Writing
Six essays, written between 2024 and 2025, on what I understand about how people work and what changes them. They are where the ideas behind these programmes were first worked out, and they are more personal than anything else on this site.
A note on how I write them: my background is in experimental research, and I still care a great deal about what the evidence supports. But much of what I share here comes from somewhere else, and I try to be clear about which is which.
On the Importance of Understanding
Why no strategy survives being ungrounded in understanding, and how a principle I taught in Marketing Foundations turned out to apply to people as much as to markets.
On Our Most Powerful Navigational System (Hint: it's Not Our Mind)
Emotions as information rather than obstacles, and the question I ask when one arrives with more force than the situation seems to warrant.
On the True Conductor of the Orchestra
Why mindset cannot override what the nervous system has decided is unsafe, and what that means for anyone trying to change a pattern by deciding to.
On Self-Presentation
What it costs to manage how we come across, and why the version of us that is managed tends to reach people less than the version that is not.
On Relationship
Why other people show us what we cannot see on our own, and why the moments that unsettle us most are usually the informative ones.
On Being Present
What actually happens to attention in the present moment, written from my own practice rather than from any research literature.