What workplace trauma actually does to your brain. And what you can do about it. When I was seventeen, I started an apprenticeship at a small arms factory in a small country town. In my first week we were introduced to a drill press. A machine ten, twelve feet tall…

  A man who is decisive is a leader. A woman who is decisive is a lot.   A man who is angry is passionate. A woman who is angry is emotional. They are both emotional. That’s the point, and it’s a point the research has now caught up with, even if many…

There was a concept we used in leadership meetings at one organisation I worked at. You may have heard of it. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats. On paper, it’s a genuinely useful framework. Six hats, six modes of thinking — white for facts, red for instincts, black for…

On charm, manipulation, and what you can’t see until you can.   Heathcliff didn’t age well. Neither did my excuses for him.   I reread Wuthering Heights recently — in my mid-fifties, having remembered it hazily and fondly as a love story. Dark and dramatic,…

Somewhere between the pastel Instagram quotes and the $47 “Transform Your Life” PDF, coaching went off the rails. Manifest your dream career. Visualise your way to confidence. Vibrate higher. You’ve seen it. You’ve probably clicked on it. And if you bought it, you…

I became a manager the way a lot of people do. Someone thought I was good at my job, so they gave me other people’s jobs to worry about too. No handover. No training. Just a new title and an assumption that I’d work it out. So I did. Or I tried to. For years I assumed…