by hundreds of thousands of Americans for its health benefits, which have been recognized by the National Institutes of Health, Veterans Administration, and major medical institutions.[4] How is Medical Qi Gong different from Qi Gong? Within Qi Gong, a lesser-known but most powerful branch is Medical Qi Gong (also known as “External Qi Gong” because it involves projecting energy into other people). MQG goes beyond healing the practitioner; it can be used by the practitioner to heal other people by projecting healthy life force energy into their bodies and removing toxic energy clots from the sick patient. MQG has been refined over millennia into a meticulous science. It includes 18 Rules of Posture, 16 Rules of Neigong (“Internal skill,” comprised of once-secret Daoist practices to absorb energy from the ground and environment), detailed understanding of the anatomy of the body’s acupuncture meridians and energy centers, and a highly developed ability to sense and control electromagnetic energy. In fact, the number one principle of MQG is, "Your mind is incredibly powerful in its ability to sense and control energy around you, much more than is recognized in the West." California Qi Gong Dr. Eliza Meeker performing the General Treatment Protocol on a client Unlike any other energy healing practice in the world, MQG has dozens of protocols developed over centuries to treat specific diseases, including several types of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, chronic fatigue, hypertension, and many other diseases.[4] [5] Where can I find out more about Medical Qi Gong and learn how to practice it? Fewer than 1,000 MQG doctors have been certified in the U.S. (These degrees are theological doctorates to comply with U.S. regulations, not M.D.s.) The author and his colleagues in California Qi Gong are among those MQG doctors, trained directly for at least five years under Dr. Jerry Alan Johnson. Dr. Johnson is widely recognized as “the father of Medical Qi Gong in the West” and author of 11 books documenting dozens of treatment protocols used in the Chinese Medical Qi Gong hospitals. Our mission is to bring the healing powers of MQG to especially those who can least afford it, and hence, we have provided over 80 pro bono workshops at homeless shelters, Veterans facilities, dementia wards, and women’s cancer groups. We presented multiple topics on our work at the 2026 Harvard Medical School conference and were featured by the National Qi Gong Association this year. For those interested in learning how to practice MQG, California Qi Gong provides three weekly online classes. For those interested in learning how to treat others and not just themselves, including the millions of veterans awaiting MQG treatments, enrollment is now open for a three and a half year program beginning in January 2027. This program will certify Master of Energetic Medicine (M.E.M.) degrees, with both weekly online and in-person clinical workshops (Continuing Education Credits may be available). No prior experience is required for any of our classes. Conclusion MQG provides powerful techniques to help heal oneself, loved ones, and friends, including for illnesses where Western medicine has not been satisfactory on its own. Please see here or email us for more information, and watch for upcoming articles in this series on MQG. Follow me on LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Leonard Shen Leonard Shen, Doctor of Chinese Energetic Medicine & Buddhist Lama Len Shen is a Doctor, Lawyer, Buddhist Lama, and Priest. He has dedicated his life to public service, first as a Harvard-trained environmental advocate and Fortune 100 corporate chief ethics and compliance officer, and now bringing the 4,000-year-old healing tradition of Medical Qi Gong to clients and students through his non-profit. Dr. Shen and his colleagues at California Qi Gong provide treatments and online training, including for those who can least afford medical care. They are recognized experts, including presenting their work at Harvard Medical School in May 2026. Medical Qi Gong is used to treat a host of diseases, including cancer, chronic fatigue, menopause, and trauma-related illnesses. References: [1] Abstracts of the Harvard conference proceedings [2] VA Credentialing [3] This article includes portions of the author’s own presentation at the May 2026 Harvard Medical School conference. [4] Qigong: What You Need To Know [5] The Secrets of Chinese Energetic Medicine, Volumes 1 to 5, by Jerry Alan Johnson.

Written by Brad Rhinehart, Author Brad Rhinehart is an optometrist who loves his profession but believes that one's occupation is only one of many ways to do meaningful work. In his book, Everyday Genius: Principles of Creativity and Innovation for Life, he highlights the importance of recognizing and developing our innate talents and embracing opportunities for growth. Is it ever beneficial to experience a bit of self-deception? When we begin a DIY project, optimism can carry us beyond our actual knowledge and skills. Yet that same confidence can inspire us to create, persevere through setbacks, and discover that the process shapes us as much as it shapes our work. The DIY spirit After my wife and I had been married for about a year, we bought a little house in the city where I was attending college. Home repairs were occasionally needed, though hiring a repairman wasn’t really an option. As a newlywed going to school, my resources were limited. Within a short time, I had to make repairs on the water softener, the water heater, and the furnace. In doing these tasks myself, I really had no idea what I was doing. At that time, Google and YouTube did not exist. Initially, one might say I was a bit delusional about performing such tasks with no pre-existing knowledge or skill. Later, I remodeled the bathroom in that same house. Though many years have passed, I still remember my wife’s impression as I worked on things in our home. It was a revelation to her. She told me that even though her father was a handy guy and a hard-working farmer, household repairs were generally done by professionals in the home where she grew up, and she was surprised to discover that her husband was becoming a do-it-yourselfer, or DIYer. But the DIY spirit is not just for solving problems, it can inspire us to do creative work. My favorite project during that time was repurposing and refinishing a ridiculously heavy cabinet that we got from some friends who had upgraded their furniture. Though it was crudely done, the repurposed cabinet worked in our space, and we even thought it was good enough to take with us when we moved across the country for more school in spite of its impressive mass. Incidentally, we did not think it was worth bringing back when we returned to our home state. Think about something you have made, something that exists because you created it. For some, the phrase do-it-yourself evokes images of home renovations, woodworking, or crafting. While DIYing certainly includes those activities, it is much more, it could be making your own yogurt, bread, clothing, tools, software, or anything else that you didn’t rely on someone else for. Your DIY project could be a baked Alaska, a special quilt, or, in my not-too-distant future, a custom guitar. The muse Picture yourself at the end of a pet project as you behold your handiwork. Assigning value to our work and judging outcomes is a topic for another time, so let’s just assume that your results are similar to what you envisioned. Now, suppose that your creative process was a struggle, a difficult task that required real commitment, dedication, and the acquisition of new knowledge and skills, but you stuck to it, and now your project is finished! How do you think you would feel about your project? It’s natural that we should feel good when we have a hand in making something. Even the limited work involved with a piece of ready-to-assemble furniture can provide gratification. In fact, researchers have described the natural tendency to overvalue things we help produce over those made entirely by someone else as “the IKEA effect.”[1] Although the type of creative work we do varies, most of our creative projects start the same way. Someone we know did something, and we thought it would be great to try it, we read something that inspired us, or we saw a video that showed us how something could be done. Whatever it is, the muse sings to us, and we feel like we can move a mountain. We get excited, conclude that a project is doable, and decide to have a go. So far, so good. We need impulses like this, or we would never start. We’ll soon be confronted with the reality that our assumptions are flawed. Whether we really don’t know that we are overreaching or we just don’t want to know, we move forward because all we hear is the muse. The anticipation of both a good outcome and the positive subjective experience that we expect from our creative work combines to form an intoxicating elixir that inspires us to leave our comfort zone. Why our aspirations seem delusional To be clear, being delusional doesn’t necessarily mean that something can’t be done or that we can’t do it. Most of us have enough self-awareness to keep us from becoming quixotic, though we still bring some naivety and inexperience to novel tasks. During the course of a given project, however, we can feel as though we’ve set ourselves up to fail when our grand expectations collide with reality. We might wonder what we were thinking. This inner drive to journey into the uncharted landscape of some novel interest or activity is part of human nature. The impulse to stretch and reach is in us. We humans do not aspire to something we’ve already done or know how to do. We aspire to things we’ve not yet achieved or obtained, and there lies the challenge. New ideas move us to higher levels of understanding, greater depth and breadth of knowledge. New tasks involve new skills. In the development of knowledge and skill, we naturally encounter a learning curve. I’ve certainly displayed my share of overconfidence in different projects by starting something I thought was doable, only to find myself in deep water later. My experience is not unique. I’ve observed this phenomenon with other people and in a variety of circumstances. In his book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, Rolf Dobelli states that “hardly any major projects exist that are completed in less time and at a lower cost than forecasted. Some delays and cost overruns are even legendary, such as the Airbus A400M, the Sydney Opera House, and Boston’s Big Dig. The list can be added to at will.”[2] Why do such incorrect and often comically inaccurate estimates occur? What is it that causes us to get our plans and our cost, labor, and time estimates so wrong? While Dobelli’s analysis points to many challenges inherent in complex collaborations, we will focus on his first reason, “the classic overconfidence effect,”[3] which is common in groups and in individuals. Psychologists refer to a specific form of overconfidence as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is “a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area, because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.”[4] This confidence vs. capability disparity can vary greatly from person to person and task to task. Some creators might come up woefully short of their expectations while others might have no significant challenge. It is likely that most of us reside somewhere between these two extremes where, for a variety of reasons, we operate from a starting point of relative overconfidence. Perhaps we are prone to overconfidence and resultant delusions because certain ideas are presented in ways that miscalibrate our expectations. Reality is fraught with limitations, variables, and unknowns that can range from a strict budget to the presence of a load-bearing wall. Varying levels of individual knowledge and skill also impact each person’s process. Because we really can’t know everything that a new endeavor will require, the gap between expectations and reality can produce feelings of disappointment, frustration, and worry about being exposed to judgment and criticism. Jesus acknowledged the humanness of failure and also our tendencies to judge others on their work when he said: "For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish." – Luke 14:28-30, KJV While it’s important to acknowledge and manage our feelings about the potential for judgment and criticism, this is not our only consideration, and it’s certainly not the most important. While Jesus’ larger message points to the commitment that discipleship requires, his teachings here also demonstrate the importance of realistic planning, wise preparation, and the ability to finish what we start. When we begin any worthy endeavor, we should expect challenges. We also need to consider the options available to us when we hit a roadblock. The first option is to keep going. Next, we have to consider whether our project will be a continuation of our original approach or whether we will alter our process and even our outcome so we can keep working despite factors that might otherwise halt our process. We also have the option to quit. In such cases, we have to decide if we are just bored, tired, or frustrated, or if it really is wise to terminate the project because it is not feasible to continue. Because we can plainly see and appreciate completed work, it is natural to feel that aborting a project is a failure even though that is not necessarily the case. There may be something for us to gain even when we call it quits. If a given project turns out to be unworkable in spite of our best efforts, we can keep what we learned even when we decide to terminate the work. Furthermore, we may be able to salvage some of the material resources and repurpose them for other projects. Many famous paintings by artists, including Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Picasso, were painted on reused canvases from previous works.[5][6] A scientific experiment that is inconsistent with the hypothesis is not a waste of time, researchers and the larger scientific community can still glean information from that experiment. If a cake you baked falls apart, you don’t toss it in the bin, you make a trifle. Finally, there is also a hybrid approach in which we might step away from our creative work for a defined time frame in order to rest or regroup. Setting a limit to our rest period keeps our pause from turning into a hard stop. Why our aspirations are beautiful Principles of hope and faith are integral to our desires to do something worthwhile. Without the impulses and thoughts that prompt us to engage in creative work, we wouldn’t aspire, we wouldn’t plan, and we wouldn’t work, we wouldn’t even try and, consequently, we wouldn’t achieve. We wouldn’t even fail, which is not as great as it sounds. Possessing hope, looking forward to something good, and reaching for something that requires effort, and yes, even failing in that quest, are essential to our growth and happiness. That growth and happiness are facilitated both by what the work directly yields and by what our process creates within us. All creative work, including various do-it-yourself projects, has the potential and power to transform us. Such work can change us from unlearned to informed, from unskilled to proficient, from dull to interesting, and from uncertain to confident. It expands our minds, enlarges our souls, and fills our whole being with substance. American novelist Kurt Vonnegut wrote that “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.”[7] These are some of the ways that our aspirations are beautiful. The struggle is real, but not unworkable We love stories that involve some initial struggle and eventual triumph, fictional favorites include The Little Engine That Could and Rocky. Real-life examples include young David, Seabiscuit, and Nelson Mandela. We naturally connect with these examples and, even though we might see ourselves as underdogs in certain situations, we generally like to avoid hardship and prefer to experience trials as observers rather than participants. While encountering challenges is a natural and universal aspect of life, many of us think it unfortunate when we are cast as the struggling protagonist from time to time. Perhaps our natural impulses to avoid discomfort cause some of us to avoid the self-inflicted challenges that are part of doing things that are not absolutely necessary, even when it is possible for us to overcome them. Perhaps in addition to the abundant optimism and excitement we feel at the beginning of a new project, we can add just a pinch of flexibility and a dash of realistic perspective to help us remember that challenges can be frustrating. When we acknowledge that any new project will likely require more than we initially anticipated, it can take the sting out of setbacks, like getting punched in the gut, it doesn’t feel as bad if you see it coming and can brace for it. We should also remember that, though frustrating, challenges in our creative work can be good for us. This is an important point to remember at all stages of creative work, challenges are a natural part of our process that provides opportunities to zoom in to better examine and understand the nature of our problems and also to zoom out and gain helpful perspective on our work. Furthermore, opportunities to pause, to critique, to ponder, to ask questions, to ideate, and to do research and experimentation expand and deepen our intellect, and the exercise of traits like curiosity, patience, diligence, persistence, courage, hope, and faith can expand our souls in ways we could not otherwise experience. Make it personal Now, let’s return to that project you envisioned at the beginning, the one that was challenging but which, in the end, brought you such satisfaction. Imagine that, instead of being challenged and compelled to work through difficulties to get it done, you found it less work-, time-, and cost-intensive than you expected. How would you feel about it in that case? How would you feel about yourself? I’ve never had a project go that way and, if one did, I would take the win. Maybe I’d feel some modest sense of accomplishment or esteem. But I think I would know inside that I needed to set my sights higher for my next project. I would need to be a bit delusional, for those delusions are the origin of any worthwhile endeavor. They set the stage for many real things to follow, real courage, real persistence, critical thinking and problem-solving, accomplishment, and a more complete version of the real you, and that, my friends, is beautiful. Follow me on Facebook and visit my website for more info! Read more from Brad Rhinehart Brad Rhinehart, Author Brad Rhinehart is the author of Everyday Genius: Principles of Creativity and Innovation for Life. He is a graduate of Idaho State University and the Pennsylvania College of Optometry (now part of Drexel University) and has also studied at Liberty University. His education has spanned several disciplines, including instrumental music, history, microbiology, visual science, optometry, and English literature. He is a forever reader, part-time podcaster, and lifelong learner who loves discovering and sharing powerful ideas with others. References: [1] Michael I. Norton, Daniel Mochon, and Dan Ariely, “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 22, no. 3 (2012): 453-60. [2] Rolf Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, trans. Nicky Griffin (New York: Harper, 2014), 45. [3] Dobelli, The Art of Thinking Clearly, 45. [4] “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” Psychology Today, reviewed April 24, 2026. [5] Ernst van de Wetering, “Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits: Problems of Authenticity and Function,” in A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings IV: The Self-Portraits, ed. Ernst van de Wetering (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 96-97. [6] Annelies Rios Casier et al., “Towards a Classification System for Modernist Painters’ Reworking Practices Illustrated by James Ensor’s Revised Paintings,” npj Heritage Science 13 (2025): 411. [7] Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country, ed. Daniel Simon (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 24.

Written by Cherriell Orius, Women Empowerment Trauma Coach Cherriell Orius is known for her work in trauma recovery, personal transformation and mindset development. She is the founder of CRB Enterprizezz, creator of Limitlezz Mindzet program, host of the Woman2Woman with Cherrie Podcast, and author of the Broken Compass: Life Out of Alignment. We speak thousands of words every day, most of them without conscious thought. Yet among the countless phrases woven into daily conversation, few carry more personal significance than two simple words: “I am.” Whether used in passing or repeated over a lifetime, these words often serve as the foundation upon which people build their sense of identity, possibility, and purpose. There is a quiet moment that occurs in everyone's life, often several times a day, when a simple statement becomes something more. It happens when a person says, “I am tired.” Or “I am capable.” Or “I am unlucky.” Or “I am successful.” The words themselves are ordinary. They rarely attract attention. Yet what follows the phrase “I am” can reveal how individuals see themselves and, over time, influence how they experience the world around them. While modern discussions about mindset, personal development and self-awareness often focus on goals, habits and performance, psychologists and communication experts have increasingly recognized the role language plays in shaping personal identity. The words people repeatedly use about themselves frequently become intertwined with the beliefs they hold, the choices they make, and the futures they ultimately create. In this sense, “I am” statements may function as more than descriptions. They can become declarations of identity, shaping expectations and influencing behavior in ways both subtle and profound. The language of self-definition Human beings are storytelling creatures. Long before formal education, professional titles or personal achievements, people begin constructing internal narratives about who they are. These narratives become frameworks through which experiences are interpreted and understood. Language plays a central role in that process. When someone says, “I am creative,” they are not merely describing an ability. They are identifying with a characteristic. The statement becomes part of an internal story. Likewise, when someone says, “I am not good enough,” the statement often extends beyond a temporary feeling. It becomes a lens through which future experiences are filtered. The distinction may seem minor, but it carries significant implications. Researchers studying the concept of self have long observed that people tend to act in ways that are consistent with their perceived identities. In other words, individuals often make decisions that reinforce what they already believe about themselves. A person who sees themselves as resilient may respond differently to adversity than someone who identifies as incapable. A person who views themselves as adaptable may approach change with greater confidence than someone who believes they are destined to fail. Identity, in many ways, becomes a silent guide influencing countless decisions. When description becomes declaration One reason “I am” statements are so influential is that they occupy a unique space between observation and identity. Consider the difference between the following statements: “I feel stressed” versus “I am stressed.” The first describes an experience. The second may suggest an identity. In everyday conversation, the distinction may appear insignificant. Yet psychologically, the difference can be substantial. Experiences are temporary. Identity is enduring. Feelings come and go. Identity tends to persist. Challenges emerge and eventually pass. Labels often remain long after the circumstances that inspired them have disappeared. The language people use can influence whether difficult experiences remain temporary events or become permanent definitions of themselves. A failed project can become evidence of growth, or it can become proof of inadequacy. The decision often begins with the words chosen to describe it. The self-fulfilling prophecy Sociologists have long studied what is known as the “self-fulfilling prophecy,” a phenomenon in which expectations influence behavior in ways that help bring those expectations to life. In practical terms, what people believe about themselves often affects how they act. Someone who believes they are competent may pursue opportunities with confidence. Someone who views themselves as incapable may hesitate before taking similar risks. The expectation itself influences behavior. Behavior then influences results. Results appear to confirm the original belief. The cycle repeats. This helps explain why seemingly simple identity statements can carry significant weight over time. When repeatedly reinforced, phrases such as “I am successful,” “I am adaptable,” or “I am resilient” may encourage actions aligned with those beliefs. Conversely, statements such as “I am hopeless” or “I am destined to fail” can create mental barriers that limit future possibilities. The prophecy is not mystical. It is behavioral. People often move toward what they repeatedly expect from themselves. The science of internal dialogue Every individual carries on an ongoing internal conversation. Some experts estimate that people engage in thousands of internal thoughts each day. Much of this internal dialogue operates automatically, forming a background narrative that influences perception and decision-making. This inner language has become a subject of growing interest among psychologists and neuroscientists. Studies suggest that internal dialogue can affect confidence, emotional regulation, performance under pressure, and overall well-being. The brain responds not only to external messages but also to messages generated internally. Repeated statements help establish mental patterns. The more frequently a thought is repeated, the more familiar it becomes. The more familiar it becomes, the more likely it is to be accepted as true. Over time, repetition can transform speculation into belief. This may explain why negative descriptions of oneself often become difficult to challenge. Once an identity has been rehearsed often enough, it begins to feel permanent. Yet identity is rarely as fixed as language sometimes suggests. The cost of careless labels Throughout life, people accumulate labels. Some are given by family members. Others emerge from schools, workplaces, communities or social circles. Many are eventually adopted by individuals themselves. Labels can be empowering. They can also be limiting. An individual who repeatedly describes themselves as “bad with money,” “poor at relationships,” “not leadership material,” or “naturally unlucky” may gradually begin organizing behavior around those assumptions. The label becomes accepted. The accepted label becomes expected. The expectation influences performance. The performance reinforces the label. What begins as language can eventually become reality. This process often occurs so gradually that it goes unnoticed. Yet its influence can be profound. A culture of identity The modern era places unprecedented emphasis on identity. From professional branding and social media profiles to personality assessments and personal narratives, people are continually encouraged to define who they are. In many respects, this focus can be beneficial. Self-awareness is an asset. However, overreliance on rigid identity labels can create unintended consequences. When identity becomes fixed, growth becomes difficult. Someone who insists, “I am not creative,” may stop exploring creative pursuits. Someone who declares, “I am not athletic,” may avoid physical challenges. Someone who believes, “I am not a leader,” may never develop leadership skills. In each case, language establishes invisible boundaries. The assumption of permanence replaces the possibility of growth. The power of possibility Perhaps the most transformative identity statements are those that leave room for development. Rather than defining a person exclusively by present circumstances, they acknowledge movement and progress. Consider the difference between “I am a failure” and “I am learning.” One suggests finality. The other suggests growth. Similarly, consider “I am incapable” and “I am developing new skills.” The first closes a door. The second opens one. Language that allows for growth creates psychological flexibility. It encourages adaptation, learning, and resilience. In a rapidly changing world, such flexibility may be among the most valuable qualities a person can possess. The stories people live Perhaps the greatest influence of “I am” statements lies in their ability to shape personal narratives. Everyone carries a story about who they are. For some, the story emphasizes possibility. For others, limitations. For some, resilience. For others, defeat. The remarkable reality is that many of these stories are reinforced daily through ordinary language. A statement repeated often enough becomes part of the narrative. The narrative becomes part of identity. Identity influences behavior. And behavior helps determine outcomes. The cycle continues. In this way, the language people choose becomes woven into the fabric of their lives. A more intentional conversation Awareness of language does not require forced optimism or the denial of genuine challenges. Life contains difficulties, disappointments, setbacks, and uncertainty. Acknowledging those realities is healthy. The question is not whether challenges exist. The question is whether those challenges are allowed to become permanent identities. There is a meaningful difference between experiencing a difficult season and defining oneself by it. The most constructive form of self-description may be one that remains both honest and open to growth. Language that recognizes reality while preserving possibility creates room for change. Change begins with how people see themselves. The lasting significance of “I am” The phrase appears so frequently in everyday speech that its influence often goes unnoticed. Yet those two words occupy a unique place in human experience. They introduce beliefs. They reveal assumptions. They communicate expectations. They shape narratives. In many instances, they influence the futures people move toward. Whether spoken quietly in moments of doubt or confidently in moments of ambition, “I am” statements help answer one of the most important questions any person can face: Who do I believe I am? The answer may not be determined by circumstances alone. It may also be shaped by the language repeated day after day, year after year, until it becomes part of the story a person tells about themselves. Stories, once believed, have a remarkable way of becoming reality. Sidebar: Words that shape identity Common identity statements people use: I am capable. I am overwhelmed. I am creative. I am unlucky. I am resilient. I am not good enough. I am learning. I am successful. I am adaptable. I am stuck. The question is not whether identity statements matter. The question is which ones are helping shape your future. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Cherriell Orius Cherriell Orius, Women Empowerment Trauma Coach Cherriell Orius is a transformational leader, certified trauma coach, author, speaker, and entrepreneur dedicated to helping individuals heal, grow, and rediscover their purpose. Drawing from both professional expertise and lived experience, she guides people in overcoming adversity, building resilience, and embracing personal transformation. She is the founder of CRB Enterprizezz, creator of Limitlezz Mindzet, host of the Woman2Woman Podcast, and author of The Broken Compass: Life Out of Alignment. Her mission is to help others transform pain into purpose and live with confidence, faith, and intention.

Written by David Bovis, Founder of Duxinaroe Ltd. David Bovis is a leadership strategist and founder of Duxinaroe Ltd., specialising in the neuroscience of decision-making, behaviour, and performance. Creator of the BTFA (Believe-Think-Feel-Act) framework, he works with senior leaders to address the neurological root causes of misalignment, disengagement, and failed change. Walk into almost any manufacturing facility in the world and you will find evidence of waste. Waiting. Overproduction. Unnecessary motion. Defects that reappear after they have been solved. Processes that work on paper but drift in practice. People who know exactly what the problem is and say nothing about it. For most of my career, the response to waste has followed a familiar pattern. We map the value stream. We identify the steps that add no value. We run a kaizen event, reorganise the flow, set new standards and measure the improvement. Sometimes the numbers move. Sometimes they move significantly. Then, over months, things drift back toward where they were before. We call this a sustainability problem. We introduce audit processes and leader standard work to hold the gains. We retrain. We reengage. We run another event. What we rarely do is ask what the waste was actually telling us in the first place. Waste is a signal, not a starting point Lean methodology, in its original conception, treats waste as a consequence of system design. The system produces what it is designed to produce. If the system produces waste, the design is the problem. That principle is correct. Where it becomes incomplete is in how narrowly we have historically defined the system. We map material flow. We analyse process steps, cycle times and changeover sequences. We examine equipment reliability and layout efficiency. These are all legitimate components of the system. But the system also includes the people interpreting every standard, making every decision at the point of activity and determining, through thousands of small daily judgements, whether the process actually runs as designed or as experience has taught them it really works. Those people have brains. Those brains are continuously processing signals about safety, status, predictability and control, none of which appear on a value stream map. When the environment those brains are operating in elevates threat, something predictable happens at a neurological level. Cortisol rises. Attentional bandwidth narrows. The prefrontal cortex, which supports problem-solving, learning and the kind of discretionary thinking that stops a defect before it occurs, becomes less available. The brain conserves resources and defaults to established patterns. The result, viewed from the shop floor, looks like disengagement, cutting corners or resistance to the new standard. Viewed through a neurological lens, it is a biological system responding rationally to the environment it is in. The waste is the signal. The environment is the cause. The standard that nobody owns One of the most common frustrations I hear from operations leaders is this: we set the standard, we trained to it, we audited it, and six months later, we are back where we started. This is so familiar that it has almost become accepted as an inherent property of change. Standards slip. Gains erode. That is just how it goes. It is not how it has to go. But understanding why it happens requires looking upstream of the standard itself. A standard is an instruction to a brain. How that brain receives and responds to that instruction depends entirely on the environment in which the instruction arrives. If the brain receiving the standard has learned, through accumulated experience, that raising a problem leads to criticism rather than curiosity, it will not raise problems. It will comply visibly and adapt quietly. The standard will appear to hold under observation and drift the moment observation is removed. If the brain has learned that taking initiative without permission creates risk, it will not take initiative. It will wait. Waiting, in a dynamic production environment, is where waste lives. If the brain is operating under chronic pressure, with prediction error elevated and stress chemistry altered, its capacity for the kind of attentive, adaptive thinking that sustains a standard over time is genuinely reduced. Not because the person lacks capability or commitment, but because the biological system they are working with is not operating in conditions that allow it to function at its best. A Basildon factory I worked with some years ago offers a useful illustration. A senior lean advocate had achieved something genuinely impressive: a cellularised production approach that worked, that people had understood and adopted, and that delivered measurable improvement. Then he moved on. Within months, the shop floor had drifted back toward batch manufacturing. The standard had been implemented. The understanding behind it had not been transferred. More precisely, the beliefs people held about how work should be done had never been addressed. When the personal authority that had driven the change was removed, the existing neural wiring simply reasserted itself. The system returned to what it already knew. That is not a training failure. It is a belief failure, and belief failures do not show up on audit checklists. The methodology was never designed for a biological system The improvement frameworks most organisations use, whether Lean, Six Sigma, the Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA) cycle, the Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control (DMAIC) methodology or the various hybrid methodologies that have emerged over recent decades, share a common architecture. They are designed to identify variation, locate its cause, remove that cause and standardise the improvement. That architecture is extraordinarily effective when applied to mechanical or process systems where cause and effect are direct, observable and repeatable. Human systems do not behave that way. When we apply the same linear control logic to a system driven by perception, emotion, social signalling and the continuous neurological processing of environmental cues, we are using the right tool in the wrong domain. The methodology assumes the system will hold the improvement once the cause has been removed. The human system does not hold improvements because the cause has been removed. It holds them because the people inside it have internalised a different belief about how work should be done and because the environment sustains that belief rather than gradually eroding it. This is the gap that has produced decades of frustration in continuous improvement functions globally. It is not a gap in the methodology. It is a gap in the model of the system to which the methodology is being applied. What this means in practice It means that before asking what the waste is, it is worth asking what environment the people closest to that waste are operating in. Are they in an environment where raising a problem is welcomed or where it creates exposure? Do they have genuine agency over the work, or are they executing instructions from a system that has been designed to remove human judgement from the equation? Does the standard feel like something they helped create and understand, or something imposed from outside and monitored from above? These are not soft questions. They are diagnostic ones. The answers predict, with considerable reliability, whether an improvement will hold or drift. The Believe-Think-Feel-Act (BTFA) framework is useful here precisely because it makes the upstream chain visible. If people are not sustaining a standard, the behaviour is the output. The question is what the chain of belief, prediction and emotional response looks like for the people being asked to sustain it and what the environment is doing to that chain every day. Change the environment, and you change the neurological conditions in which the standard has to survive. That is what determines whether the gain holds. The competitive advantage nobody is measuring Toyota understood something that most Western manufacturing organisations have spent decades trying to replicate through methodology alone. The Toyota Production System is not primarily a set of tools. It is a set of conditions designed to allow human neurological capability to contribute to continuous improvement at the point of activity, consistently, over time. The tools are visible and transferable. The conditions are not. They are produced by what leaders believe about people, how that belief expresses itself in system design and how the resulting environment is experienced by the brains working within it every day. That is why organisations that copy the tools consistently fail to replicate the results. They are intervening at the output. The system producing the output, the belief architecture of the leadership and the neurological conditions it creates, remains unchanged. Waste will continue to appear in any system where the human operating system producing it is not part of the improvement model. Not because the people are unwilling, but because the conditions have not been designed for the biology. Once leaders begin treating the brain as a component of the production system rather than a variable to be managed through compliance, the conversation about waste changes fundamentally, and so do the results. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from David Bovis David Bovis, Founder of Duxinaroe Ltd. David Bovis is a leadership strategist and founder of Duxinaroe Ltd., specializing in the neuroscience of belief, decision-making, and performance under pressure. He is the creator of the BTFA (Believe-Think-Feel-Act) framework, a practical model that helps leaders understand why change, culture, and strategy often fail despite good intent. David works globally with senior leaders to address the neurological root causes of misalignment, disengagement, and stalled performance. His work bridges neuroscience, leadership, and systems thinking to enable sustainable behavioural change where traditional approaches fall short.

For personal stylist Stephanie Vaughan, style became more than clothing after she was diagnosed with young-onset Parkinson’s at 41 and spent nine years keeping her diagnosis hidden. Her experience transformed the way she helps women reconnect with their identity, confidence, and visibility through what they wear. In this interview, Stephanie explores why midlife wardrobes can feel disconnected from the women who own them, how to move beyond restrictive fashion rules, and why dressing authentically starts with understanding who you are today. Stephanie Vaughan, Personal Stylist What first made you see personal style as something deeper than simply choosing the right clothes? My own experience really changed the way I understood personal style. I was diagnosed with Young Onset Parkinson’s at 41, when I was a mum to three young children, and I kept my diagnosis hidden for nine years. I was afraid people would see Parkinson’s before they saw me. During that time, I became very good at using clothes as armour. I could put together an outfit, walk into a room and look confident while hiding what was really happening inside me. The irony was that I was working as a personal stylist, encouraging other women to express who they truly were through their style, while I wasn’t doing that myself. At times, I felt like a fraud. When I finally shared my diagnosis at 50, I began to understand that style can both hide and reveal who we are. That changed everything for me. Today, styling isn't simply about what looks good. It’s about identity, intention and helping a woman feel confident enough to let the outside reflect who she truly is on the inside. When a woman no longer recognises herself in her wardrobe, what do you look for before making any styling recommendations? The first thing I look at isn't her wardrobe. It’s her life. I want to understand what has changed and where she is now. Midlife can bring so many transitions: our bodies change, children grow up, careers evolve, relationships shift, menopause changes how we feel physically and emotionally, and our priorities can become completely different. Yet our wardrobes don't always evolve with us. I also listen very carefully to the language a woman uses about herself. Often, she will tell me what she thinks she should wear before she tells me what she actually enjoys wearing. So before talking about colours, body shapes or clothes, I want to know: How do you want to feel? How do you want to be seen? What feels missing? What parts of yourself would you like to express more? That gives me far more information than simply looking inside her wardrobe. Once we understand the woman we are dressing, we can begin making intentional choices that reflect who she is now rather than simply fixing what she thinks is “wrong” with her clothes. How do you help a client dress for who she is now rather than for a past version of herself? Our wardrobes can become little time capsules. They hold clothes from different bodies, careers, relationships, lifestyles and stages of our lives. Sometimes we keep those pieces because we genuinely love them, but sometimes we're holding onto the woman we were when we wore them. I never want a client to feel she needs to reject that woman. She is part of her story. But I encourage her to become curious about whether those clothes still represent who she is today. One question I love is: “If you saw this in a shop today, would you still choose it?” That can be incredibly revealing. Instead of focusing only on whether something still fits physically, we explore whether it still fits her identity, lifestyle and how she wants to feel. Then we look forward. What feels exciting now? What makes her stand differently or smile at herself in the mirror? The goal isn't to recreate a younger version of herself. It’s to create space for the woman she has become, and perhaps the woman she is still becoming. Why do you think the idea of dressing “age appropriately” still has such a strong hold on women over 40? Women receive so many messages about becoming less visible as we age. We hear that certain hemlines are too short, colours are too bright, trends are too young, arms should be covered, hair should be shorter, there seems to be an endless list of rules. Over time, those messages can become our own internal voice. We stop asking, “Do I love this?” and start asking, “Am I allowed to wear this at my age?” I think that’s incredibly limiting. I prefer to talk about dressing authentically and intentionally, rather than dressing “age appropriately”. Context matters, of course. What we wear to work, a wedding or the beach may be different, but age alone shouldn't determine whether something belongs in our wardrobe. Midlife doesn't erase our personality. If anything, I think it can be a wonderful opportunity to understand it more deeply. So rather than asking, “Am I too old for this?”, I encourage women to ask, “Does this feel like me? Do I feel good in it? Does it reflect the woman I am now?” Those questions create freedom rather than rules. Where does the styling industry get confidence wrong when it relies too heavily on rules, colours or capsule wardrobes? Colour analysis, body-shape guidelines and capsule wardrobes can all be useful tools. The problem comes when the tools become rules and women start believing there is a “correct” way to dress. You can know your perfect colour palette, understand your proportions and own a beautifully curated capsule wardrobe and still look in the mirror and not feel like yourself. Confidence isn't created by following somebody else's formula. For me, styling should give a woman greater trust in herself, not make her dependent on an expert to tell her whether she's getting dressed correctly. I want my clients to understand why something works for them, but also to have permission to break the so-called rules when something brings them joy or feels authentically theirs. Ultimately, I think personal style should be exactly that, personal. The goal isn't a perfect wardrobe. It’s a wardrobe that supports your life, reflects your personality and makes getting dressed feel easier and more enjoyable. When a woman can choose something because she genuinely loves how she feels in it, that is confidence. What is one sign that a wardrobe is reflecting an old identity rather than a woman’s current life? One of the clearest signs is something I hear all the time: “I have a wardrobe full of clothes, but nothing to wear.” Often, she doesn't actually have a clothing problem. She has a disconnect between the woman represented in her wardrobe and the woman living her life today. Perhaps her wardrobe was built around a corporate career she has left, a body she had ten years ago, a lifestyle that has changed, or an image of herself she no longer relates to. The clothes may be beautiful. They may even still fit. But they don't feel relevant anymore. Another clue is when a woman repeatedly wears only a tiny percentage of what she owns. Those pieces she reaches for are telling us something about who she is now, while the rest may be telling the story of who she used to be. I don't see that as a reason to throw everything away. I see it as an invitation to get curious. Your wardrobe should evolve as you do. It should support the life you're actually living, not keep you tied to one you've outgrown. How can someone begin dressing more intentionally without replacing most of what she already owns? Start by shopping your own wardrobe before buying anything new. I encourage women to pull out the pieces they wear repeatedly and ask themselves why. Is it the colour, comfort, shape, fabric or simply the way they feel when wearing it? Those favourites contain valuable clues about your personal style. Then look at what you aren't wearing, without judging yourself for buying it. Ask why. Does it need altering? Is it difficult to style? Does it belong to a lifestyle you no longer have? Or does it simply not feel like you? From there, experiment with what you already own. Try combinations you've never worn before. Change the shoes, add a belt or accessory, roll a sleeve, play with proportions or wear something you've been “saving for good”. I also suggest taking photographs of outfits you love. You start building your own visual reference rather than looking outside yourself for inspiration every morning. Intentional style isn't about constantly consuming more. It’s about understanding yourself well enough to make better use of what you already have, and making future purchases with purpose. What has your own journey with visibility taught you about the difference between being seen and simply being noticed? I've learnt that being noticed and being seen are very different things. Being noticed is about attracting attention. You can wear a beautiful outfit, walk confidently into a room and have people notice you without actually allowing them to know very much about you. I did that for years. After my Parkinson’s diagnosis, I could present a polished, confident version of myself while keeping an enormous part of my reality hidden. People could see me, but I wasn't allowing myself to be truly seen. When I shared my diagnosis at 50, visibility took on a completely different meaning. I realised being seen isn't about telling everyone everything or becoming the loudest person in the room. It is about allowing what you show the world to feel congruent with who you actually are. There is vulnerability in that, but also enormous freedom. That experience now shapes the way I work. I don't want women to dress for attention or approval. I want them to feel comfortable occupying their space without shrinking, disguising or editing themselves. To me, true visibility is being able to say, quietly and confidently, “This is me.” What would you like women who feel they have lost part of themselves to understand about the way they choose to show up? I would want them to know that they may not have lost themselves at all. They may simply have stopped recognising themselves. Midlife can bring enormous change. Our bodies change, children grow up, relationships shift, careers evolve and our priorities can look completely different. Sometimes we're so busy adapting to everyone and everything around us that we stop asking ourselves, “Who am I now?” I don't believe the answer is trying to get back to the woman you were at 30 or 40. I think there is something much more powerful in becoming curious about the woman you are today. Style can be one gentle way to begin that reconnection. Wear the colour you're drawn to. Put on the earrings you've been saving. Stop keeping your favourite clothes for “something special”. Notice what makes you feel more like yourself. Clothes won't solve everything, and I would never suggest they do. But getting dressed is something we do almost every day, which gives us a small daily opportunity to choose how we want to show up. You don't need to become a new woman. You can begin by allowing the woman you already are to be seen. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Stephanie Vaughan

Written by Barbara Basia Siwik, Personal Coach & Nutrition Advisor Barbara Basia-Siwik is a certified personal coach, holistic fitness coach, and nutrition advisor using sports psychology and neuroscience to elevate wellbeing worldwide. She authored a practical e-book and leads transformation bootcamps and holistic programs for lasting change. Christmas is coming. Then January will arrive. Then someone will remind you that summer bodies are made in winter. Spring becomes the time to “get serious.” Summer becomes the time to show the results. September becomes another opportunity to start again. Lose weight for Christmas. Recover from Christmas in January. Prepare for summer. Relax during summer. Restart in September. When exactly do you simply live? Your body doesn’t know Christmas is coming. Your muscles don’t know bikini season has ended. Your digestive system doesn’t care whether it’s Monday, December or three weeks before your holiday. Your health isn’t divided into seasons. Your habits shouldn’t be either. Feeling healthy comes first There is nothing wrong with wanting to look good. Wanting to feel confident in your dress, bikini, jeans or simply in your own body doesn’t make you superficial. But I would change the order. Feel healthy. Feel strong. Have energy. Feel confident. Yes, enjoy how you look too. Problems begin when looking good for one particular event becomes the entire strategy. We cut carbohydrates before holidays. Slash calories before Christmas. Add cardio before summer. Avoid restaurants because there’s a wedding in three weeks. The event happens, the deadline disappears and so does the routine. Make it practical: Before changing your diet or training, ask yourself: Would I still be willing to do this in February? On holiday? During a busy work week? If the answer is no, modify the strategy before you even begin. Stop cutting and start building Most diet conversations begin with subtraction. What should I stop eating? What should I cut? How many calories should I remove? What foods are “bad”? Try reversing the question: What does my body need more of? Maybe it’s protein. Fibre. Strength. Sleep. Walking. Recovery. Regular meals. Or simply enough food to support what you're asking your body to do. Protein needs vary depending on factors including body weight, activity, goals, age and life stage. Foods rich in fibre, such as vegetables, fruit, legumes, whole grains, nuts and seeds, support digestive health and can contribute to satiety. Neither requires a seasonal challenge. Make it practical: Look at your next meal before removing anything. Where is your protein? Where is your fibre? What could you add that makes the meal more nourishing and satisfying? Sometimes improving your nutrition starts with addition, not restriction. Strength training doesn’t mean living in the gym Another misconception keeps people stuck: if you can’t do the full workout, there’s no point in doing anything. An hour or nothing. Five workouts or failure. Perfect program or no program. But strength training doesn't have to mean living inside a gym. Depending on your goals, experience and circumstances, a well-designed program can work within a much more realistic schedule. Some weeks you might have 60 minutes. Sometimes 30. Sometimes an exercise needs modifying because of discomfort, an injury or limited mobility. That doesn't automatically mean stopping. Pain or injury may require assessment from an appropriate healthcare professional, but when movement is safe, the goal can often become adaptation rather than abandonment. This is something I reinforce with the people I coach. We don’t build programs around the fantasy that every week will look identical. We build them around the body, lifestyle and circumstances of the person actually doing them. Make it practical: Create three versions of your training week: ideal, realistic and minimum. If the ideal session is 60 minutes, decide beforehand what the 30-minute version looks like. Your minimum version keeps the habit alive when life changes. Your sleep is part of your program People will spend hours researching supplements while treating sleep like something they’ll eventually catch up on. But recovery isn't the part of your health plan that happens when everything else is finished. It is part of the plan. Sleep supports recovery, cognitive performance, appetite regulation and physical performance. No perfectly organised meal plan can make chronic exhaustion irrelevant. You don’t need to create a two-hour evening routine with seventeen wellness products. Start simpler. Make it practical: Pick one consistent action before bed. Put your phone away earlier. Dim the lights. Stretch for five minutes. Take a few slow breaths. Or simply go to bed 30 minutes earlier instead of trying to squeeze another task out of the day. Stress management is also attention management Stress management isn't just meditation, breathwork or yoga. Sometimes it's deciding what deserves access to your attention. Not every notification requires an immediate response. Not every opinion deserves your emotional energy. Not every problem is yours to solve. We talk constantly about managing time, yet very little about managing attention. But where your attention repeatedly goes affects how much energy you have left for training, cooking, relationships, sleep and yourself. Make it practical: Ask yourself at the end of the day: What took most of my attention today, and did it deserve that much? Sometimes the healthiest habit you can build is a boundary. Build a routine that can travel with you A sustainable routine should survive more than your easiest week. It should have a version for travel. Busy periods. Christmas. Dinner with friends. A stressful Tuesday. A week when training needs to be modified. This is one of the biggest shifts I try to create with my clients. Instead of designing their lives around a temporary fitness plan, we design the plan around their actual lives. That means sometimes doing more and sometimes doing less, but not disappearing. Make it practical: When circumstances change, don't immediately ask, “Should I stop?” Ask, “What version of my routine fits this week?” Maybe 60 minutes becomes 30. Ten thousand steps become two short walks. A home-cooked dinner becomes a simple option with protein and fibre. Your normal routine becomes its minimum version. The dose changes. The identity stays. Before you start another diet There will always be another deadline. Christmas. January. A birthday. A wedding. Summer. Another holiday. If every event requires a different version of you, you can spend years moving between restriction and relaxation without ever building something that feels normal. So before starting another seasonal diet, ask a different question: What could I build now that I would still want in my life next September? Eat enough protein. Get your fibre. Strength train. Walk. Sleep. Recover. Protect your attention. Adjust when life changes. Build those habits around your body and your lifestyle, not around the season you're currently trying to prepare for. Because looking good and feeling healthy don't have to live on opposite sides of the calendar. Your body doesn't live in seasons. Your health shouldn't either. Follow me on Facebook and Instagram for more info! Read more from Barbara Basia Siwik Barbara Basia Siwik, Personal Coach & Nutrition Advisor Barbara Basia-Siwik is a personal coach and holistic fitness & nutrition advisor who blends physical training with mind-body science for lasting transformation. She applies sports psychology and neuroscience to help clients create sustainable change from within. After starting her career in England, she built a successful practice in Spain, coaching clients in Barcelona and worldwide online. Barbara has developed holistic programs, authored a practical e-book for busy individuals, and led transformation bootcamp events across Spain. Her mission is to inspire long-term change through holistic fitness, evidence-based methods, and habits that strengthen both body and mind.

Written by Guy Van de Putte, Spiritual Guide & Mentor Guy Van de Putte works as a guide for those looking for help navigating life's challenges or finding themselves at a crossroads. Blending shamanism, breathwork, and constellation therapy with the non-dual and yogic traditions, he has a wide toolkit to support the power of presence and the healing words to accommodate lasting change. In recent conversations with clients and friends, I have noticed how often artificial intelligence (AI) brings up uncertainty about the future. Early concerns focused mainly on AI going rogue and taking over the world. Today, people wonder whether their jobs will still exist, whether their children will lose the ability to think for themselves, and where this technology might eventually lead us. Beneath these questions, I often hear something deeper: fear of a future we cannot predict or control. AI is everywhere these days. There seems to be no escaping it. In a very short time, it has become almost indispensable, and its applications keep expanding like an unstoppable avalanche. Hardly any app or website exists that hasn’t incorporated this new technology. AI chatbots increasingly handle work once done by customer service employees, while teachers struggle to determine whether their students wrote those remarkable essays themselves. Claiming that AI has rapidly entered almost every aspect of our lives would hardly be an exaggeration. Developments that once took decades, or even centuries, now seem to happen within years. The pace of technological change keeps accelerating. In the midst of it all, we try to keep up while occasionally looking back on what seemed like a simpler time. Change may be the only constant, but that doesn’t mean we welcome it. The human mind naturally resists the unknown. It fills the empty spaces with worries about the future, often fed by science fiction books and movies whose grim predictions suddenly appear a lot less fictional than before. But what if AI is not only changing how we live and work, but also revealing how we respond to uncertainty? AI is here to stay. Perhaps it’s time to examine those fears, look at what history can teach us, and explore how we might work with it without losing ourselves in the stories our minds create about it. Will AI take over our jobs? Yes, and no. Throughout history, major technological advances have transformed the way we work. During the Industrial Revolution, many people left the countryside and moved to cities to work in factories. With the arrival of the digital age, much of our work shifted again, from physical labor toward computers, information, and knowledge. Professions such as lamplighters and coachmen disappeared, while entirely new industries emerged around technologies previous generations could never have imagined. That does not mean every transition was easy or fair. People lost their livelihoods. Communities were disrupted. New opportunities did not always appear in the same place, at the same time, or for the same people whose work had disappeared. The arrival of AI may be no different. Schools, companies, governments, and workers will all need time to adapt. We cannot yet know what this new reality will look like. Consider music producers. Many of those who created innovative sounds embraced synthesizers, samplers, and computers, exploring possibilities that had not existed before. Today, they are beginning to do the same with AI. Across many professions, therefore, the question may not only be, “Will AI replace my job?” but also, “How could it change what I can create?” That possibility shouldn’t blind us to the genuine risks. Some people will be affected more than others, and there is no guarantee that the opportunities created by AI will automatically compensate for everything it takes away. History cannot tell us exactly what will happen this time. It can only remind us that change does not always lead where our fears predict or where our hopes promise. Is AI safe? Let me answer that question with another: Is electricity safe? It can injure or kill people and cause fires that burn down houses. Yet it also lights our homes, preserves our food, and powers our hospitals. We don’t consider electricity either good or bad. We recognize both its value and its dangers and try to use it responsibly. AI is far more complex, and many of its risks are still unknown. But perhaps approaching it as either our salvation or our destruction is equally limiting. AI’s developers, owners, training data, safeguards, and commercial interests all influence how it behaves and how it may be used. I am not an AI expert, so I will leave questions about machines escaping human control to those with the knowledge required to assess that possibility. But it would be too easy to gather all responsibility into a box, wrap it with a ribbon, and send it to the people building the technology. Those of us using it also have a role to play. We can use AI to deceive and harm, or to express our creativity, solve problems, and create something meaningful that contributes to life on Earth. Who might benefit from what we create, and who might get hurt? What matters is not only what AI can do, but also the level of awareness we bring when engaging with it. Regulation will matter. So will education, accountability, and transparency. But rules alone cannot determine how wisely we use what we have created, especially since technological possibilities are expanding faster than our legal and political systems can keep up with. What are we really afraid of? These concerns should not be dismissed. Jobs may be lost, technology can be misused, and people may become overly dependent on systems few of us fully understand. This is not about convincing ourselves that AI is safe or that everything will work out. It is about recognizing which concerns require a conscious response and which fears are stories about a future no one can predict. Fear rarely limits itself to what is happening now. It takes a genuine concern and carries it into an imagined future. Before long, we are no longer responding to what is in front of us. We are responding to everything our minds tell us might happen. This is not unique to AI. We do the same thing when facing illness, a change in our relationships, or any situation we cannot control. When information is missing, the mind often fills the gaps with our deepest fears. The question is therefore not only whether AI is dangerous. It is also whether living in fear will make us any safer. Fear can alert us to a risk and inspire us to act. But when it takes control, it narrows our vision. It can make us resist change, reject possibilities before exploring them, or surrender our responsibility to those who promise certainty. Perhaps the invitation is not to rise above our fears or pretend they aren’t there, but to turn toward them. Which part of the fear is asking for a practical response? Which part comes from an old need to know and control what has never been ours to control? Could AI change human consciousness? In this context, a rise in consciousness does not mean transcending our humanity or eliminating fear. It means becoming aware of what is shaping our choices, so we can respond rather than merely react. Beyond the fears it brings to the surface, perhaps AI’s greatest impact will be the deeper questions it asks us to face. If a machine can write, draw, compose music, analyze data, and reproduce much of what we once considered uniquely human, we may be forced to reconsider what makes us unique. What does it actually mean to be human? Is our value determined by how much we produce, by how quickly we can process information, or by how much knowledge we can collect and repeat? Or is there something within us that productivity or intelligence alone cannot measure? AI may challenge us to distinguish intelligence from wisdom, information from understanding, and imitation from genuine experience. It may require us to become more discerning about what is real, what is valuable, and what is worthy of our attention. It may also reveal how easily we give away our own authority. If we accept every answer generated for us without questioning it, the problem may not be that AI has learned to think. It may be that we have stopped thinking for ourselves. AI will not create a shift in consciousness for us. No technology can take responsibility for the way we choose to live. It can just as easily amplify whatever remains unconscious within us. But it can also become a mirror, reflecting not only our extraordinary creative potential, but also the level of awareness with which we use it. Our power to create has never been greater. That means the way we move forward, individually and collectively, has never mattered more. Perhaps AI will not bring about the rise in human consciousness we have been waiting for. Perhaps it will show us why that rise can no longer wait. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Guy Van de Putte Guy Van de Putte, Spiritual Guide & Mentor Guy Van de Putte works as a guide for all those looking for help navigating life's challenges or finding themselves at a crossroads. His passion is helping people who are ready to wake up and go beyond the stories and patterns that unconsciously run their lives. Thereby helping them to debunk the lies they told themselves that are at the root of all the drama in their life, and take back the power over their own lives. So the old wounds from the past can be permanently healed, and a new life of true freedom can emerge from that. A fulfilled life in service of and in harmony with their true calling.

Written by Janice Webber, Owner, Coach & Artist Janice Webber is a creative leadership coach and artist who works at the intersection of stress, burnout, and creativity. She helps people restore calm, clarity, and creative flow through embodied, sustainable practices. You've always been capable. You've learned how to cope, adapt, push through, and carry a lot. You've handled demanding days, competing priorities, unexpected problems, and the endless things that simply need to get done. But lately, something feels different. The things you've always handled are taking more out of you. So you tell yourself: I just need a break. Maybe you take one. You get away for the weekend, take a vacation, spend a quiet day at home, walk, paint, read, sleep, or simply permit yourself to do less. It feels good. Maybe you even think, I really needed that. Then life starts again, and by Wednesday, you're exhausted. You took a break. It felt great. So why do you need another one already? The break worked, so why didn't the feeling last? It's easy to decide you simply didn't take enough time off. Maybe you needed a week instead of a weekend. Maybe you didn't disconnect properly. Maybe you should have rested more, slept longer, or done a better job of looking after yourself. So you start looking toward the next break. But what if the problem isn't that you need a better break? What if needing another one so quickly is telling you something, not about how well you rested or whether you're still capable, but about what it now costs you to keep doing everything you've always done? Maybe something has changed in your capacity. What happened to my capacity? Think of your capacity like a battery. You start each day with a certain amount of energy available for the ordinary demands of your life. Let's call that Battery A. Ideally, you use some of that energy during the day and restore it through sleep, rest, and the things that replenish you. But sometimes life asks for more than Battery A has available. That's when you begin drawing from Battery B, which is your reserve. That's not necessarily a problem. We need reserves. They help us respond to unexpected demands and get through difficult periods when life temporarily asks more of us. The problem is when temporarily becomes routine. If Battery A isn't being fully restored and you continually draw from Battery B, eventually you begin reaching deeper into what I call Battery C, your deep reserve. The battery is a metaphor, not a measurement. It's simply a way of recognizing something capable people can easily miss: You can continue functioning long after your day-to-day capacity is no longer meeting the demands you're placing on it. You're still getting things done, showing up, carrying the responsibilities, and remaining capable. But the cost of maintaining that capability has changed. What keeps draining your battery? We spend a lot of time talking about how to recharge ourselves: take the weekend, book the vacation, get more sleep, go for a walk, have a massage, or do something creative. Those things can help. But there's another question we don't ask nearly as often: What keeps draining me? It isn't always one enormous stressor. Sometimes it's the accumulation of things you've become very good at carrying. The constant decisions. Being available to everyone. Pushing through when you're tired. Taking responsibility because it's easier to do it yourself. Adapting to one change after another. Ignoring the signals that you're reaching your limits because there's still something that needs to be done. You may have become so good at adapting, coping, pushing, and carrying that you no longer notice how much energy those things require. Then you take a break. Some of the demands disappear. You sleep, breathe, laugh, create, spend time outside, and stop answering emails or making so many decisions. Of course, you feel better. You recharged some of the battery. But then you returned to what was draining it. Are you borrowing calm? Most of us know how to borrow calm. We borrow it from the weekend, the vacation, the massage, an afternoon at the beach, or an hour spent painting, gardening, walking, or doing something that lets the noise disappear for a while. There's nothing wrong with borrowing calm. Sometimes we desperately need it. But if you continually have to step outside your ordinary life to experience that feeling, it's worth becoming curious about what happens when you step back in. A break can give you temporary relief. The Creative Reset is about building the capacity that helps that relief last. It isn't about becoming better at pushing through. It isn't about becoming better at taking breaks. It's about creating the conditions that allow calm, clarity, creativity, and greater capacity to become part of how you live, rather than something you experience only when you finally get away. What happens between the breaks? So yes. Take the break. Enjoy it. Rest. Sleep. Paint. Walk on the beach. Turn off your phone. Go somewhere beautiful. Do whatever helps you reconnect with yourself. But if you find yourself needing another break almost as soon as the last one is over, don't immediately assume you need to become better at resting. Instead, get curious. What are you carrying? What are you continually adapting to? Where are you pushing through? What has become normal that is costing you more than you realize? Perhaps most importantly: What happened to my capacity? Because maybe the break isn't failing you. Maybe it's giving you enough space to finally notice the question. Come and take a break with me If you've been thinking, “I just took a break. Why do I need another one already?”, I'd like to invite you to do something different. On September 24, I'm hosting a free online masterclass around this very question. We're going to start by doing exactly what you've been telling yourself you need. We're going to take a break. Then we'll look at why the relief from the breaks you're already taking may not be lasting, what may be happening to your capacity, and why continually pushing through can cost more than you realize. You can join me inside the "Creative Reset Circle on Skool," where the free masterclass will take place. Come and take a break with me. Because sometimes the first step isn't figuring out how to do more. It's giving yourself enough space to notice what's been taking so much out of you. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Janice Webber Janice Webber, Owner, Coach & Artist Janice Webber is a creative leadership coach and artist specializing in stress, burnout, and creative shutdown. Drawing on decades of lived and professional experience, she helps people restore calm, clarity, and creative flow through embodied, sustainable practices. Her work is grounded in the belief that stress is a normal part of being human and that learning how to work with stress is essential. References: Capacity Changes Before Burnout Happens by Janice Webber Why Relief Doesn’t Last When Capacity Is Depleted by Janice Webber What High Achieving Women Carry in Silence by Jamie Coscia The painting is one of mine: Walk On The Beach I love walking on the beach at low tide and looking back at the footprints I've left behind. For a while, they mark where I've been. Then the tide comes in, the water washes over the sand, and the footprints disappear. The beach is ready for what comes next. I wanted to capture that sense of impermanence in this watercolour, the way something can be real and meaningful without being permanent. Watercolour was the perfect medium for creating the effect of the incoming water gradually washing the footprints away.

Written by Nathaniel McAllister, Founder of Hurdle Community Nathaniel is the founder of Hurdle Community, a platform empowering graduates and young professionals to find clarity, confidence, and opportunity. He is now building a platform and ecosystem that redefines how people grow and progress in a rapidly changing world of work. Somewhere between the graduation photos and the “so, what’s next?” question from every relative, there is a very real moment of: I genuinely do not know. If that is where you are right now, this is for you. If you have graduated without a clear next step, you are not behind. One in five UK graduates now applies for over 100 jobs before landing one. What actually helps in the first few months is not panic applying everywhere. It is having a realistic plan, a genuine support system, and permission not to have it all figured out yet. Is it normal to graduate without a plan? Yes, it is more normal than it has ever been, and the numbers back it up. UK graduate unemployment has risen from 5% to 6% in the latest year, and only 57% of 2023-24 graduates were in full-time work 15 months after finishing university, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA), down from 59% the year before. This is not a personal failure to plan properly. It is a genuinely tighter market than the one your older siblings or parents graduated into. The experience of finishing university without a clear next step is not an exception right now. It is the norm. Why does the graduate job market feel so much harder right now? Because it is. Entry-level roles have narrowed, and competition for the ones that exist has intensified sharply. Around 20% of graduates apply to more than 100 jobs before finding one, a figure that has nearly doubled year on year. Full-time graduate employment has dropped for two years running. More than 700,000 UK graduates are currently out of work. None of this means you are doing it wrong. It means the goalposts have genuinely moved, and comparing your timeline with an older generation’s experience or with the few who now have roles is not a fair comparison. What should I actually do in the first few weeks after graduating? The most useful thing you can do in the first few weeks after graduating is resist the urge to either freeze completely or apply to fifty jobs in a panic. A more deliberate first few weeks might look like this: Give yourself a short, defined reset period. Take a week or two during which you are not required to have a plan yet. You have just finished years of structured deadlines. Some decompression is not laziness. It is necessary. The job search is a long game, and starting it from a place of exhaustion makes it harder, not faster. Talk to people about what you actually want, not just what sounds impressive. A surprising number of graduates apply for roles they do not want because they do not know what else to say when someone asks. Be honest about what genuinely interests you. There are many people who would be happy to offer advice, including former lecturers, alumni, and people already working in an industry you are targeting. Get your LinkedIn messaging ready! Start with a short list of realistic next steps. Identify a handful of roles to explore, a couple of industries to research, and one or two people to ask for a conversation. Track what you send and what you hear back. A stalled job search feels significantly worse when it is invisible. Keeping a simple record of applications, responses, and outcomes means you can see progress and patterns, even when nothing has landed yet. Look at new opportunities. Yes, I know you have just finished studying, but this is where the realisation sets in that you never stop learning. So, what is hot at the moment in the industry you are entering? Artificial intelligence (AI)? Are there gaps in your knowledge? This is where you set aside time each day to learn something new. It can also genuinely distract you from your job search. Should I take any job just to have one? There is no single right answer, but there is a useful distinction worth making. A genuinely difficult market can be a valid reason to take a bridging role while you keep looking for the right fit. That is not settling. It is being practical. Income and structure both matter during a prolonged search. But remember, taking on something as “temporary” can lead to settling. You have to keep the fire burning. What is worth avoiding is taking the first thing that comes along purely out of panic, without checking whether it actively makes your job search harder. A role that leaves you with no time, no headspace, and no connection to where you want to go can set your search back rather than support it. If a role gives you income and the space to keep looking, it is doing its job. If it does neither, it is worth thinking carefully before accepting. What if everyone else seems to have a plan and I don’t? They mostly do not either. You are just seeing the version of their lives they chose to post. That is the best and worst part of social media. Social platforms are particularly unkind during the post-graduation period. A friend’s new job announcement says nothing about the four months of rejections that came before it or the quiet uncertainty almost everyone is experiencing at the same time as you. This is exactly the kind of comparison that makes an already difficult stretch feel isolating, when the reality is that most of your graduating class is experiencing some version of the same uncertainty right now. The experience of not knowing what comes next and feeling like you should is one of the most universal graduate experiences that almost nobody talks about honestly. How long does it take to find a job after graduating? The honest answer is that it varies significantly and takes longer than most graduates expect. Given that the average graduate job search now frequently extends over several months, building a sustainable approach, one you can maintain without burning out, matters as much as the pace at which you start. What the data does suggest is that the graduates who navigate this period most effectively are not necessarily the ones who apply for the most roles. They are the ones who combine a targeted, well-prepared approach with a genuine support system made up of people who understand what the process actually feels like in real time. What is the biggest mistake graduates make in their job search? The most common and costly mistake graduates make in their job search is treating it as a volume exercise. Sending hundreds of generic applications is not the same as conducting a job search. It is a way of feeling busy while avoiding the harder, more effective work of researching roles properly, tailoring applications specifically, and building genuine connections in the industries you want to work in. The second most common mistake is going through the whole process alone. The job search is often treated as a solo experience. It does not have to be. Graduates who find the right community, with people going through the same thing at the same time, generally navigate it better than those who do not. Where can I find people who actually get it? Talking to people who are currently at the same stage tends to help more than receiving another generic list of tips from people five years further along who are offering retrospective advice. That is true whether you are a graduate figuring out your first step or are further into your career and navigating a change. The underlying experience of “I do not know what is next, and I feel like I should” is the same one Hurdle was built around. Hurdle is a professional network for people who are still figuring it out. It is a space where the real experience of navigating the graduate job market can be discussed honestly and where the people around you actually understand what you are going through. Figuring out what is next after graduating? You do not have to work it out alone. Join the Hurdle waitlist. Follow me on Instagram, LinkedIn, and visit my website for more info! Read more from Nathaniel McAllister Nathaniel McAllister, Founder of Hurdle Community After experiencing redundancy firsthand, Nathaniel recognised how isolating the job search can be and set out to change it. Through Hurdle, he’s building a global platform and community where people can rebuild confidence, find support, and move forward together. His mission is simple, no one should face the job search alone.

Written by Karin Wellbrock, Leadership Consultant & Coach Karin Wellbrock is a Tokyo-based executive coach holding the ICF's Master Certified Coach credential and one of Tokyo's Top 15 Coaches two years running. She writes about the crossings where a leader's job stops getting bigger and starts getting different, how DEI plays out across Asia, and what real growth actually requires. Every level of mastery has its own version of a checklist. Early on, you get better by doing more: more frameworks, more techniques, more ways to respond skilfully in the moment. That approach works, right up until it doesn't. At the next level, stepping up doesn't ask for another layer of skill stacked on top. It asks you to let the skill disappear. I'd spent a decade getting very good at being seen doing the work well. Stepping up asked me to disappear instead. In the room that mattered most, I stopped performing the skills I'd built a career on. I let the client's silence sit there instead of filling it with a technique. I asked whatever I was actually curious about instead of reaching for the “right” question. I accepted the client completely, exactly as they showed up, instead of angling them toward where a framework said they should go. It worked better than any explicit technique ever had. That's the reset nobody warns you about on the way to mastery: more visible skill doesn't get you there. Less does, because what's underneath it has finally become who you are, not something you do. I earned my Master Certified Coach credential this year, a level held by roughly three percent of coaches worldwide. I expected it to feel like arrival, the moment a decade of technique finally paid off. Instead, it felt like starting over. Here's what that reset taught me, in case you're due for one of your own. 1. Unlearn before you can learn Every framework I owned, the ones that had built my entire practice, turned into noise the moment I tried to operate at this level. Not wrong. Just in the way. I had to actively set them down, one by one, and trust that what was left, presence, attention, and the willingness not to have an answer ready, was enough on its own. It wasn't a small adjustment. It was closer to demolition. The instincts that made me good were the first things I had to unlearn to get better. 2. Choose to be a beginner again Years earlier, I'd taken a course with Marcia Reynolds, a former global president of the International Coaching Federation (ICF), where she talked about the difference between being proficient and being profound: proficient is how well you execute; profound is the presence you bring, unguarded, into the room. I remember the idea landing intellectually and going nowhere useful. It wasn't until I was inside my own process of stepping up, sitting in a session with nothing but the client and the unknown between us, that I understood what she really meant. Profound isn't a more advanced skill. It's the choice to stop performing competence and let yourself not know, on purpose, in front of someone who's paying you to know. 3. Find the people who are lost with you None of this happened alone. It happened inside a group of coaches chasing the same credential, carrying the same uncertainty and the same fear that we'd built a decade of expertise on something we now had to take apart. We practised on each other. We debriefed honestly, no performance, no polish. Some days, what one of us needed most was a virtual hug, and someone in the group gave it. Working toward the same near-impossible goal, with the same specific kind of lost, built friendships I never expected and wouldn't trade. That group gave me something most environments never do: permission to become a different version of myself without my existing network, my existing stories, and my existing relationships holding the door shut. Most workplaces don't offer that kind of room. Find or build one anyway. Where this shows up outside a coaching room You don't need a credential for any of this to apply to you. Every field has its own version of this shift, the point where doing more stops being the answer and doing less, more honestly, takes over. It might show up the moment you're promoted into a role where your technical mastery stops being the point and the job suddenly needs your judgment and your presence instead of your answers. It might show up as a plateau you can't quite explain: you're doing everything the way that has always worked, and the results have quietly stopped moving anyway. It might show up when a client, a board, or a market that used to respond to your playbook stops responding to it, and no one can tell you exactly why. In each case, the instinct is to add: another framework, another certification, another layer of proficiency stacked on top of what already works. The harder, more useful move is usually the opposite. Set something down. Admit, out loud, that you don't fully know. Let the people around you watch you rebuild. So, where in your own work has the playbook started to get in the way? That's usually where your next reset is already waiting. Follow me on LinkedIn and visit my website for more info! Read more from Karin Wellbrock Karin Wellbrock, Leadership Consultant & Coach Karin Wellbrock is a Partner and Executive Coach at Kay Group K.K. in Tokyo, where she works one-on-one with CEOs and senior leaders on the parts of leadership that are hardest to see from the outside: the assumptions they've stopped questioning, the instincts they've stopped testing, and the version of themselves the work ahead now requires. She holds the ICF's Master Certified Coach credential and has been named one of Tokyo's Top 15 Coaches two years running. Her path has taken her through nearly two decades at Deloitte Consulting across Europe, North America, and East and Southeast Asia, before she settled in Tokyo to build Kay Group. She's the creator of The Two Crossings, a framework built on a simple idea, that at each real career transition the job doesn't get bigger, it gets different, and she researches and writes on exactly that shift alongside how DEI plays out across Asia. Outside her coaching practice, she mentors founders across the region through Founder Institute and Techstars.

Written by Ryan Phillips, Entrepreneur, Model & Fitness Trainer Ryan Phillips is an entrepreneur, model, coach, athlete, and community leader dedicated to empowering others through business, athletics, and networking. As the founder of Phillips Services, Phillips Athletics, and International Connectionz, he is passionate about creating opportunities that help individuals and organizations grow and succeed. Earth is a beautiful place filled with incredible people, cultures, ideas, and possibilities. Yet, throughout history, society has often found ways to separate us rather than bring us together. Despite our differences, we share something fundamental: we are all part of the human race, and the future we create today will shape the generations that come after us. It does not matter where you come from. For society to progress, we must invest in the future, and the future is our children. If humanity is going to continue to grow and thrive, we must improve the cultures, systems, and lifestyles that shape human life. The decisions we make today will influence the world that the next generation inherits. In a "perfect world," one might say that everyone would simply get along. But if people sometimes struggle to agree even within their own families, we cannot expect differences to disappear simply because we step outside the home. Having different views and ideas is part of what makes us individuals. The challenge is learning how to communicate, connect, listen, and work together despite those differences. Communication and connection are skills that help build stronger societies. We should be willing to bring solutions to the table rather than only identifying problems. Every person has something to contribute, and meaningful progress happens when people are willing to share ideas, listen to one another, and work toward common goals. Around the world, people face different challenges. Many of these problems may seem too large for one person, one community, or even one country to solve. But if humanity works together, we have a greater opportunity to create meaningful solutions. It may be easier said than done, but difficult does not mean impossible. Throughout history, governments and institutions have played a major role in shaping society. History also shows us examples of corruption, abuse of power, discrimination, and systems that have failed the people they were created to serve. This raises an important question: How can we continue improving the systems that govern our societies? There may not be one simple answer. Changing systems is complicated, and no single person has all the answers. But it is worth having the conversation. Progress begins when people are willing to question what is not working, recognize what can be improved, and participate in creating better solutions. In today's world, with the technology and communication tools available to us, we should be capable of thinking more progressively about society. We should protect people who are vulnerable and hold individuals and institutions accountable for their actions. No person should be forgotten simply because they were born into difficult circumstances. Countries also have opportunities to resolve disagreements through communication, negotiation, cooperation, and responsible relationships. We have more ways to communicate with one another than any previous generation. The question is whether we will use those tools to divide ourselves further or to find productive ways to work together. The power of the people is significant. If we genuinely committed ourselves to protecting women, children, families, and vulnerable communities, we could create a stronger foundation for society. Morals, compassion, accountability, and high principles should not simply be ideas we talk about; they should be principles we practice. There is no clear limit to what the great minds of this planet can accomplish. As the saying goes, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste." If we discover ideas, systems, and approaches that work, we should learn from them, apply them, improve upon them, and share that knowledge with others. At the same time, we cannot ignore the discrimination and racial violence that have affected communities throughout history and continue to be concerns in different parts of the world. Organizations and movements built around racial hatred or violence work against the goal of creating inclusive and prosperous societies. Recognizing these realities does not mean ignoring the progress that has been made; it means understanding where progress is still needed. Education is an important part of that progress. Learning the truth about history allows people to understand where societies have come from and how past decisions continue to influence the present. Education can also help future generations make informed choices about how they want to live, lead their families, and contribute to their communities. We also cannot become numb to the suffering caused by conflicts around the world. The situations in Palestine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Tigray, among others, remind us of the human cost of conflict. Civilians, including women and children, can suffer enormously during war and political instability. Human life should never be treated as expendable. The future of humanity depends on our ability to recognize our shared humanity. We will always have different cultures, beliefs, opinions, experiences, and ways of life. Those differences do not have to prevent us from working together. In fact, they can become a source of strength when we learn how to communicate and respect one another. The world does not need everyone to think exactly the same way. It needs people who are willing to listen, learn, collaborate, and take responsibility for the world they are helping to create. Unity does not mean uniformity. It means recognizing that, despite our differences, we all share this planet, and the future belongs to all of us. Follow me on Facebook, Instagram, and visit my LinkedIn for more info! Read more from Ryan Phillips Ryan Phillips, Entrepreneur, Model & Fitness Trainer Ryan Phillips is an entrepreneur, model, coach, and community leader dedicated to empowering others through business, athletics, and networking. As the founder of Phillips Services, Phillips Athletics, and International Connectionz, he is passionate about creating opportunities, developing talent, and building meaningful connections. Through leadership, mentorship, and community engagement, Ryan inspires individuals to pursue excellence, embrace discipline, and achieve their personal and professional goals.