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.
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.
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.
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.