The Brave Next Step

A night at the theatre reminded me of something we often forget in leadership: people don’t think their way into feeling connected. Sometimes the body responds first. We feel the energy, the emotion and that powerful sense of being part of something bigger than ourselves. In this episode, I’m exploring what music, sport and theatre can teach us about moving people. Strategy decks and town halls ha...

In this episode, I’m joined by Emma Saccomani to talk about boundaries, people pleasing and the difference between genuinely empowering someone and quietly enabling them. Emma shares why boundaries aren’t simply about saying no, and why they can become too rigid just as easily as they can become too loose. We explore guilt, difficult conversations, self-awareness, capacity and the urge to rescue p...

In this episode, I’m exploring the gap between what we intend as leaders and how our behaviour actually lands. You might genuinely trust, respect and support your team, but if your actions communicate control, checking or hovering, that is the experience people will remember. We look at why this gap often gets wider under pressure, how unconscious habits can override our values, and why self-aware...

In this episode, I’m exploring observation as a leadership skill, and why being too close to a team, habit or way of working can make important patterns almost impossible to see. A recent conversation with a former boss reminded me how powerful it can be when someone reflects back something about us that we cannot currently see for ourselves. I also look at what happens when observations are ignor...

In this episode, I’m exploring the difference between pressure that drains us and pressure that actually helps us perform better. It started with something as simple as swimming, where I noticed that the targets I was setting for myself were creating more stress and fatigue without improving my performance. I’ll share what happened when I removed those targets completely, and what changed again wh...

In this episode, I’m exploring the psychology underneath delegation and why it is about far more than giving someone a clear brief and trusting them to get on with it. I’m looking at dependence, independence and interdependence, and what each one asks of us as leaders. I’ll also share why some leaders accidentally create the very dependence they complain about, why other people struggle to receive...

In this episode, I’m getting practical about upward influence and what actually helps an idea land with senior decision-makers. Building on the last episode, I’m looking at Yukl and Tracey’s influence tactics and the difference between simply having a strong argument and creating the conditions for someone to support it. I’ll talk through the tactics that tend to work best when influencing upwards...

I’ve had to learn this one the hard way: having a good idea does not automatically mean people will get behind it. For years, I often went straight to the decision maker, trusted the quality of my thinking to do the work, and skipped the slower job of bringing people with me. Sometimes that was impatience. Sometimes it was confidence. And sometimes, if I’m honest, it was arrogance. In this episode...

In this episode, I’m exploring why effective leadership is not about finding one perfect style and sticking to it. The people we lead are constantly changing, so the way we show up needs to change too. Someone who needed direction last month might need space today, while someone who seemed confident may suddenly need more support. I bring together situational leadership and co-active leadership to...

I’m reflecting on one of the hardest questions in leadership: what do you do when there is no obvious right answer? After a decision in my own business did not work out as planned, I found myself asking not what I should do next, but what I actually want. In this episode, I explore why ambiguity is not a problem to fix, but a condition to navigate. We’ll look at the tolerance, curiosity and courag...

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been doing more things alone, from attending a wedding solo to driving across Germany and exploring Munich by myself. None of it felt completely comfortable, but that was exactly the point. In this episode, I’m reflecting on the confidence that grows when there’s nobody else to lean on, navigate for you or absorb the social risk. Sometimes being alone reveals ju...

In this episode, I’m exploring self-authorisation, what it really means, and why it matters so much in leadership and life. I share one of the hardest decisions I made as a teenager, when I chose to protect my own wellbeing without anyone telling me I was allowed to. We often wait to feel ready, senior enough or confident enough before we speak, act or set a boundary. But confidence comes and goes...

What if the thing holding your message back is not what you are saying, but how you are breathing while you say it? In this episode, I’m joined by Melissa Thom, founder of Brava, to explore what leaders can learn from the world of broadcasting, voice work and performance. We talk about why public speaking fear is so common, how breath can change the way you sound and feel, and why confidence is no...

Why do people resist change, even when the change is positive? In this episode, I’m exploring how the brain’s bias towards threat detection can shape behaviour at work, and why resistance, disengagement or conflict may not be an attitude problem at all. I introduce the SCARF model and its five domains: status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. I also share practical examples of how le...

When we talk about breaking a habit, we often make change feel like a battle. In this episode, I’m exploring why words such as stopping, removing and giving something up can create resistance before we have even begun. I share a simpler approach: swap the old pattern for something that moves you towards the person or leader you want to become. With a real example of replacing one high-intensity ac...

In this episode, I’m continuing what has accidentally become a three-part mini series on psychological safety, trust, and what leaders can do when something in the team feels off. I talk through why it is so important to diagnose first, rather than rushing straight into action with a generic fix that might miss the real issue. We explore the difference between trust and psychological safety, the q...

In this episode, I’m talking about trust, and honestly, how have we got to episode 60 without giving it its own moment? After last week’s reflections on psychological safety, I wanted to pull apart the difference between feeling safe in a group and deciding whether we trust another person. I look at why trust is really about prediction and risk, how it builds over time, and why leaders need to kno...

In this episode, I’m sharing a reflective learning moment from one of my most extreme leadership testing grounds, supporting my son in his ambitions as an athlete. It has had me thinking deeply about psychological safety, what it really means to create it, and how easy it is for good intentions to land as pressure instead of support. I’m talking about the fine line between helping and over-enginee...

In this episode, I’m talking about accountability, one of those words we use all the time in business, but often mean very different things by it. Rather than seeing accountability as something reactive, something we only drag out when things go wrong, I’m exploring how we can think about it as a proactive relationship with a commitment. I unpack the difference between responsibility and accountab...

In this episode, I’m joined by Leah Boxell, CEO and founder of Enable Lists, for a conversation about legacy, impact and the people who shape us often without realising just how much they have done. Leah begins with a powerful letter to her first boss, David, the person who saw something in her at 16 and gave her something that changed everything: hope. Leah shares part of her personal story, from...

In this reflective episode, I’m talking about failure, or more specifically, whether we are sometimes too quick to call something a failure before we have actually understood what it came to teach us. After a recent experience where the outcome was not what I had hoped for, I found myself thinking deeply about labels, judgement, shame and the way we respond when things feel messy. I explore the di...

In this episode, I’m taking a slightly lighter route, inspired by a book that made me laugh, made me feel a little bit seen, and reminded me how easy it is to question what success is supposed to look like. It also got me thinking about gratitude, and why we have not really talked about it here before. I’m sharing why noticing the positives matters, especially when life and leadership feel busy, m...

In this episode, I’m talking about change, and why it can feel so much harder than we expect, even when we genuinely want it. Whether you’re trying to shift something in yourself, your team, or a whole organisation, there’s usually an existing system quietly trying to pull everything back to how it was. I revisit Kurt Lewin’s three-step change model, unfreeze, change, refreeze, but focus on the pa...

In this episode, I’m exploring a simple but powerful tool that can help us understand how we’re really doing as leaders. I’m talking about the energy emotion matrix, how our energy and emotions work together, and what they reveal about whether we’re performing, renewing, surviving or heading towards burnout. This is a practical conversation, but it’s also a deeply human one. If you’ve been feeling...

In this episode, I’m talking about something easy to forget and impossible to escape as a leader, people are always watching. Not in a dramatic way, but in the everyday moments that quietly shape how others respond to you, trust you, and decide what feels safe around you. I explore why leadership is never just about what we say, it is also about what our behaviour teaches people over time. I also...