The Radical Act of Being Kind to Yourself
On self-compassion, why we resist it, and what makes it genuinely difficult for high achieving people. Self -compassion sounds simple. For most people in professional life, it turns out to be one of the hardest things available. Self-compassion has an image problem In many professional contexts, it sounds like something between therapy speak and self-indulgence, […]
The Aliveness – You Are Not Chasing
On joy, genuine contact, and why the feeling you are looking for is already here. Joy is not what happens when everything goes right. Gestalt suggests it is what happens when you are genuinely present to whatever is actually here. We have spent a good deal of this series in difficult territory. Shame, burnout, the […]
The Hardest Person To Forgive
On self-forgiveness, unfinished business, and what it means to finally let yourself off the hook. Most people think forgiveness is about the other person. Gestalt suggests the person most in need of your forgiveness may be closer to home. There is someone you have probably not fully forgiven. Not the person who let you down […]
Who Are You When There Is Nothing To Do?
A deeper companion to Be, Not Do, on identity, the self beneath the doing, and what remains when the doing stops. The last blog explored why we resist empty space. This one asks a harder question: what are we actually afraid of finding there? This blog follows directly from Be, Not Do: Rediscovering the Value […]
Be, Not Do – Rediscovering the Value of Empty Space
In a world that celebrates productivity, it can feel almost radical to do nothing. Our days are filled with meetings, messages, errands, plans and goals. Even our leisure time often becomes another opportunity for achievement. We count steps, track sleep, set reading targets and create bucket lists. The pressure to make every moment useful can […]
So What Actually Is Gestalt Coaching?
A proper introduction to the approach for those who are new, and those who have been here all along. Thirteen blogs in, it felt like time to properly introduce the approach that has been quietly running through all of them. A note to those who have been reading this series: if any of the previous […]
Holistic Leadership: Purpose, Empowerment, and Balanced Presence
What it means to lead as a whole person and why that changes everything. Leadership has been taught as a set of skills for long enough. This blog makes the case for something deeper and more human. There is a version of leadership that is essentially technical. It can be learned from books, developed through […]
The Invisible Cost of Always Being Available
On leadership, the reflex to solve, and the deeper value of stepping back. There’s a version of leadership that feels productive because it’s constantly busy. This blog asks what that busyness is actually costing. If I shifted more of my time from ad hoc requests to coaching my team, the value I would create would […]
What Drains You. What Restores You.
A Gestalt inquiry into energy – and why we so rarely tend to it honestly. Most of us manage our energy the way we manage our finances when we are avoiding the bank statement. We have a rough sense of things, we hope it’s not as bad as it feels, and we carry on. There […]
The Awareness Cycle
How We Come Alive and Where We Get Stuck The beating heart of gestalt and a map for understanding almost everything in this series. If you have been reading this series, you have already been living the awareness cycle. This blog names it and in doing so, ties everything together. A note before we begin: […]