Five Ways Back into Making Things
For anyone who used to make things and has not for a while.
When people tell me they have not made anything in months or years, there is usually an imaginary project standing in the doorway. It might be a complete screenplay, an oil painting, an album, or a finished collection of essays. Because daily life is already exhausting, the prospect of starting something that monumental triggers an immediate freeze response. Your brain looks at the energetic cost of a project and decides you don’t have the capacity, so you scroll on your phone instead.
The mistake we often make is confusing creative expression with production. When you’re dealing with chronic stress or burnout, the point of creativity isn’t output, talent, or an audience. It is a way of letting go of tension, allowing yourself to complete an emotional cycle, and moving out of stuckness. And the way back into creativity doesn’t have to be an ambitious project. It’s far less daunting to start with five minutes of low-stakes play.
I'd advocate for everyone having some form of expression – getting emotions, thoughts, ideas and challenges out of our heads and into the world somehow is a powerful therapeutic tool.
Here are five simple ways to re-engage your expressive muscles without overwhelming your nervous system:
Wellbeing Is Not a Perk
For anyone who has to decide what to cut this year.
The exit interview blind spot
A familiar scene plays out in leadership teams every year - a capable, committed colleague hands in their notice, and senior managers are blindsided.
At the exit interview, the feedback is uncomfortable. The departing team member speaks about chronic exhaustion, feeling unheard, and burning out under an unmanageable workload. The leadership team may be completely baffled. From where they sit, they worked hard to protect staff support and keep them in jobs despite difficult funding cycles. They point to the lunchtime mindfulness sessions, the employee assistance helpline, and the subsidised health and fitness memberships. They invested money and good intentions into those benefits, yet their best people are still walking out of the door.
This disconnect happens because nobody joined the dots between working conditions, structural pressures, and actual human wellbeing. Leaders often assume that providing these tools fulfills their duty of care. But when staff are routinely carrying the emotional weight of frontline work, absorbing vicarious trauma, or operating in under-resourced services, a class or an app doesn’t balance the ledger.
Anchors That Actually Hold
For anyone who has been advised to try grounding techniques, and found that they didn’t work.
Why standard grounding tools aren’t for everyone
If you have ever experienced acute overwhelm, panic, or dissociation (feeling detached from your body and untethered from reality), you have most likely been offered advice on using grounding techniques.
One of the most common techniques is five-senses grounding: name five things you can see, four you can feel, three you can hear, two you can smell, and one you can taste. On paper, it sounds practical, and for many people, it’s useful. For others, the exercise falls flat, or might even accelerate the panic it was meant to soothe.
Generic advice can fail specifically because it’s generic. It seems to be based on the assumption that we all possess a uniform set of sensory processing mechanisms, ignoring physical differences, sensory impairments, or neurological variations. It’s also not always the case that an activated nervous system wants more input.
If you have a sensitive neurotype or a system that has experienced trauma, sensory stimulation is often the problem, rather than the solution. When you are already overstimulated, scanning a chaotic environment for sights and sounds adds more data to a system that is already struggling to process the load. In those moments, what you need is likely to be containment and less sensory input.
A Safer Space, Not a Safe One
For anyone who holds space for other people – facilitators, coaches, managers.
The promise and the evidence
The expression ‘this is a safe space’ is often heard in workshops, team away-days and coaching rooms. Facilitators usually offer it with good intentions, hoping to reassure participants that they can speak openly without fear of judgement or professional penalty.
Before questioning that promise, it is worth being clear about what psychological safety actually is. In her foundational workplace research, Amy Edmondson defines psychological safety as ‘the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes, and that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking’. In an organisational setting, this condition is vital. Teams cannot innovate, admit costly errors or challenge bad decisions if speaking up feels professionally hazardous.
Your body knows before you do - using body wisdom to support difficult conversations
For anyone with a conversation they have been putting off.
The Conversation That Went Wrong
Recently, I found myself hooked into a political argument at the pub. Someone expressed views I found distressing, and almost immediately, my awareness went out of the window. The sudden feeling of being unsafe had me holding my breath and feeling spaced out, before moving straight into fight preparation.
I have spent years in embodiment practice, working consciously with physical sensations and body awareness. I teach people how to re-regulate their autonomic nervous system, the network that manages our involuntary stress and survival responses, so they can communicate from a grounded place. Yet here I was, reacting with emotional impulsivity and waiting impatiently to speak, stuck in hyperarousal.
ADHD and masking: what it actually costs
For anyone diagnosed later in life, and still working out what it changes.
Someone on a training course once told me that I’d never be taken seriously if I continued to move my hands like that when I talk. For the rest of the course, I grudgingly sat on them or kept them as still as I could.
I've thought a lot about that comment in the years since being diagnosed with ADHD. I’ve reflected on what was actually being asked of me. It wasn't that I should communicate more clearly - I don’t think anyone was struggling to follow me because I talk with my hands. What was being asked was that I ‘tone it down’, so that the people watching would feel more comfortable.
Masking, or taking up less space in order to fit in or be 'taken seriously', is more about others' comfort than the needs of the person wearing the mask.
The fizzy bottle: how safe does it feel to lift the lid on ‘fizzy’ emotions and sticky subjects?
For leaders sitting on something their team hasn't said out loud yet.
Bottling up emotions and unsayable words can risk a build up of stress that leads to explosive conflicts, burnout, health problems and more. I’m interested in how we can take the same approach we would use with a shaken up fizzy bottle – unscrewing the lid slowly, carefully, and a little at a time.
Sharing and Taking Up Space: Why We Shrink, and How to Stop
For anyone who has learned to make themselves small, quiet, or convenient.
The Tube, the pavement, and the art of squeezing In
If you travel on public transport in any major city, you already know the choreography.
You sit on the Tube or the bus, and the person next to you has their knees spread wide, claiming half of your seat alongside their own. You feel the familiar, automatic contraction: you pull your knees together, tuck your elbows against your ribs, and pull your bag onto your lap. You might let out a quiet sigh, but mostly you make yourself compact. You spend the rest of the journey carrying physical tension in your thighs, shoulders, and jaw, simply to avoid confrontation or unwanted physical contact.
You see the same dynamic on the pavement. A few years ago, several women documented playing a game dubbed ‘patriarchy chicken’: walking down a crowded street at a normal pace and refusing to automatically step aside for oncoming men. The result, almost universally, was repeated shoulder collisions.
On the surface, these seem like minor everyday irritations. But our physical posture is rarely just about etiquette. It is a direct reflection of how power, privilege, and social hierarchy are experienced in the body. How much physical and emotional space we feel entitled to occupy is learned long before we are conscious of the lesson.
Why certain bodies learn to shrink
Shrinking yourself might seem like a character flaw or a lack of confidence, but it is an intelligent, learned survival strategy.
‘Nothing about us without us’ – addressing tokenism, conflict and exploitative practice in work with experts by experience
For anyone commissioning or running work with experts by experience.
I recently heard a young adult involved in service design describe what it felt like to be brought into consultation meetings with senior leaders: she called it being asked to ‘put on the show’.
She was referring to the familiar request to share personal stories on demand: talk about the impact of the hardship she had faced, recount private struggles to a room of professionals, or provide emotional resonance for decision-makers.
Involving the people closest to a social issue in designing, delivering, and evaluating services – often described as ‘co-production’ (collaborating as equals with service users) or working with ‘experts by experience’ (people whose authority comes from having lived through the challenge) – is now fairly standard across social services, public bodies, and charities. When done well, it shifts institutional power and leads to services that make a real difference.
And yet, after twenty years in participatory work, I see the same systemic pitfalls recurring. Co-production fails in five predictable ways - here they are, with counter measures you can actually implement.
The 'Authentic Self': What Is It, and Does It Help to Search for the 'Real Me'?
For anyone exhausted from searching for the 'real me' – or wondering who they are beneath the mask.
The modern demand to 'be yourself'
We live in a culture saturated with the demand to be ‘authentic’.
We see it on social media slogans, corporate leadership seminars, and wellness wall art, all urging us to strip away our filters, ‘live our truth’, and reveal our ‘real’ self. It might be presented as some kind of moral virtue - if you are not showing up unfiltered in every room, you are being inauthentic.
For values-driven people, late-diagnosed neurodivergents, and anyone experiencing the strain of high-responsibility caring or community work, this advice is unlikely to feel liberating.
Many of my coaching clients arrive feeling like imposters. They tell me they have spent decades masking ADHD or Autistic traits, adapting to rigid workplaces, or people-pleasing to maintain relationships, to the point where they question who they really are now. They wonder whether their tendency to adapt their tone, body language, and energy depending on who they are with is a problem. The search for an elusive, permanent ‘authentic self’ can become another standard to fail.
In Praise of Discomfort -Unlearning White Politeness, Masking and Conflict Avoidance
For anyone exhausted by people-pleasing, masking, or keeping the peace at their own expense.
When the mask begins to slip
In the years since being diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, I have spent a lot of time thinking about masking: the conscious or unconscious effort to suppress natural instincts and modify behaviour to appear socially acceptable.
At a certain point, particularly for those diagnosed later in life, the mask begins to slip. Sometimes we make a deliberate decision to take it off; more often, our nervous systems simply run out of the energetic fuel required to keep it in place.
It is revealing to notice how that unmasking is received. In some spaces, people are accustomed to neurodivergent communication styles, unusual movements, and direct requests for adjustments.
Resilience Is Not Just A Personal Trait
For anyone who needs their team to be more resilient.
Lunchtime yoga
Picture a scene that plays out across public and third-sector organisations every month.
A leadership team is grappling with brutal budget contractions, rising community demand, and staffing shortages. They are at their own limits, desperately trying to keep essential services afloat. Meanwhile, frontline caseworkers and project managers are burning out, absorbing secondary trauma, and calling in sick with stress.
Tension mounts. Staff raise concerns about unmanageable workloads and the lack of time to process emotionally demanding casework. The leadership team, feeling defensive and constrained by forces beyond their control, looks for a way to support their people that doesn’t require money they don’t have.
The response arrives from the top down: a memo reminding staff that they need to be more resilient, accompanied by a checklist of self-care tips, an employee assistance helpline, and a reminder that lunchtime yoga is available on Tuesdays.
Navigating personal and political grief in a time of chaos and change
For anyone dealing with personal or collective grief, and wondering where all the feelings are supposed to go.
The song and the slow glide
'I don't know if we were meant to carry so much grief in one body… Yet, we are not alone.'
These words are from a song by Alexandra/Ahlay Blakely that I have sung with others at song circles, protests, and community gatherings. Groups assemble to process sorrow that feels too vast, frightening, or unfathomable to hold in isolation. The song includes a section that is essentially a tuneful wail, created to reconnect us with the messy, loud, and physical reality of mourning.
Reclaiming ritual, authentic expression, and communal grieving can be a form of resistance to the legacy of Victorian Britain, where emotional repression and sanitised mourning rituals became the default expectation.
Third sector burnout: How can we build sustainable services and treat helping professionals as people first?
For leaders and managers in charities and public services.
Across the charity and public sectors, many professionals are at their edges, resources are strained, and the divide between leadership and frontline teams is widening. Staff are often asked to stretch caseloads and boundaries to breaking point. Words and phrases like ‘burnout’, ‘dehumanising’, and ‘taken for granted’ dominate conversations with exhausted, disappointed workers.
Charities and not-for-profits being asked to do more with less is not a new phenomenon. But the pressures have intensified, and a crucial aspect of how this plays out is the way that those in the driving seat choose to allocate resources, design workloads, and communicate with their staff. The picture can look bleak, but there are choices to be made and space to be taken: re-imagining how we work together to bring about sustainable, meaningful change for service users and the workforce alike.
What Does a Somatic Coach Actually Do?
For anyone wondering what somatic coaching actually looks like in practice – and whether it could help.
The problem with niche titles
I have a confession to make: I sometimes dread the question ‘what do you do?’
When I tell people I am a somatic coach and practitioner, the title often sounds like a specialist niche that requires a ten-minute explanation. For many, ‘somatic’ sounds vaguely mystical, evoking images of crystal bowls or unstructured emotional catharsis. For others, ‘coaching’ suggests corporate performance optimisation, five-year plans, and relentless positivity.
My work sits in neither camp. It exists to address a practical, grounded reality: the challenges that bring people to coaching – things like exhaustion, chronic self-doubt, conflict avoidance, and career paralysis – need more than thinking and talking to be resolved. Intellectually understanding your patterns does not stop your body from reacting when the pressure mounts.
Essential Skills for Socially Conscious Leadership - Using the Seven Cs Model to Drive Change
For leaders, managers, and organisations moving beyond command-and-control without burning out their teams.
The flaw in technical promotion
In many parts of the working world, there has been a noticeable shift away from top-down, command-and-control management towards more collaborative, socially conscious leadership. Yet for some decision-makers, this evolution is still viewed with suspicion – dismissed as a soft, optional extra or a recipe for decision paralysis.
In practice, leadership development still tends to follow a flawed promotional pattern: an individual demonstrates excellence in a specialist operational or technical role, and is subsequently promoted into management on the strength of that expertise, with little preparation for the relational demands of leading human beings.
Performance Anxiety Part 2: Supporting candidates to shine in recruitment and audition
For anyone whose interviews and auditions don’t show what they can actually do.
As a coach and somatic practitioner, I often work with people who freeze or panic when the stakes are high. People facing interviews, major presentations, auditions, or board meetings, who find their body taking over the moment they are required to perform in front of others.
Most of us know what we are capable of when nobody is watching. That speech was word-perfect in the mirror this morning, but now that you see everyone looking at you, your mind has gone blank. You would give Mariah a run for her money when you sing in the shower, but you believe you couldn’t reproduce that performance for an audience.
Performance Anxiety Part 1: How to shine in performance and presentation
For anyone whose interviews and auditions don’t show what they can actually do.
As a coach and somatic practitioner, I often work with people who freeze or panic when the stakes are high. People facing interviews, major presentations, auditions, or board meetings, who find their body taking over the moment they are required to perform in front of others.
Most of us know what we are capable of when nobody is watching. That speech was word-perfect in the mirror this morning, but now that you see everyone looking at you, your mind has gone blank. You would give Mariah a run for her money when you sing in the shower, but you believe you couldn’t reproduce that performance for an audience.
Embodied, Courageous Communication
For anyone who has frozen during a difficult conversation or felt their body lock up when trying to speak.
Reading the warning at the base of the skull
Most of us develop protective habits against feeling unsafe long before we realise we are doing so.
In somatic practice, this is often described as body armour: holding chronic tension in the musculature as a physical shield against distress, long after the immediate threat has passed. When I began working with a practitioner to support my recovery, learning to track these sensations was eye-opening. By paying attention to what my body was doing when I felt exposed, I began to see the connection between physical sensation, emotion, and action.
I learned, for instance, that whenever I feel vulnerable or anticipate conflict, the muscles at the base of my skull tend to shudder or vibrate. It is not a subtle cue. It has shown up during tense meetings, difficult personal conversations, and job interviews.
If you can talk, you can sing!
For anyone who says they can't sing.
The gap between anatomy and belief
When I talk about the physical and emotional benefits of singing, the most common response I hear is a variation of ‘I can't sing"‘ ‘I'm completely tone-deaf’, or ‘I would love to, but I really can't.’
It is true that a small percentage of the population has a genuine neurological barrier to processing pitch. Up to 4 per cent of people have congenital amusia, a condition that cannot be explained by hearing loss, brain injury, or other cognitive factors. Yet, in any given room, far more than 4 per cent of people will insist they are permanently and completely unable to carry a tune.
That gap between reality and the stories we tell about ourselves is significant. We accept that playing the piano, the guitar or the violin will require hundreds of hours of practice to master, even though some people seem to have more of a natural affinity for it than others. But because our voices are an inherent part of our anatomy, we tend to believe that singing tunefully is an innate, binary gift: you either have it or you don’t.