It’s a rare experience to feel truly heard by another person. More often, the ‘listener’ is mentally rehearsing their own opinions, stories, judgments or advice – and seizing the chance to impart them. It leaves us feeling disconnected and it can intensify conflict...

Our lives are stories of change.   Change sets the coordinates on our life path. And the challenges we encounter along the way are often linked to tackling change – perhaps in our day-to-day habits, or at the deeper level of our identity and sources of meaning.  ...

The pressures of the Covid era have not only created societal conflicts; they have also escalated the conflicts inside our own head. This ‘parts therapy’ practice helps you to prevent burnout, boost resilience and restore harmony to your inner life. Read the full...

Change happens from the inside out. That’s a popular piece of wisdom in the world of personal development and therapy.   It focuses our attention on the ‘inner work’ rather than the outer circumstances of our life. And it’s a sound, empowering principle. Up to a...

Last year, I heard a striking story about customer service from an unexpected source. It cut through all the ‘best practice’ that you might read about in management textbooks or glean from customer satisfaction data. It was a story that inspired me and, at the same...

Feedback processes at work are supposed to give us useful insight into how we’re doing and how to improve. But instead, they are often a source of confusion and resentment. Here’s how to encourage more clarity and curiosity on both sides. Read the full article on...

This June, it’s my 10-year anniversary of being a sannyasin, which means ‘seeker of truth’. More specifically, I’m an Osho sannyasin, a follower (in a sense) of the Indian mystic who became globally infamous in the 1980s.   When I tell people this – usually...

In Part One of this post, I talked about needing more integration in my life and my coaching work – and how Zen Coaching became part of the solution. To show how this approach works in practice, I’m going to describe the arc of a ‘typical’ session. Of course, there’s...

Integration has been a recurring theme in my life over the past several years. Previously, my attempts to find ‘balance’ involved lurching somewhat wildly between extremes: five years of hard labour in high-rise offices followed by a year or two getting my hippy fix...

In my previous incarnation as a business consultant, one of my biggest fears was to be caught on the hop without a good answer. My stock-in-trade was expertise, authority, knowhow. Confessing to a client or colleague, “I don’t know” seemed like a...

As we saw in Part One, businesses are duty-bound to set out specific goals and projected returns – but authentic mindfulness doesn’t respond well to this kind of marshalling. So where does that leave us? Is ‘corporate mindfulness’ a self-cancelling oxymoron, or can we...

Did you see the Buzzfeed article that everyone was talking about recently? It pointed to ‘burnout’ as an endemic psychological condition of the Millennial generation. In a long, world-weary dissection of her own and her peers’ life experience, Anne Helen Petersen...