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.
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.
Collective Psyche, Myth and Ritual
For anyone feeling disoriented by the stories our culture tells in a crisis – and looking for grounding that feels real.
Humans are hard-wired for connection. We evolved as pack animals who relied on safety in numbers, but we're also compulsive meaning-makers. When a crisis hits and the world stops making sense, the stories we tell ourselves determine whether we pull together or turn on each other.
Throughout human history, sharing stories around a fire helped our ancestors create a common identity, honour those who came before them, and navigate an unpredictable environment. Our ability to imagine together allowed us to build shared symbols, rules, and communities.