A Thought I Kept

What if you could worry and still live your life? When survivor activist and author Sophie Olson joins me on A Thought I Kept, she brings something incredibly personal: a poem about worry, handwritten in her grandmother's old recipe book. Its message is simple. There's very little point in worrying about things that might never happen. But what if you can't simply stop? In this deep...

How much of your life are you putting off until you feel ready? Until you’re more confident. More qualified. More certain. Until the doubts have gone, the timing is better, or you finally feel like the kind of person who gets to do the thing you want to do. My guest this week on A Thought I Kept is photographer and podcaster Victoria Phipps , and the thought she brings is one that changed the dire...

Can a poem really change how you feel? My guest this week is Deborah Alma, poet, editor and founder of The Poetry Pharmacy, where poems are prescribed for the emotional ailments of everyday life. Deborah’s thought kept is: “A poem can fundamentally change someone’s mood.” It’s an idea that began while Deborah was working with people living with dementia, where she saw how a poem could take someone...

How do you deal with criticism without letting it change how you see yourself? And what happens when becoming more visible means becoming more open to other people’s opinions of you? This week on A Thought I Kept , I’m talking to leadership development coach, trainer and author Hannah Wilson about a piece of advice she was given early in her leadership career: when you put your head above the para...

What if fun wasn’t something we earned after we’d done the difficult, serious or important things but part of how we found our way through them? My guest this week is Anne Ditmeyer , an American writer, creative coach and workshop facilitator living in Paris, whose work asks one wonderfully disruptive question: What if there was another way? In this episode, we talk about Creativity, play and why...

What if the problem isn’t that you haven’t found the right way to live, work or be but that there isn’t one? My guest this week is Alice Thompson-Boyd , therapeutic coach, podcaster, psychotherapist-in-training and co-founder of the social enterprise Social Bite. Alice spent her twenties helping build an organisation that went on to have an extraordinary impact on homelessness in Scotland. But alo...

What happens when you spend so much of your life helping, caring for and making a difference to other people that you forget to include yourself? My guest this week is Nicky Marshall — speaker, mentor, publisher, wellbeing facilitator and author of No One Is Coming to Save You . Nicky’s thought kept is: “To make a difference in this life, I had to put myself in the queue first.” It’s a thought she...

Are you burnt out, exhausted by work, or wondering whether the life you’ve worked so hard to build is actually making you happy? This week on A Thought I Kept , I’m talking to career and life design coach Selina Barker about burnout, energy management, career change and what it really means to create a life that makes you feel alive. Selina and I talk about why burnout and exhaustion have become s...

What if confidence isn't where we begin? What if courage comes first? This week on A Thought I Kept , I'm joined by women's leadership and career development coach Sadia Ghazanfar , founder of Slay Your Dragons, to explore the thought she has carried with her for years: "Be brave enough to suck at something new." Together we unpack why so many of us wait to feel confident...

What happens when you spend so long supporting everyone else that you begin to lose sight of yourself? In this episode of A Thought I Kept, I talk to coach and charity co-founder Lois Jackson about caregiving, identity, emotional wellbeing and learning to matter in your own life too. In 2017, Lois’s fiancé, former professional rugby player Ed Jackson, suffered a life-changing spinal cord injury. L...

Motherhood is often talked about as something instinctive, natural, or inevitable. But what if the stories we've inherited about mothering tell only part of the story? In this episode of A Thought I Kept, I sit down with feminist cultural historian and bestselling author Elinor Cleghorn to explore the hidden history of motherhood and the women whose experiences have so often been left out of...

What happens when movement stops being something we measure, earn, optimise or squeeze into a busy day, and becomes something much simpler? In this episode, I’m talking to Wendy Welpton about the idea that everyday movement matters just as much as exercise. It’s a conversation that begins with movement, but quickly becomes one about trust, self-compassion, ageing, wellbeing, and our relationship w...

There are times in life when trying to be a good person can become exhausting. A good daughter. A good mother. A good friend. A good employee. A good partner. A good citizen. So much of our lives can be shaped by trying to meet expectations, keep the peace, and make other people comfortable. But what happens when being good starts pulling us away from ourselves? In this episode, I talk to Alice Br...

In a world that often feels noisy, fast-moving, and full of other people's expectations, how do we stay connected to ourselves? How do we know what's truly ours, what lifts us up, and what might be shifting us into someone we were never meant to be? This week, I’m joined by Claire Venus, writer, mentor, Substack strategist, and founder of Creatively Conscious. Claire is someone I turn to...

Burnout is often described as being too busy, working too hard, or having too much on our plates. But what if it has as much to do with how we relate to ourselves as it does with how much we do? In this episode of A Thought I Kept, I talk to Dr Jillian Bybee, a paediatric intensive care physician, certified coach, writer, and host of the Humans Leading podcast. Having experienced burnout twice her...

What happens when wanting something is reason enough? In this episode of A Thought I Kept, I’m joined by writer and journalist Rachel Hartigan to explore a thought that has stayed with her for years: “I do it because I want to.” This opens up some surprisingly big questions: How often do we feel the need to justify what we want? How do we separate our own desires from expectations, responsibilitie...

My guest this week Natalie Lue is known to many people for her groundbreaking work on people pleasing, boundaries, emotional baggage, and relationships through The Baggage Reclaim Sessions and her book The Joy of Saying No .  We talk about the emotional roots of perfectionism and over-responsibility, the pressure to keep proving yourself, and the exhausting belief that you have to “earn” permissio...

This week, I talk to Toni Jones about all things self-help. Toni is the founder of Shelf Help, the world’s first self-help book club and over the last decade she has read 1,000 self-help books while building a global community around reading, reflection and connection. We explore the difference between trying to optimise yourself and actually learning how to care for yourself. Toni shares why she...

In this episode of A Thought I Kept , I talk to Hiroko Yoda about grief, Japanese spirituality, uncertainty, ritual, belonging, and what it means to live somewhere between belief and doubt. We explore the idea of “half belief, half doubt” — the Japanese concept of hanshin hangi and how it can offer a more spacious way of relating to uncertainty, spirituality, and even ourselves. Hiroko shares how...

In this episode, I talk to Jacky Power about feelings — the ones we hide, the ones we soften, and the ones we’re not always sure we’re allowed to have. We explore what it means to be seen, and why that can feel both deeply wanted and quietly risky. There’s something here about the tension between expression and protection — how we might say things sideways, through poetry or humour or busyness, an...

There are days when you’re here, fully in your life, in your conversations, in the small, ordinary moments, and days when part of you feels somewhere else entirely. That's what I get into with Cathy Rentzenbrink this week. We explore what it means to live a life that feels both grounded and slightly unreal at the same time. We explore the tension between being present and being pulled elsewhe...

In this episode, I talk to Tanya Lynch about hope, resilience, and the ways we hold ourselves through change. We explore what it means to believe that things will be OK, not as a forced positive mindset, but as something lived and felt over time. Through stories of heartbreak, midlife, motherhood, and starting again, Tanya shares how this trust has been shaped not just by ease, but by everything s...

What if trying — in your work, your parenting, your creativity — was already enough? There are time when it can feel like you’re doing everything you can, and still wondering if it’s enough. The days where you’re holding work, parenting, and life all at once, trying to build something, care for others, and look after your own mental health in the middle of it all. In this episode, I talk to Imogen...

There’s something that changes when we stop doing life on our own. Maybe that's an idea that only makes sense once it’s shared, a feeling that softens when someone else is there to hear it, or the magic that comes from being a room of likeminded people singing Queen . In this episode, I talk to Laurence McCahill about connection in its most everyday form and what it means to gather, to listen...

In this episode, I talk to Rachel Hart-Phillips about grief, suicide, and what it means to be there for someone in the hardest moments of their life. We explore that quiet, often uncomfortable space where words feel inadequate and yet, where they can matter most. We talk about the fear of saying the wrong thing, the silence that can grow around loss and mental health, and how even the simplest ges...