I haven’t written here for a few weeks over the summer break. So I thought I’d do a bit of a summer round up of stuff I’ve found interesting recently - more of a smorgasbord of stuff than one essay piece of writing. One of the reasons I love writing on Substack is something said recently: ‘it’s a great place to put the things you’re thinking about.’ So here’s a list of things I’ve been thinking about this summer. Some of them connect. Some of them don’t, but made the cut anyway.

Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth (podcast)

Perhaps the best thing I’ve listened to all summer - and that’s saying something - is an old episode of the Rosebud podcast with Alan Davies. I’ve actually not historically been a particular fan of his - never got on with Jonathan Creek, never really connected with the stand-up - but his interview with Gyles Brandreth was a really powerful podcast and I came away having such a huge amount of admiration for him and warmth towards him. He had an unthinkably hard childhood: his mother died when he was young, and the years after were possibly even more brutal. And yet he’s managed, against the odds, to build a functioning adult life. What struck me most was how clearly he’s made sense of his own story - what psychologists call a “coherent autobiographical narrative,” which is when stuff is extremely hard but you can see it clearly and make sense of it enough so you have a life beyond it. At one point he talks about “the presence of an absence,” and how his mother’s absence shaped everything that came after.

I also loved the Rosebud episode with John Major - almost the mirror image of Alan’s story. Major’s childhood was poor, and unconventionally bohemian, but full of love - none of which I knew, growing up thinking of him as the grey-faced Major who somehow became prime minister. A cruel and inaccurate portrait, as it turns out. (Small aside: apparently Tony Blair started wearing make-up in the Commons and on TV to look better on camera, and Major refused - hence, forever, grey-faced.) The bit that’s stayed with me is Major saying that what his parents gave him - their love - served him better in life than any education could have. The quiet, invaluable power of unconditional love. And perhaps Major is one of the few 20th-century prime ministers who actually got that from his parents, rather than being shipped off to Eton at eight.

Other great episodes so far: Caitlin Moran, Grayson Perry, Amol Rajan. There are times when his interview style is a bit dismissive or on the side of the parent, even when they were clearly being negligent and not giving their kids what they needed, but it’s a tonic too in a way and possibly fosters greater understanding of both parties as the listener.

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London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe (book): An exotic summer holiday was off the cards this year, so instead I had London Falling for company as I lugged a watering can round my knackered-looking garden every evening. It’s brilliant - a piece of compelling, masterful storytelling. You’ve probably heard about it too unless you’ve been under a rock. The story of a London teenager who pretended to be the son of a Russian oligarch and who jumped to his death off a luxury building on the Thames. It weaves together many themes: parenting, social media, the consequence of the deregulation of the financial markets under Thatcher, Russian money in London, gangs, the trouble that telling fibs can get you into and more… It connects nicely, too, to The Gold (the brilliant TV drama about the Brink’s-Mat robbery) and Adam Curtis’s HyperNormalisation, exploring how Russian wealth flooded into the UK after the fall of the Soviet Union and how the UK government asked few questions. It made me think again of that brilliant docudrama about the The Salisbury Poisonings in 2018.
And then, of course, I did the thing where you have to listen to every interview with the author afterwards just to keep the story alive a bit longer. Adam Buxton’s conversation with him made me think about my own parenting and what I might do in that situation. Louis Theroux’s interview was brilliant too exploring more of Radden Keefe’s work and approach.

Another book I loved over the summer (and brilliantly read on audio) was The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett. Set in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, during the Great Depression, it follows three women whose lives collide. It’s a historical novel about friendship, hardship, injustice, and women fighting back, with real dark humour and adventure running through it. Genuinely excellent. Afterwards I watched the author’s interview with Oprah - what a strong Southern woman. That sent me back to her first book The Help, which is also utterly brilliant. And so interesting how long it took her to write The Calamity Club after the criticism she received after writing about The Help.

One of the great delights of the summer has been working my way through the newly published first issue of the Humanist Review of AI - commissioned by one of DeepMind’s founders, which I was put onto by my pal Jess Thornley. It’s brilliantly curated, with essays from some of my favourite thinkers: Alain de Botton, Ian Leslie (aka The Ruffian), Naomi Alderman, Nick Cave, Alison Gopnik and others, all exploring what it means to be human in the age of AI. I tracked down the one stockist in London that sells the beautifully printed edition and picked up a couple of copies, so I could sit on the sofa and read through them in the evenings.

Talking of AI and how it interconnects with humanity, the success of the summer TV shows has to go to Ann Droid, which 8 million people have tuned in to watch. A brilliantly observed comedy about a robot carer played by Diane Morgan, who also co-wrote it. Amazingly acted, excellent script and really thought-provoking - the clever embodiment of how LLMs interact with us and the consequences of that - all with an 90’s vibe. Brilliant.

The final Radical episode with Amol Rajan - before he left the podcast for pastures new (doing a Gary Lineker off to set up a media empire, perhaps?) - with Sophie Pender was also brilliant: is it time to abolish private schools? One friend sent me that to listen to; another sent me the BBC’s three-part series on boarding schools and what they’ve done for us. It’s a debate I’ve always been fascinated by. I was state educated until 16, then went to boarding school for sixth form - the opposite direction to most people I knew (who were leaving private school for state sixth forms that age). And now, with my son at an inner-city state school in Hackney, I’ve got a front-row seat on how state education in London has evolved for the better (to balance it out I’ve also got a daughter whose dream it is to go to boarding school where she can have a pony and one of those tidal swimming pools - too much Malory Towers). I've got a lot of time for Sophie Pender's argument about imagining the consequences of abolishing private schools. When I lived in the Netherlands, pretty much everyone sent their kids to state school regardless of social standing (unless you were an advertising expat working at W+K, who tend to choose an international school for the language barrier). I saw how much more cohesive it made their society. I thought the point about how the alumni of private schools are proud to go back and talk to students about their experiences, while those who 'make it out' from failing state schools don't want anything to do with their schools, and so the opportunities for supporting networks are lessened, was a particularly interesting one. It made me think about how much we can all do to support the next generation coming through.

Another highlight of the summer was seeing Nick Cave at Preston Park. Brighton has always held a special place in his heart since he raised his family there (and mourned the loss of his son, Arthur there), and it was a beautiful evening - before the dust bowl vibe took over all festivals and music gigs. The atmosphere was something else. And good old Kylie joined him on stage - clearly a lot of genuine love and affection between them - wearing a beautiful white dress that only Suzie Bick could have made.

We had a few lovely days in Devon over the summer staying with friends in Kingsbridge. Most seaside trips were to the gorgeous Hope Cove ('Inner Hope’ and ‘Outer Hope’ as they’re call - gets me everytime) which I love. But mornings were spent crabbing by the estuary in Kingsbridge. It was rich pickings this year - so many crabs, we had them escaping and running across the pavement.

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A few other things worth a mention:

• The kids and I went to see Deep Sky at the IMAX - short film showing the space footage from the James Webb telescope. The imagery was out of this world - pretty mind expanding (bit too many head shots to camera of NASA scientists weeping about the beauty of it all - give me Brian Cox any day of the week).

• We’ve been slowly (very slowly) working through a 1000-piece Odyssey puzzle that’s still not finished and still taking up the sitting-room floor. Would be perfect if I had a house where I had a room just for massive puzzles (and a life where I had time to do them).

• The Podyssey podcast (always brilliant) did a special episode on what they made of it - the good and the less good - slightly earnest but also very insightful - debates included why Nolan would make a film that doesn’t include any Greeks and doesn’t look like Greece (but everyone agreed the dog was a brilliant actor).

• I took my daughter to the Longdines Global Champions showjumping event with all the world champions at Chelsea. If you’re interested in horses or riding, or just seeing people top of their game at any sport, I’d recommend it. You can sit right up close to the arena, and there’s a chance to visit the horses in the paddock. (Tip - get the covered seating to avoid heat stroke - life saver on a 36 degree day). I’ve read Riders so many times that I just kept trying to work out who would be considered RCB and Billy this gen around.

• The North Face’s Climb Festival at Docklands. Free event, opportunities to climb and boulder, talks with amazing climbers and a competition over the water to watch them climb and then fall off into the Thames. Good vibes.

• Adam Buxton’s Successpod on Audible. Produced by Louis Theroux’s production company. Very funny (very Buxton) satire on all the big podcasts - so many good bits but his send-up of Sam Harris and Jon Ronson (who I think he’s mates with, maybe not?) is uncanny.. Podcast of him and Louis talking about it here also very funny.

• Dirty Business (Channel 4) - docudrama about the sewage water scandal and two admirable retired men (former police detective and profressional of computational biology) trying to take down what one of them describes as the UK’s ‘largest organised crime network’. I’ve thought before about setting up a charity protecting the UK chalk streams (I’m a currently lapsed fly fisherwoman) so this one was close to my heart and pretty depressing to watch.

• Ride or Die (Amazon Prime) - a new black comedy assassin drama series with Octavia Spencer (who I love) - it’s funny and well-written with a great cast (including Bill Bailey) and defo good for a light-hearted - though quite bloody - palette cleanser after the lying bastards depicted at Thames Water in Dirty Business.

On the coaching front, I’ve actually been coaching far more than I expected as it’s holiday season. So here’s a bit of coaching chat to finish up with. One tool I keep coming back to at the moment is the circle of control.

It’s a model developed by the business consultant Stephen Covey, and it’s simple: split everything on your mind into three circles. The outer one holds everything you care about but have no say over - the news, other people’s opinions, the state of the world. Inside that sits what you can influence - your relationships, your work, the things you can nudge in a direction. And in the middle is what you actually control - your own attitude, choices and actions. Most of our stress comes from spending our energy in that outer circle, on things we can’t change. The idea is that by visualising it, you can start to think more consciously about where things sit for you: let go of what’s outside your control, and put your effort into what you can act on. The lovely paradox is that the more you realise what you can’t control, and apply the circle approach, the more your circle of influence tends to grow. Here’s a pic to show how it works:

Something to finish with.

This, from John Major’s interview on Rosebud, brought a lump to my throat:

I’m Abi, a leadership coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries & beyond to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

I first came across the term ‘maxim’ when I started working with Nike in 2007. At that point, I was working for their ad agency, Wieden+Kennedy, and we’d travel weekly to their European HQ at Hilversum to present creative work, take a brief, or prep for an upcoming production. Nike had 11 maxims - 11 core beliefs in pithy statements - and they were everywhere: meeting room walls, corridors, referenced in every deck, talked about in every meeting.

Three years later, I left W+K and joined Nike myself, and the maxims became even more woven into my work life. They were the philosophy on which all the business behaviours were based. They were really powerful, and we all knew what they meant. I always particularly liked ‘Be a Sponge’ and ‘We are on the offense. Always’. I remember just how much they helped me think about how to approach my brand plan & creative projects.

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I was thinking about them last week as I spent the day facilitating a workshop for 25 young creatives on their careers - covering a lot of the stuff that we don’t get taught when we’re starting out. The workshop was about self-leadership and how that’s fundamental to building one’s self-agency -thriving life at work. One of the exercises we did early in the day was a values session. They had to write 3–5 values that they really felt were core to their beliefs and that would influence their behaviours (e.g. if transparency was a core belief, what would that mean for how they disclosed their LLM usage - or if bravery was a core belief, what would that mean for how they’d present their creative concepts, etc.). As they all worked in the world of brand building, I drew the parallels with how we define brand beliefs and behaviours for our clients’ brands - it was essentially the same exercise, but for themselves. And the Nike maxims came into my head as such a strong example of company beliefs that influenced everything.

Nike, of course, didn’t invent the notion of a maxim. They’ve been around for thousands of years. In Ancient Greece, maxims were short, practical sayings designed to guide everyday life, many of which were famously inscribed at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. These pithy pieces of philosophical wisdom (with well-known examples like “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess”) encouraged individuals to understand their limits and avoid extremes. Rather than complex philosophy, these maxims provided clear, memorable guidance intended to help people live their lives well. The Greek philosophers would carry these teachings from the Stoics or the Platonists around in little handbooks in their pockets (togas?) and refer to them regularly - reading them when a stressful situation might arise, an early self-regulation tool of sorts.

Many of the great schools of philosophy in Greece saw maxims as a central way to indoctrinate themselves into their teachings. They would meditate on them daily. The maxims were like neural shortcuts - they helped turn a conscious philosophical principle into an automatic habit of thinking. A bit like CBT for the ancients - where they’d assimilate these teachings into their inner dialogue and make them a part of themselves. We now know they were onto something, and that’s how the brain (and brainwashing) can work.

In fact, I was reading a book last week (highly recommend - I read an article by the brilliant Ade Edmondson (AKA Vivian from The Young Ones) and he said this book had a profound effect on him, so I picked up a second-hand copy as it seemed to be out print). In the chapter on Pythagoras, it has an anecdote of a young fighter pilot who was captured over enemy lines in North Vietnam and was subjected to seven years in prison, held in solitary and repeatedly tortured. This chap, whose name was James Stockdale, had come across the Greeks when studying philosophy at Stanford, and he had a copy of Epictetus’s handbook that he’d memorised passages from. One of the lines had been: “Some things are up to us and others are not.” When he was in this particularly shitty situation, he recalled that sentiment and he accepted that much of his life in that prison was outside his control, but that his own character, dignity, and self-respect were within his control - and no one could take that away from him. Through memorising the handbook, he could bring it to mind in his hour of need and inoculate himself from being brainwashed or broken by his persecutors. Similar to Victor Frankl’s experience from his time in the death camps of WWII.

Marcus Aurelius that the handbook of maxims was a ‘first-aid kit in emergencies’, to be kept on hand for those times of need.

I’ve been thinking about maxims - whether they’re Nike’s, a young creative’s, or a fighter pilot fighting for his life - and how increasingly important I think they’ll become as the world develops rapidly towards a more AI/human hybrid world. As I wrote about recently, I’m particularly interested in how we can increasingly make ourselves the most human we’ve ever been, and use AI to deepen our humanity rather than lessen it or replace it.

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Last week I interviewed a founder of an AI tech start-up, in my role as a Partner at the marketing consultancy I work with, Grace&Co. Their company helps brands get ready for the significant disruption coming round the corner for AI search. The premise being that very soon, the majority of search will go through the LLMs (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT, etc.), and the results will be shown within the ‘walled garden’ of the LLM, with transactions even being possible. So consumers will no longer use a search engine and then click through to a website - the whole brand engagement with the consumer will happen within the LLM interface. I was asking what makes a brand show up effectively as a listing within the LLM, and what criteria they might look for when assessing which brands to reference - and a huge indicator is how consistent the brand is across its entire digital footprint.

Now, for those of us who have been in the business of creative brand building for many years, the idea of consistency can be good, but it can also be a bit of a death knell for creative originality. The samey-ness of always showing up in the same way, saying the same thing - it can make brands feel reliable, but often that brand doesn’t speak to our hearts at all.

And that got me thinking about maxims. Because what I love about a maxim is that, at their best, they’re quite simple and profound. They are big ideas and values that can guide you - from which you can express that sentiment in many different ways. The sentiment can be the same, but it allows you to show up in different ways - to make the same point in a thousand different ways (like Nike’s advertising has always done). They are congruent with who you are but they are not always consistent. The former being way more powerful than the latter.

In fact, Pythagoras was big on this.

In his book, Jules Evans writes:

Pythagoras and his followers had a profound understanding of the irrationality of the human psyche. It’s not enough to transform the personality through abstract philosophical reading, although that has its place. You need to speak to the irrational part of the psyche using maxims, songs, symbols, and imagery so that your philosophical insights really sink into the brain and become part of your nervous system. Pythagorean maxims were short, cryptic sayings which packed together more complex thinking. For example, ‘Eat not the heart’ is thought to have meant ‘don’t wallow in unnecessary self-pity’. ‘Tear not to pieces the crown’ supposedly meant ‘don’t be a joy-killer’. ‘Never sing without the harp’ meant ‘try and live a life as a whole’…

I love that. He understood that we didn’t just need maxims that were on the nose, but ones that were poetic and profound.

My coach had many of these maxims. One that comes to mind is: ‘The truth will set you free’. It’s cryptic and yet so simple. And once you get its meaning (intellectually and emotionally), it has quite a profound effect on you.

So, I hope the LLMs will get their heads around that - that it’s not all about matching-collars-and-cuffs consistency, but that what we’re looking for is congruency. A brand that is held together by deeper meaning that rings true to the consumer when they experience the product for themselves too. That’s where Nike has been going wrong in recent years - it’s all very well having philosophy on TV, but if your product is poor, you have incongruency, which is a business nightmare.

My vote is definitely less for consistency and more for congruency. For individuals trying to live a good life and for brands trying to show up within the new world order of the LLM’s.

And all this thinking about maxims has made me want to get back on the case with a handbook. In our previous house, I had started a wall of quotes in the loo for my kids to read - trying to indoctrinate them into some philosophical wisdom (perhaps alongside ‘FLUSH THE LOO’ or ‘TURN THE TAPS OFF’ for good measure) - but I disapointed with my art direction so the poster didn’t make it into the new flat. So that’s now a mission for 2026: some loo maxims to educate their young minds.

As Marcus Aurelius wrote 2000 years ago:

‘Your mind will be like its habitual thoughts; for the soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts. Soak it, then, in wise trains of thought.’

Amen.

I’m Abi, a leadership coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries & beyond to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

What would Socrates have made of 2026?

Have you watched the BBC’s Dear England yet? I’m telling everyone to watch it. I missed it at the National and was delighted to see they’d reworked it for TV. A four-part series about Gareth Southgate’s time as England manager, exploring his leadership approach and journey for himself and the team.

It’s rare to see such human leadership playing out on the world stage as this did. And boy did it get results. Okay, football didn’t come home, but Southgate led England to their most consistent period of tournament success in decades: the 2018 World Cup semi-finals, the Euro 2020 final, the 2022 World Cup quarter-finals, and the Euro 2024 final. He also achieved a win rate of over 60%, making him one of England’s most statistically successful managers. Beyond results, he transformed the team’s culture, creating a more unified, resilient, and confident national side.

One of the key points in the story arc is when he convinces Pippa Grange, a cultural psychologist, to join the FA as his Head of People. Her role was to improve the team’s psychology, culture, and emotional resilience. She worked with players on handling pressure (especially penalty shootouts), building trust and openness, and critically reducing fear of failure.

There’s this lovely bit in episode one when they’ve been trying to work out what’s gone wrong for England. She says: “They are afraid. They don’t know how to ask for help. And we don’t know how to give it to them.” It’s a powerful moment - all these famous, well-paid, talented young men admired by the world, and yet they’re shit scared of failing on the world stage. And so, of course, that’s exactly what they’re doing.

As the series goes on, you see glimpses of the emotional work Southgate and Grange put into building the team back up - building them into a team that is deeply connected to one another. Southgate, who had overcome his own demons (missing the penalty in the 1996 Euros that saw England lose the final to Germany), took the big job and ensured that no one felt as isolated as he had. There’s a lot of what I would call “attachment techniques,” where they use strategies to deeply connect the players to each other - and to their football forefathers -to build their sense of safety and deepen their resilience. It’s such a brilliant example of how resilience is actually built out of being deeply interconnected, rather than the self-reliance myth.

There’s so much in it about kind, clear leadership. The high performance expectations are still there, but they come with a high support environment. As I say to my coaching clients, high-performance, high-support environments are the holy grail of places to work.

And it culminates in his famous Dear England letter - a love letter to the nation about the country and sport he loves. Honestly, it’s such a brilliant example of how great leadership works in a really accessible way. If you can get your kids to watch it with you, then do. I came away with a profound sense that this is how we are designed to work together.

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You might be surprised to hear how often I have to coach senior leaders on how to ask for help. Some of my clients might have hundreds of direct reports, but they usually still have a boss - even if it’s the board - and they often do not know how to ask for help from those above them, or around them. They’ve been taught that self-reliance is strength, and to only take solutions to their bosses, not their challenges.

I remember the first time I started learning about leadership development and realised it was the inverse of what I’d been doing my whole career. I’d been taking only solutions to my boss, not asking for help. Asking for help would put me in a bad light -I wanted them to think I had everything under control at all times. When I learnt that we should often take our greatest challenges to our boss for their help, it blew my mind. And that a good boss should not respond by fixing, but by coaching us to the answer, so that we grow further and have a lived experience of solving problems in the presence of others.

It made me think of a recent Substack article by Naomi Alderman about her travels around New Zealand this year. She was writing about the virtues of solo travel and wrote:

“My friend Annette said to me the other day: ‘People think this kind of trip makes you more independent, but actually what you’re often practising is asking for help.’ That’s a lesson I could do with constantly learning - how to ask for help, how to accept help, how easy and nice it is for other people to give help.”

I loved that. What you’re actually practising is asking for help - and how nice it is for other people to give help. On all my travels worldwide, one of my favourite things is the kindness of strangers who step in to help.

I wrote previously about something I’d learned from The Art of Connection: that people like you more when you give them opportunities to help you. It’s so deeply wired in us to help each other that we feel more human and alive when we do it. For someone like me (who definitely errs on the self-reliant side), that was a great reason to start asking for it more - it is actually pleasurable for the other person.

Which makes me think about asking for help in the age of LLMs. They are, of course, incredibly helpful and keen to assist, and they can be very good at solving problems with you. But the best relationships are where both sides learn and grow -and help each other. One of their limitations (apart from the fact they’re not a human being) is that you can’t help them back; it’s a one-sided relationship.

Already, LLMs are deeply interwoven into our relationships. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, “therapy and companionship” remains the single most common use case for LLMs globally. People are increasingly turning to AI as a low-risk space to rehearse difficult conversations - like conflict or breakups - and to get guidance on how to respond more thoughtfully in real interactions. These tools are also being used as informal relationship coaches, helping users reflect on patterns, emotions, and communication dynamics. And that’s because we get into all the crazy ‘I married my LLM stuff’.

I have mixed feelings about this. And about using tech as a human proxy, but there are some roles for LLMs that I can get behind. And honestly, whenever I’ve asked an LLM to check my draft email to remove any passive aggression or immaturity, it does a really damn good job. I often coach my clients to use it to run through their drafts before sending them off to a co-parent, challenging colleague, or teacher they’re pissed off with.

A great example of an LLM being used as a relationship coach is the brilliantly observed example in the latest Amandaland, where Ann, initially dismissive of AI, starts turning to ChatGPT for advice on how to engage with her adolescent son. She comically starts putting her phone on her pillow and speaking to it as though it were human: “Goodnight, ChatGPT.”

As I continue to weigh up what I think of AI and LLMs, and all the rapid changes that are happening, I keep coming back to this question: how can it make us more deeply human - and how might it reduce our humanness?

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Earlier today, I watched a 14-minute video from Chloe Lubinski, an employee at Anthropic, at the ARC conference on understanding AI. As I expected, it was mind-boggling to understand how rapidly the tech is evolving and how “human-like” (but not actually human) it is becoming. Towards the end, she talks about roles AI can’t replace, and about how important it is that we think carefully about how to use this technology for good (no shit).

The roles she cites aren’t surprising: gardening (caring for our natural world), caregiving (caring for others), self-care (caring for ourselves). My friend Jess, who shared the article with me, reflected on what this might do to the value of these roles in the future. Is there a chance that caregiving - often unpaid or invisible labour when applied to our kids or ageing parents, or low-paid in roles like childminding - actually becomes more valuable? Because the machines can’t do it. It’s quite a redeeming thought.

Lubinski’s concluding point is that Anthropic acknowledges AI labs operate under significant commercial pressures that conflict with ethical development, and that we need informed critics and moral voices to help identify blind spots. And that actually, the more we feed the LLM’s ‘morally good content’, the more good they will become (or the opposite):

“Our moral imagination is the raw material these systems learn from… the stories we tell don’t just describe the future, they could help create it.”

I found this both urgent and mind-expanding. We’re no longer in the realm of imagining consequences -we’re in an age where what we think, say, and write becomes part of the moral code for the future.

As I was watching it, I thought: what would the great philosophers make of this? If I could time-travel, Bill & Ted style, and bring Aristotle and Socrates to 2026 - what would they say?

Aristotle argued that we don’t become good by thinking our way into goodness - we become good by repeatedly doing good things until they shape our character. In other words, virtue is formed through practice, not intention.

If Aristotle is right, then we are shaped less by our intentions than by our practices - especially under pressure. Which makes the small, repeated interactions we now have with AI - drafting difficult emails, rehearsing apologies, softening tone - more significant than they might seem.

Seen this way, LLMs are not just tools of thought, but environments of practice. And if Aristotle is right, that means they are also involved in shaping character.

Which brings us back to moral imagination. If, as Chloe Lubinski suggests, the systems we build are shaped by human stories and values, then we are not only designing technology -we are rehearsing a version of humanity within it.

In another definitely-worth-your-time clip from the ARC conference, Jonathan Pageau explores the ethical implications of artificial intelligence by drawing parallels between modern technological advancements and ancient Grail legends. He asks whether these innovations serve human flourishing or lead us toward a kind of cultural wasteland -and urges us to prioritise wisdom, human values, and personal integrity in an increasingly automated world.

He implores us to become the most human we’ve ever been.

“Learn poems, read fairy tales, go camping, grow a garden, be involved in your community, your family, your relationships…”

And that’s why I love Dear England. It’s a wonderful example of a man stepping in to lead a team in service of making them more human.

And brilliant things happen as a result.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries & beyond to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

I first came across this quote when I was working at the Nike Foundation and we had a project in Rwanda establishing a girl-centred media platform, Ni Nyampinga. My friend, Jess, was the Brand Manager and her and her team had put together the most beautiful brand book, and on the inside cover there was this quote. Over the course of the last 7 years it’s been the most helpful quote to me as I’ve navigated building back my life to a version that I want to live.

Aristotle believed that a good life isn’t something that happens to us, but something we actively shape through our intention and actions. He wrote about the importance of developing phronesis - practical wisdom - the ability to pause, take stock of what’s happened, and decide how to act next in service of our telos, our deeper purpose. Without that moment of reflection, he would say that we’re just reacting, repeating patterns, reinforcing habits we didn’t consciously choose. But with concious reflection, experience becomes how we learn - and start to do things differently/better. A way of refining our character, our arete, and moving closer to the kind of life we actually want to live. He believed that reflection isn’t a luxury or a nice-to-have; it’s the mechanism by which we become more ourselves.

Modern science backs this up. Daniel Siegel’s work as a relational neuroscientist shows that reflection is not just a psychological exercise, but a neurological process that changes how the brain functions. When we reflect (especially when we make sense of our experiences in language) we activate and link different regions of the brain, particularly those involved in memory, self-awareness and meaning-making. This process, which Siegel calls “integration,” helps organise our experiences into a coherent narrative rather than a series of disconnected events. Without reflection, experiences can remain fragmented, stored in ways that are hard to access or learn from. But with it, the brain (literally) builds connections - strengthening pathways that allow us to interpret the past, understand the present, and anticipate the future with greater clarity.

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I had a couple of particularly rewarding coaching sessions this week with two separate senior leaders. Both of them worked for the same company -a high-pressure, fast-paced company facing huge challenges due to market forces. I had been working with them on making a reflective process more central to their day-to-day work life.

For the first client, he had been struggling with not being able to influence his global team enough and improve their outcomes. One of the strategies we’d deployed was reflecting on how he was approaching it currently, and what he could do differently. This practice helped shift him from exhausting control (hard to do with a globally dispersed team) to an approach with more positive influence. By stepping back and examining what was and wasn’t working, he had begun to conserve energy -letting go of the need to push everything forward and instead adapting his approach to people and situations. Perhaps most importantly, it had allowed him to recalibrate his expectations of progress -seeing that steady, slower improvement can still be meaningful -while becoming more intentional about where his effort actually makes a difference.

For the second client, the reflective work had a different purpose. He became aware that he struggles speaking to people in authority without getting nervous so he was avoiding any difficult conversations with him which was affecting his chance of a promotion. By becoming far more conscious of what was happening internally in those moments, we were able to put strategies in place to help him reduce anxiety and increase his confidence; how he prepares for those conversations in advance with clear narrative points, how he takes time to feel-his-feelings before he has them, and how he considers ‘what’s the worst than can happen’ (always a great way of highlighting how irrational our fears are).

So much of the progess made when coaching clients isn’t in the sessions themselves, but between them. One of my favourite things is when you meet again for your next session and they open the conversation by saying: ‘I was thinking about what we talked about last time, and it’s really made me think about X and that perhaps I often act as XYZ but I had a thought that perhaps I could try ABC…’ and you can see how they’re building up their reflective muscle.

Yesterday I was at a cub camp with my daughter when the camp leader called the kids together to do some camp reflection time (great idea I thought!). He said: ‘okay, I want everyone to tell me something that they enjoyed, something they didn’t and one thing that we could do at the next camp’. The kids piped up and said they loved the marshmellows/waterslide/campfire/banana with chocolate, that they didn’t like tent inspection and that next time they’d like to visit a waterpark/have a nerf gun fight/have chocolate for breakfast. And I thought, well good idea to do some camp reflection, but how about you ask them: a) one thing that went really well and why b) one thing that was hard/could have gone better and why and c) one thing they’ve learnt for next time. Now, that’s actual reflection for learning, Aristotle style.

The thing I love about the Mandela quote is that it is both about not doing and doing: taking the pause, taking delight in the distance you’ve come, and then continuing on. Rwanda, an African country I’ve been to many times, is known as the land of a thousand hills, so I can picture that kind of vista where you climb and pause, and then realise you still have another 999 to climb.

When I was a teenager, I would climb the hill behind our house in Portugal and sit there, looking out across the valley. It’s one of the things I thought when I visited last month to say goodbye and hand the keys over to the new owners. I thought of teenage Abi sitting on that hill alone, trying to process whatever teenage angst I had that holiday. There’s something about humans and height that feels like a wonderful aid to perspective. I’ve often found myself drawn to hills and mountains on holiday - like the Great Rift in Ethiopia, or the Klein River mountains at the bottom of South Africa - to sit and think about where I’ve been and where I’m going.

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And for Mandela, and his incredible life’s work dedicated to reconciliation and repair for his people, alongside huge personal sacrifice including 18 years of incarceration on Robben Island, was in part because of his ability to pause.

Viktor Frankl, who shared a similar philosophy, famously said that between stimulus and response there is a space. Reflection creates that space - and therefore creates freedom.

We often live with a never-ending to-do list. Life doesn’t really remove the difficult or the simple things -it just keeps offering more of them. But what the evidence increasingly shows is that people who pause, reflect, and actively make sense of their experience -what went well, what didn’t, and what they learned -tend to perform better over time.

One study by Harvard Business School found that employees who spent just 15 minutes at the end of the day reflecting on what they had learned improved their performance by around 20% over a short period, compared with those who didn’t. It’s a small intervention with a disproportionately large impact.

So for all the high achievers, and for those who might roll their eyes at anything that sounds a bit “woo-woo”, this is not hippy stuff. It’s about performance.

If you want to get ahead in life, build in reflection.

As I’ve been on ‘project build back’ over the last few years, I do a quick reflection right before bed. I use a great digital diary app called One Day and I write:

Something that went well, or a success.
Something that could have gone better.
Something I learned.

Across all the realms of life - work, relationships, parenting, self.

And interestingly, my brain really looks forward to it. It’s a brilliant way to end a day, before you start climbing up that next hill.

So, here’s the reflection technique I was taught by my coach. It’s simple, but it works:

• What went well and why (up to 7)

• What could have gone better and why (up to 7)

• What have you learnt?

• Any actions to take forward

I look forward to hearing your reflections ;)

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries & beyond to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

I learnt this at school when I was 10, in my English class with Ms Alcott - a strict, often spitting-with-excitement Scottish teacher who was big on us learning things by heart. And every year, when April rolls around and the blossom comes out and the birdsong arrives, I recite it and feel alive - and a bit proud of myself for knowing some Browning.

Of all the thoughts and feelings I’ve had about AI over the last year, some of the most pleasant are that it makes me think about what it is to be human. What it is to think, and feel, and be a person who is the living embodiment of all our experiences. And what extraordinary things, as humans, we can do.

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Learning by heart

I recently came across this short clip of the late, great philosopher George Steiner - a lecture about learning things by heart - a powerful 2 minutes and 11 seconds. He talks about the power of learning things by heart and what that can do for the human experience.

He quotes a poem by Robert Graves, printed in The Atlantic in 1957, calling out the difference between the things we learn by heart and the things we learn by rote - and the life-defining difference between them:

You learned Lear’s Nonsense Rhymes by heart, not rote;
You learned Pope’s Iliad by rote, not heart;
These terms should be distinguished if you quote
My verses, children — keep them poles apart —
And call the man a liar who says I wrote
All that I wrote in love, for love of art.

(Those are Graves’s em dashes, not Claude’s.)

And by the time Steiner says “learning by heart” for the fourth time, I really understand the difference - these are words that sit in your heart.

This was a particularly poignant poem of Graves’s, because in that wonderful way that life works sometimes, I had just been clearing out a storage unit and found my childhood copy of Lear’s The Quangle Wangle’s Hat. A few nights ago, I read it to my daughter at bedtime, able to recite the whole beautiful, wonderful (and very timely - it’s all about intentional communities, don’t you know) poem. And I felt my heart sing as I recalled those words.

Steiner goes on to make a profound point about learning things by heart as a political act - an act of self-preservation. He tells the extraordinary story of a woman captured by Stalin’s police, held in the dark in solitary confinement for three years. During that time, because she knew a 40,000 word text by heart, she composed a new Russian translation of it entirely in her mind, which went on to become the country’s definitive translation of that work.

As Steiner puts it: “what you learn by heart, the bastards can’t take from you.” As a Jew himself who escaped Nazi Germany, he was a contemporary of Viktor Frankl and part of that whole philosophy of how to maintain self-agency during extreme adversity.

I’m not sure if it’s just me, but I’ve often wondered how I would stay sane if I were held in solitary confinement. When I was growing up, I had a friend whose father had been held in solitary confinement in Libya by the same group who captured Terry Waite. It was an ordeal he never fully recovered from. So perhaps I thought about this more than your average teenagers. But I would imagine that I’d survive, in part, by reciting music, poetry, stories - things I knew by heart.

Unexpected memory

Over the Easter holidays, I went to a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with my daughter. It was a last-minute decision, and perhaps because I’ve always paired theatre trips with a visit to TK Maxx, she’s developed a love of it.

We chose this production partly because it was the only Friday matinee available. It was wonderful. London is extraordinary sometimes. There’s a theatre in London Bridge called the Unicorn Theatre, just dedicated to young people’s theatre, and this was their first collaboration with the RSC. It was visually stunning, well directed, and kept the original dialogue - all projected on the wall to help the young audience. Shakespeare with a helping hand, which I still need as much as a 9-year-old.

But the reason I’m sharing this is Puck’s final words. I learnt them by heart when I was young, and as the play closed: “If we shadows have offended, think but this, and all is mended…” - I found myself reciting them too. I’d completely forgotten I’d memorised them, but they all came back and I felt a thrill reciting them by heart.

So I’m entirely with Steiner on the glory of learning things by heart. A heart that only a human has.

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Reading and thinking

I tuned in last week to Amol Rajan’s Radical (one of my top three favourite podcasts), and his conversation with James Marriott on the decline of reading - and how it may be making us less intelligent. His argument is that reading isn’t just about culture - it’s the infrastructure of how we think, and therefore how we govern ourselves.

They cover a lot of ground (well worth a listen), but a key nuance Marriot makes is that the issue isn’t basic literacy (people can still read), but a decline in comprehension and depth. Reading develops structured, logical, reflective thinking. As reading habits diminish, so too does our ability to follow complex arguments, reason carefully, and hold nuanced views. We are getting less good at thinking.

And he makes the point that children naturally love learning things - they enjoy facts, rhythm, language, things they can recite. After all, it’s pretty hard-wired into us. It’s only really since the advent of the printing press that we stopped relying so heavily on oral culture to maintain knowledge accurately in society.

Although Marriott can be quite depressing to engage with (his new book is called The New Dark Ages), there is some hope. He suggests that, much like the rise of physical exercise in society as a relatively recent phenomenon to keep fit and healthy - such as the growth of running over the last 20 years - we may begin to build in “cognitive exercise” for ourselves because we want to stay mentally healthy in the age of smartphones and AI. This, in turn, may help drive a resurgence in reading. This doesn’t mean we can’t also take great pleasure in it. After all, I jump into a cold lake each week not because I want to, but because I know how good I’ll feel afterwards. I would put learning by heart quite high up the list of ways to look after your brain (and your heart).

Memory and resilience

I’m interested in this because I’m interested in how we build resilience in ourselves. That example of the woman in solitary confinement is an incredible illustration of that. As George Steiner says: “There is nothing you can do to a human being like that. No state can touch it. No despair can touch it.” This is an extreme example, but there is a through line from learning by heart and knowing things, to being more resourceful & self agent in the world. Cicero beautifully wrote:

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

What I love about the George Steiner clip is that his love for this is so infectious. So emphatic. He doesn’t say speak to our rational selves but to our emotional selves. He implores: learning by heart - what an incredible thing, what a human thing. And I think, yes, I want to do more of that.

What the scicence tells us

And in an increasing age where AI gives us access to almost everything instantly - an extraordinary expansion of what we can reach - being human has never really been just about retaining knowledge. It’s about what we’ve absorbed, turned over, and made our own. Meaning comes from what’s been integrated (as the neurobiologists put it) - what’s been metabolised into us through our experience.

Dan Siegel would emphasise that memory isn’t just a cognitive act - it’s emotional, sensory, and relational. When something is truly “known by heart,” it isn’t simply stored away like information on a shelf; it’s felt, connected, and woven into who we are. That’s why recalling a poem or a line of music can feel so vivid and alive - it’s not just remembered, it’s experienced again, integrated across multiple parts of the brain and bound up with who we are. What Siegel knows from studying the science, Steiner knew from understanding the heart…

So, I’m off to learn some more poetry and Shakespeare - and not just in case I’m captured over the Libyan border.

And I’ll leave you with my other favourite April recital, just as good as Browning, and very helpful to remember your coat on a chilly spring day:

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries & beyond to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

I’m not quite sure when it started, but at some point a few years ago, my eldest started referring to a ‘Famous Five truth’. He was about 8 or 9, and we were getting through the Enid Blyton classics at bedtime - enjoying their tales of independence, adventure, bravery, old-fashionedness (and discussing the outdated political and social parts).

If you’ve read them, you’ll know that there’s a strong moral code that runs throughout them that the children feel keenly. It’s all rather post-Second World War -an English moral code for how to be a good person. Things like: you never tell on each other; the importance of keeping promises; of being a good sport and so on... And a big one is that you can’t openly lie.

That’s a problem when you spend all your summer holidays on some unlikely adventure which involves doing things the adults around you wouldn’t approve of: breaking into castles, following smugglers, meeting after dark without your parents knowing. The way they got around it in the books was by spending a lot of time hoping their parents wouldn’t ask them what’s going on, so they don’t have to openly lie.

So in our house, it has become known as a Famous Five truth: when you’re not in a position to tell the whole truth (you might damage a relationship, hurt someone, or get in significant trouble),but you also can’t lie. So, how do you keep your integrity and not resort to lying?

After all, it’s easy to keep integrity when we’re in a position to tell the truth- but how do you do that when you aren’t? And why is that actually important?

And this situation comes up way more often than you think. When telling the whole truth isn’t quite an option without some serious collateral damage, but you don’t want to cross over into lying.

And The Famous Five sort of had it nailed. They would always find a way to not lie but not tell the whole truth that could undermine their morally-important adventure (fighting the badies) or their own moral code (to be a good sort).

And for me, working out how to navigate this - with integrity and nuance, is one of the greatest leadership skills we can develop.

It made me think of that Buffet quote:

“In looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.” - Warren Buffett

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Earlier this week, I was coaching a senior leader in the fashion industry. She shared that the business was going to be restructuring again - she’d been through several already over the last few years. She was concerned for her role, and for the large team she runs across several markets. She wasn’t allowed to tell them about the restructure for the next two weeks and would have to keep a lot of information back, so how could she keep their trust -at a crucial time when she needed them to stay engaged - if they discovered she’d been withholding the truth, or telling them things about their futures that were later untrue?

She also had another big dilemma: she had to apply for two roles herself. She felt compelled to tell the hiring manager that she really believed in the reorganisation -when she didn’t. She needed job stability for now (she’s a single mum) and needed to land the role in the short term while she worked out her longer-term plan. She felt that if she didn’t express belief in the future, she would reduce her chances of getting the role - but saying she believed in the restructure wouldn’t be the truth.

The leadership dilemma

In reality, most leaders spend a lot of their time holding information they can’t fully share. Restructures, confidential decisions, plans that are still evolving - these are part of the job. Full transparency is often impossible, yet withholding information can easily be experienced as evasive or even deceptive.

Redefining integrity

We often talk about integrity as if it simply means “telling the whole truth.” But integrity doesn’t mean full disclosure. I think It’s about being truthful within the limits you’re holding: not saying what isn’t true, not misleading, and being clear about where the boundaries are.

So this is what we talked through.

Firstly, we worked on a simple narrative for her team for:

• phase 1 (before they know anything),

• phase 2 (when they’ve found out but their own futures are uncertain), and

• phase 3 (when they know whether they have a role or not but still need to stay engaged in the short term).

The narrative told no lies, shared what it could (Famous Five-style), but was also clear about what she was not in a position to share holding boundaries (the bit that’s not really an option for Julian, Dick, George and Anne as they’re only kids and not the one in authority ).

Then we worked on her narrative for the conversation with her hiring manager. We looked at what language was true:
“I really want this role. I am so clear in my mind about that. I want to help build up the team.”

And removed what wasn’t true:
“I really believe in this restructure.”

After a few minutes, we had a script that felt compelling to the hiring manager and didn’t include anything untrue.

She did really want the job. She did really want to build up the team (while she was there). But she didn’t believe in the restructure so we took that part out.

So why’s it really important to get this stuff right?

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Why this matters for trust

I think we all know trust isn’t built just by what you say - it’s built by how people see you act (particularly when the situation is hard).

Employees can tolerate some uncertainty and incomplete information. They also understand that leaders can’t share everything. The problem comes when they’ve been actively misled, or when they realise they weren’t told as much as could reasonably have been shared under the circumstances.

The trust “chickens come home to roost” once the full picture is revealed. And once trust at that level is broken, it’s slow to rebuild -the damage goes far deeper than the immediate decisions themselves.

We’ve seen this first-hand in the UK with poor political leadership during the pandemic. People understood that not everything could be shared - but being openly misled caused lasting damage (don’t get me started).

The Attachment Lens: Leadership as Parenting

In moments of crisis, leaders function pretty much like parents. People look to them not just for direction, but for reassurance, coherence, and stability.

When leaders are perceived as misleading, the impact goes far beyond disappointment. It creates a rupture of trust that has massive consequences - teams become disillusioned, demotivated and the team or organisation can unravel quite quickly.

The internal impact: why integrity matters to you

Something I’ve learnt quite late in life is the cost of lying to ourselves.

I’m rewatching Schitt’s Creek with my daughter, and Alexis just can’t lie - it’s comedy genius watching her whole body contort as she tries. Until later in the series, when, as part of her growth, she’s finally better at being honest with those around her. When she’s honest with Ted about how she feels about him, it’s deeply touching and a sign of her growing up.

I think many of us have a bit of Alexis in us - we don’t want to upset others so we nod along and let some white lies slip out - all in the name of keeping the peace and not ruffling feathers or upsetting others.

But the problem is that deep down it makes you feel a bit shit about yourself. It creates guilt & shame, even if you’re not in touch with that on the surface. And this is bad news when you’re leading others. And it bad news for just trying to be a human not at odds with yourself.

As Kant brutally put it:

“Truthfulness is a duty, and one cannot lie without undermining the moral law within oneself.” — Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant

I’m not here to get all fire and brimstone on you. This is not a moral lecture (well, not totally) but I know from first hand experience, lying has quite a bit cost. And when you’re a senior leader it’s important to have a clear calm head that’s not making wonky decisions before your subconsciously guilty about your latest whopper.

Here’s what it boils down to:

• Don’t say what isn’t true.

• Be transparent about what you can and cannot share.

• Avoid false reassurance. Don’t fill gaps with certainty that isn’t real.

• Let your behaviour carry integrity.

The Famous Five instinctively understood this line: they didn’t lie, they said the bit that was true.

But they were kids. So they couldn’t do the next important step.

Tell others what you can’t share.

The goal isn’t radical transparency (lord help us) - it’s not crossing the line into untruth which is bad business for your team. And for your soul.

And sometimes telling the truth does feel a bit radical. In that way that you wish there was more of it about. As my late fellow Londoner once said:

Amen to that.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

The Beatles at the Indra Club on the Grosse Freiheit street, Hamburg where they played for 48 nights.

(The original article appeared here).

It was the Beatles who famously honed their craft playing the club circuit in Hamburg. Malcolm Gladwell calls this kind of deliberate practice the “10,000-hour rule” - the idea that mastery takes time and experience. I remember working at Wieden in Amsterdam and thinking: this is what that feels like. A real apprenticeship in creative brand building.

I’m not a creative, but I have been a creative leader, running agencies. And from that experience - and now as a leadership coach often working with creatives - I’ve seen what really makes careers thrive. Good agencies absolutely prioritise developing creative talent. And that’s essential.

But it’s just the beginning.

Being a well-developed creative is about far more than crafting ideas. In fact, being good at relationships, how you respond to feedback, how you repair issues, how you advocate for yourself and others - this is the stuff that builds careers. And it leads to far better creative work.

Abi Findlay, Partner, Grace & Co and Tutor, IPA Creative Essentials Certificate

So here’s some guidance on skills to help entry-level creatives can build a good creative career - and why this matters just as much to the companies they work for as it does to the individuals.

Building strong relationships

Being a creative is a highly sociable job. You interact with clients, production partners, account teams, strategists. So invest in developing relationships - across your department, other departments and beyond your agency walls.

This takes time. Relationships are based on trust and experience. Agency life can give you a real sense of being in the trenches together, which helps. But go beyond that and make the time to get to know people (and yes, the post-work pub drinks is an excellent forum for this as it reduces hierarchy).

When you hit a tough patch - and you will - those relationships will often be the people who put you right.

For organisations, strong relationships mean better collaboration and fewer internal frictions. Ultimately, that leads to stronger work.

Learning to handle feedback (and give it well)

Creative work inevitably involves critique, disagreement and difficult conversations. Sometimes feedback is well handled. Sometimes it’s brutal. Often the most brutal version is when your boss doesn’t give feedback at all - and you’re left wondering what you did wrong.

There are two sides to this coin. Agencies need to support CDs and ECDs to give feedback well (many of them hate difficult conversations). And creatives need to learn how to handle feedback well.

This is a hugely valuable skill for any creative and one that makes a massive difference to the quality of the work. A good framework of for how to digest, ask questions and not take it personally is enormously valuable.

When it’s mastered, agencies get faster progress from idea to solution without unnecessary conflict. In my opinion, healthy creative debate is the holy grail of an agency’s culture.

Behaving well under pressure

Pressure is inevitable. How people behave during it often defines their reputation.Some people find it easier than others, but it’s a skill that can be learned. How we handle ourselves in the difficult moments is often what shapes a career - and colleagues remember it.

This includes how you treat the people around you, as well as how you handle yourself. It really is that Kipling sentiment about keeping your head when others are losing theirs.

For organisations, teams that manage pressure well tend to work better together and sustain strong creative work over time.

Advocating for your development

Early-career creatives are often unsure how to ask for opportunities, feedback or progression. Learning to articulate your value and ambitions builds confidence and clarity about the next step in your career. On the surface this can look like it serves the individual more than the organisation (teaching creatives how to ask for a pay rise - why would we do that?). But actually what you want to teach is how to have transparent conversations about progression that benefit both parties.

When people know how to advocate for themselves, organisations benefit from more engaged and motivated teams. We’ve all had the great employee who left and blindsided their department because nobody really knew what they wanted.

Conclusion

Creative industries will always celebrate talent and rightly so.

But the careers that endure, and the cultures that produce the best work, are rarely built on talent alone.

They’re built on the everyday human skills of working well with others: relationships, communication, resilience and self-awareness.

And the wonderful thing is, they can all be taught.

Abi Findlay is a Partner at Grace & Co, and is a tutor on the IPA Creative Essentials Certificate - an eight-week qualification programme for early-career creatives beginning in April 2026.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

the bag that holds our family together

I realised this week that I’ve been co-parenting now (7 years) for longer than I parented together. My son is about to be 13 and we separated when he was just 6.

Although I’m definitely not a co-parenting coach, or a parenting coach, I do get asked to share tips or wisdom on co-parenting. I also get referred to coach senior leaders who also happen to be going through a separation and need to work out the whole new roadmap that is navigating work and home life as a single-parent household.

So I hope this is useful to someone. There are some brilliant books out there like Parenting Apart. And I became a student of all of Karen Bonnell’s work - and had some invaluable 1:1 coaching sessions with her when I was really in the thick of it.

And the big, important advice is important. But, for me, much of the life-saving stuff came in the small ways I adapted how I ran our home & in how I changed how I parented. And, firstly I’d say, I’m not sitting here with it all figured out - it still remains one of the most challenging aspects of my life - how to navigate life with kids over two homes and two different sets of values and approaches and different ways of running a house. BUT it is infinitely better than it was and for that I am truly grateful and proud of my kids, myself, hell, even my ex (yes, I can say that now and really mean it).

So, the big stuff the experts tell you is true and important. There’s a good simple guide on the non-conflictual separation website, Amicable. I like their list of how to co-parent well:

Communicate respectfully
Avoid talking about adult issues in front of your kids
Stick to your parenting plan
Respect each other’s rules
Don’t speak negatively about the other parent
Keep each other in the loop
Be flexible
Make clear financial commitments
Encourage relationships with extended family
Seek support when needed

Of course, the people who choose to have a look on Amicable’s website are the few who have a decent chance of actually managing to co-parent like this from the start. The majority of us, when we separate, are not in such a cool, measured headspace and it’s really damn hard to keep calm, be the bigger person, and not simply want to take the other person down.

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Early on in my separation, there was one particular piece of advice I got which was a massive lightbulb moment. There was a diagram in a book, possibly in one of Karen Bonnell’s books, but I can’t find it now, so I’ve drawn it below. Here you go:

The conflict will keep you connected.

The point it was making is that conflict is what keeps you connected. That conflict is actually really intimate. And that by staying in conflict, it’s a way for our attachment system to stay connected to our ex-partner (a core attachment figure in our lives) . And that our attachment system can’t really tell the difference between hate and love. They are BOTH very intimate. So in order to detach from your ex, you need to move the relationship from Love or Hate (intimate) to a warm business relationship (not intimate). That blew my mind. And although it is not easy to do at all, it became a clear roadmap for where I wanted to be.

You don’t need to do pizza Fridays.

The other big “whoaah” point that I want to share is that I had some very smart professionals around me who could help me calibrate the balance between not being in deep conflict with my co-parent, but not also pretending I could flip easily to a non-emotional, highly cooperative relationship. This was really important to me.

There’s now pretty irrefutable data on what causes damage to kids in separations, and it points to the fact that it’s not the separation itself, it’s the conflict. So anyone who’s interested in protecting their kids and wants to read what the science says (many people), knows that it’s best to be highly cooperative with their co-parent. BUT actually it’s a really calibrated line to tread - to also ensure you’re being boundaried and are (often finally) standing up for yourself. Once I understood that, it was really liberating. I didn’t have to do pizza Fridays with my co-parent just for the kids’ sake. He didn’t need to come into my flat. We could be respectful while I could strongly stand my ground. That calibration was so important for me to keeping my emotional wheels on in the early days.

It’s not about being right or wrong.

I could write a whole book about the family court system (which luckily I only had to dip my toe into) and how it’s a blunt tool and it’s not a “right/wrong” justice system. It will always consider what’s best for the child, not reward one parent who was in the right 9/10 (naturally me of course). It took me so long to get my head around that. I wanted moral vindication so much, but once I let that go, everything became so much easier.

Keep the relationship with your ex, not their partner.

I’ve been tempted many times to just work with my ex-partner’s new girlfriend on the mountain of logistics that co-parenting involves. She’s probably more organised, more responsive. But I had some good advice early on to keep the relationship with the other co-parent. And I’ve been amazed over the years how much he’s stepped up since we separated. And the kids get to see that. They see it’s their dad who helps with homework, packs the bag to go between houses, takes them to the dentist, gives them their antibiotics. They see him showing up for them, even though he’s not a naturally organised person. That’s important for their relationship.

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So that’s some of the bigger stuff I’ve learnt about co-parenting. But a co-parenting relationship is build through a million smaller logisticals and this is some of the stuff that I’ve also found life changing/saving:

1. Write the bits of the plan you can write: Writing a co-parenting plan is probably the biggest thing to do and I could write a whole article just on this. Many poeple will start with the CAFCAS template. However, I think the most important part is how you do it, particularly when you might be in high conflict and disagree on most things. My advice (that my coach gave me): just start simply, with the stuff you do agree on. It took me 18 months to be able to sit down and draft one with my co-parent. The way we did it was that we’d have a simple agenda with non-contentious things on it, and as we agreed them, that’s what would build our plan up. Every time we hit something we disagreed on, we’d put it to one side and say we’d come back to it. After each session, I’d write up what we’d agreed. After three sessions of doing that, we actually had quite a bit of a co-parenting plan and that started to feel better and we could even face tackling some of the more contentious topics. We did need some legal help on things like parent time, but we actually managed to do holidays, birthdays, schools by ourselves - no mean feat.

2. Start Holiday planning 4–6 months out: I know that sounds like a lot but I try and plan the Christmas holiday when we’re still in the summer holidays. I’ll write a draft based on the broad agreement (about five nights each, alternating - and taking it in turns each year for Christmas). It just means there’s plenty of time to plan the stuff you’ll need as a single parent to keep the wheels on over the holidays.

3. Daily special time: Special Time is a Hand in Hand Parenting tool that I’ve been using for years. It’s a tool for connection. The idea is that you have an amount of time - it can be 5 minutes, it can be 30 - and you set an alarm and during that time, your kid calls the shots on what you do (you can define what’s off limits up front - my line is no throwing eggs in the house). Some popular ones in our house have been indoor snowball fights, bed Olympics, donkey rides (me as donkey), water balloon fights. But it may also be an episode of Bluey (or these days Schitt’s Creek more like). The idea is that your child is in charge - after a day at school of being told what to do all day - so they can counter their powerlessness - and often it’s really fun and funny. Then when the timer goes off, there might be defiance and anger leading to big tears which might be well needed (emotional cleaning house) before bed. It sounds hard but it’s good “business sense” as it helps with more flexible behaviour. and it can just be 5 minutes of your day. I think now my son’s 12, we’ve pretty much stopped doing it daily, but he’ll still join in when we’re on holiday (last week was playing tag along a Marriott hotel corridor network in our PJs).

4. Put the effort in on birthdays (your own included): As teeth-gritting as it can be in the early days, make sure your kids have a present for their other parent. You remind them to make a card, make something homemade or take them to the shop to choose something. Even when you’re seething with your ex, support your kids to put some love and time into their other parent’s birthday. AND, just as importantly, make sure you help them prep for your birthday. In the early days, when things were still very challenging, I would make sure they had an adult to take them to the shop so they could choose me a gift I didn’t know about. And we’d keep a box full of party decorations so they could surprise me on my birthday morning. They loved being able to do that.

5. All the extra clothes: Thank goodness for Vinted. I spend my life buying second-hand denim for my daughter so she has enough jeans in both houses. It’s quite hard for kids to never really know what’s in which wardrobe - mum’s or dad’s - so I often buy doubles of stuff so they have enough in both homes. Early on, I had to learn to let go of trying to control which house the expensive party dress I’d just bought my daughter was in. It deeply irritated me and I’d get really annoyed. Now I buy on Vinted and don’t sweat it. The same for double bunny rabbits, blankets to cuddle, double football boots. Our old babysitter told me once she felt like a snail her whole childhood with a bag on her back between two homes. So where possible, I try to double up. And yes, hand me downs are a gift from heaven for this reason.

6. A waterproof bag for between homes: I love this practical tip. Get a waterproof holdall for moving school uniform and the stuff that you can’t double up on that just has to move back and forth between homes. The amount of times we’ve had to stash the bag in a bush outside their dad’s house because they’re out and I have to get to work - and it all stays dry. I’ve got one of the The North Face vinyl ones that I bought 20 years ago when they were cool but they’re uncomfortable to actually packback with - it’s finally found its calling.

7. An emotional tank-filling day once a term: Sometimes my kids’ tanks will be really empty after a long weekend away. They have a half sibling relationship to navigate, a step-mum, and just the difference between the two houses. And I’ve found that if I give them a duvet day once a term they can use, they go to school pretty happily on every other day. My son doesn’t really use it anymore as he’s at secondary school where you have to do 90 minute catch up if you miss it but it helped enormously for years. We try not to lie about it to the school, I write “they’re under the weather” on the parentmail app - which they are. It’s a no-screens day at home recharging (or I’d never get them to school, lol).

8. Use Claude to take the shittiness out of your messages: There are many things I don’t think you should use LLMs for when you’re trying to build a genuine relationship (like writing genuiune messages yourself - that actually sound like a human) BUT they are amazing at taking the passive aggression out of your communications. A prompt like: “Please re-edit my message using a non-violent communication framework - keeping my natural voice and personality.” - is really quite amazing at removing the barbs. It took me 2-3 years of my coach helping me re-draft all my messages to my ex - and now an LLM can do a pretty good job in under 10 seconds.

9. A framed photo by the bed: Every now and then we pick out a recent photo of us together and frame it and they take it to their dad’s house and put it by the bed to help with homesickness. I’ve also suggested before that they could ask Daddy to send me one of them if they wanted and I printed that for by their bed at mine. I’m not going to say it was easy when I had to print a photo of them with their new baby sister on the sofa in the house we used to live in together (but they didn’t know that). Similarly I might put a little letter or note in their bag if I felt they needed it to find in their bag before bed.

And a few that aren’t about co-parenting but are about keeping the solo parenting wheels on:

10. Smart reminders: Total lifesaver. I spend my life in one room with one child while I’m hoping the other child is doing what they’re supposed to - turning off the TV or their game and starting their homework/reading/tooth brushing. If I had a word cloud for stuff I say the most in our house, the biggest phrase on the page would be: “Alexa, time 10 minutes.” Then they know they’ve got 10 minutes and then they need to crack on with their maths/shower/packing their bag. Yes, of course I need to nudge them, but it’s a massive help at keeping the logistics moving.

11. Deliveroo. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve paid £10 just to get a pint of milk at 9pm when the kids were little and I couldn’t leave the house. (yep, single parent tax is definitely a thing, beyond the rent). But I often think - what did people do before?

12. Fully stocked medicine cupboard. Some things can’t get on Deliveroo and there’s nothing that will send a single-parent household off kilter quicker than an attack of itchy bum worms at bedtime. Piriton, Calpol, bum worm banana liquid stuff, emollient - all of it always stocked up.

13. A slow cooker: One of the things I missed the most after separating was a sunday lunch. They just aren’t fun when you’re the only parent and you have to cook and parent. But a slow cooker that’s working away for you all day, and when you come home from a day out with your kids, and you open the door, and the waft of cooking greets you, it’s a brilliant hack. It feels like someone’s been at home caring for you all day. (Our current favourite is nachos using vension mince cooked in the slow cooker for 6 hours - highly recommend).

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I’ve probably forgotten so many things - because kids change. What my kids needed when they were 2 and 6 when we separated is different from now when they’re 9 and 12. And to anyone reading this right in the thick of it, it does get easier - my son can walk between our homes, he has a Nokia he can call me from, he has a key to let himself in when he wants to and often pops in at the weekend to pick up his football or to watch some anime with a friend. But the fact they need a solid base - that doesn’t change. My son still lines up all his teddy bears carefully under the duvet before he leaves for his dad’s. They both call the cat’s name as soon as they walk in the door.

And I am very grateful for semi-remote working. Yes, I think we’re probably better in an office together most of the time - better for creativity, for relationships, for smarter thinking - but as a co-parenting single parent, I feel so fortunate that I can have a really stimulating and interesting job and still feel so connected to my kids. And when you co-parent and you don’t have your kids at home all the time, being there for them when they are really matters. Finding small ways to fill up emotional tanks after school before bedtime (making a plate of snacks, a quick chat betweeen Fortnite games, sitting on the edge of the bath hearing about their day) makes all the difference.

And 7 years into co-parenting, we have somehow built a good relationship. Last week I went for my ex’s birthday lunch. He invited me to go along and I sat next to his girlfriend, opposite their daughter who was next to my daughter and my ex on my other side, opposite my son, next to his grandparents. And the kids bought presents and cards and we chatted and ate and it was good enough.

The last thing I’ll say is that your kids will tell you when you’re getting it wrong. If I’m ever a bit down on their dad (he can still drive me bananas), they’ll pull me up on it. Or if they think our behaviour is sub par, they’ll mention it to me. They’ve developed a keen barometer for what’s up to scratch or not these days I don’t feel I need a co-parenting book, I just ask them and they’ll tell me.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

Last Saturday I was down the pub with an old friend who had just suffered a nasty break-up. She was sharing how one of the most galling things for her was that he has a great network - his brother round the corner, a great mate in the flat above him, a team of people he likes and employs in his music studio. It felt, to her, like he had all the support in the world.

And she’d left that world. She was out in the cold with very little in comparison. She felt isolated and alone - she needed somewhere to live, & some more income to supplement her current salary, pronto.

Most of us know, intellectually, how important connections and community are. The work of Robert Waldinger and his team on the Harvard Adult Development Study has shown that it’s the quality of our relationships - more than smoking, drinking or cholesterol - that predicts how long we live.

Post-pandemic, I think we feel this in our bones. We need friends, family, community.

But as I sat opposite her, I thought of her connections.

This is someone with an extraordinary network - compelling, creative, resourceful, interesting people across art, architecture, academia, physics, critical theory. Across London, Paris and beyond.

But in that moment, heartbroken and displaced, she couldn’t see what I could see.

So we talked about the power of her invisible network - and how it could change her life.

This article is for my friend. For anyone who needs a roadmap to unlock the gold mine they’re already sitting on.

And I don’t mean that in an extractive, “use your mates” way. I mean relationships are pure gold - the most valuable assets we have. When cared for and cultivated properly, they transform our lives.

I’ve written this as a 90-day plan because I love a 90-day plan. Three months is enough time to see real momentum, and short enough to stay focused.

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So, what do I mean by “world-class”?

I don’t mean thousands of LinkedIn followers. Or knowing super famous people. My definition of world class means a network with depth of mutual trust and respect, diversity of perspective and strength across sectors. And vitally, people who return your call and people who tell you the truth.

That’s world class in my book.

And what if I’m not in a position to network like someone who has a wife at home taking care of the kids while I’m off at the country club?

I recently went to an event where there were three speakers - two men and one woman - and both the men, when asked about career advice, basically said: network as much as possible at corporate dos, events and days out with your boss. It will build your career.

The woman (very likely a working mother, I would guess) had an entirely different answer - about values, consistency, listening well, building a world-class team around her.

And I thought: yes. She doesn’t have time for a round of golf to help secure that next promotion.

You’ll be pleased to know this approach works for people in all different situations. It has had to - to make it work for me.

I would also add that it works if you weren’t lucky enough to go to an school with an ‘old school tie’ network build in, or have a strong family connections to give you a leg up. More and more people are the first person in their family to go to uni and on to a white-collar role. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have a network, it just might look different, and have different gaps.

And what if I hate the idea of networking?

Well, that’s good, because most decent people I know do hate networking. They love the people they know, but they hate the idea of going to a networking event or asking something of someone.

So this approach should work for you.

I’ll let you into a secret:

You already know the majority of the network you need to make a really good start.

We all hugely underestimate the people we already have in our orbit. We forget former colleagues, old clients, university friends, past collaborators, ex and current neighbours, our parents’ friends’ kids, people we backpacked with - and so on.

It’s just invisible to you.

And that’s the job of the 90-day plan.

The key to building a great network:

To enter with a spirit of generosity - how can I help others and contribute to what they need?

As the imfamous Dale Carnegie wrote:

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

Okay, so where do I start?

Firstly, get clear about why you want to build this network.

Simple but important. It might be that you want a new job (a common one), or to build up your business or consulting offer. It might be that you’ve had time off raising kids, or that you want to do some moonlighting to supplement your salary. Or that work’s fine but you want to future-proof your career. Or it may not be about work, it might be about rebuilding a life after a divorce, or moving country.

Just have this in your head before you start.

Although, in my experience, leads and opportunities can come from the most unexpected places, so don’t go this too straight on.

The best time to start building your network is not when you need it. Think of it as paying into an insurance pot for a rainy day.

That said, most of us don’t do that, and we focus on it when we need help urgently - and that’s okay. But you don’t build a network by asking for things straight away, it doesn’t go down well. You need to build it with a geninune intention to want to connect.

So be clear on your “why” - it’s good to be clear - but hold it lightly . I’d encourage you to keep it broad.

If you want to get another job in advertising, you might prioritise the ad industry first. But if you’re a leadership coach (like myself), or interested in brand consultancy or starting your own voiceover business, you’ll probably want to cast a broader net.

For example, I often coach leaders in the creative industries but define “creative” quite broadly, so I’m interested in connections well beyond advertising.

And, importantly, also make sure you’re activating people in your network that you just like anyway. Because being around other humans that you just really like, is one of life’s greatest pleasures and great things can germinate from that.

I’ve recently commented on an old school friend’s post on LinkedIn ( I really loved what he’d posted) and now I’m off to a comedy night with him next month. I haven’t seen him for 12 years.

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Now write your 90-day plan outline

So you’re ready to write your plan outline. I suggest 3 phases (though they overlap quite a bit). It will look something like this:

• Phase 1 (Days 1–30): Audit and reach out: catalogue who you know and get back in touch.

• Phase 2 (Days 31–60): Network expansion: map the gaps and plug them.
  Phase 3 (Days 61–90): Contribution and visibility: work out how you can contribute (not take).

I suggest you put time in your diary daily to work on this. As it’s important, not urgent. 20 minutes daily is a good chunk of time - manageable but useful.

Phase 1 (Days 1–30): Audit & activate

Week 1:

Map your current network. This is the archaeological digging part of the process. It’s the most intensive stage. But I’ve found that once I start, additional people pop into my head more and more, even when I’m not actively researching - which I love.

Keep a spreadsheet to log your connections. Just name, title, how you got in touch (‘sent text asking for coffee’ etc), next steps.

Michael Melcher, author of my favourite networking booked called ‘Your Invisible Network’, says there are 7 types of relationships you need to build your career:

• Weak ties

• Bosses & senior stakeholders

• Colleagues

• Clients

• Mentors & sponsors

• Friends

• Beneficiaries

Thinking in these constellations can be helpful. The main places to dig:

• Go through your LinkedIn contacts

• Go through your WhatsApps

• Go through your phone contacts

Think about:

• Past colleagues

• Old bosses

• School friends

• University friends

• Ex-neighbours

• People you went on courses with

• Local community connections

• Old family friends

• Flat mates

It’s hard to put a number on it, but aim for at least 100 people you’ve crossed paths with in some way.

Weeks 2–4:

Start getting in touch.

Aim for 3–5 people a day.

Most of us love hearing from people from our past - we just don’t do it because we’re busy and life gets in the way. Don’t worry about awkwardness. Some people may not respond. That’s okay.

The important thing is that you are not leading with an agenda. It’s not: “Hi, I need a job, can you help? It’s a proper reconnect.

Some examples of what you could say:

“I thought of you the other day because I saw X and it reminded me of that shoot in Spain we did. How are you?”

“I’m making the effort to get back in touch with people I really liked working with, and you came to mind.”

“I read this piece in The New Yorker and it made me think of your dad and his role as a firefighter when we were growing up. How are you?”

Simple rules:

• Make it warm

• Add something specific

• Ask about them

• Don’t ask for anything (just saying that bit again as it’s important)

Not every reach-out needs to lead to coffee. See how the conversation goes.

If it’s on LinkedIn, get their email or number when appropriate - it’s much easier to build relationships outside the low-priority world of LinkedIn DMs.

Really you want to use digital connection to faciliate deeper connection, but it’s a brilliant way to make contact, and maintain relationships in between in person interactions.

And this is not about transactional relationships. It’s about proper meaningful relationships.

At the end of 30 days you should have got through your 100 person list. Some may have led to coffees, drinks, zooms, just a bit of text back and forth. Where possible, save their contact details (extra brownie points if you add their email into your spreadsheet) but if you’ve sent them an email, at least it will save their address in your gmail.

Phase 2 (Days 31–60): Plug the gaps

So, you’ve probably had a much more lovely time that you imagined at this point.

Now’s the time go back to your ‘why’ and bring to mind what your network is for (securing a new job, finding love etc).

With that in mind, look at your network, and look at the 7 types of relationship listed above, and ask: where are the gaps? Perhaps you have a lot of peer relationships but you don’t have any mentors yet.

You can also look at it through a more practical lens: perhaps you know a lot of people at agencies, but not in client-side roles, perhaps you spent 20 years as a teacher but you don’t know people who might hire a private tutor. Perhaps you know lots of people in London but now you’re in Cartagana.

Notice what’s missing and work out what you’d like to have filled in.

There’s a few ways to do this. A few are:

1. Use your network to build out the gaps

2. Join communities that help fill the gaps

3. Directly get in touch with people you don’t know but are the type of people you want to know.

Each day:

• Ask someone in your network for one thoughtful introduction

That could look like something like:

‘Hi Simon, I’m looking to move to Paris next month, I remember your sister lived there, do you think she would mind introducing me to a friend so I know someone when I arrive?’

Or:

‘Hi Soph, I’m looking for an introductions into the world of museums as I’ve just completed my curation masters. Is there anyone you know who would give me 15 minutes of their time for a coffee to ask them about their experience?’

Keep requests clear and light. Always follow up. Stay away from the hard sell of asking your network to get you a job, it’s more about connections and brain-picking and coffees.

And where your network can’t help you fill the gaps, you can also get in touch with people you don’t know and ask for their help.

Last week I wrote to a world-famous female mediator (she’s famous in mediation circles) - someone I had followed the work of and admired for her conflict resolution work - and I asked her if she ever mentored people, and if she’s consider mentoring me. I wrote that I admired her work and had been plucking up the courage to write to her. She wrote back immediately and suggested a Zoom call to talk and said she is always open to mentoring women who want to persue a career in mediation.

On a personal note, I don’t think I’ve EVER said no to mentoring someone who asked me, but so few people ask.

And then of course, there are community and members clubs and networking events that you can use to fill the gap too. They can be extremely valuable, but for the purpose of this piece, I’m going to focus on our own direct networks that we can tap into.

What’s really important to hold in mind is that Sociologist Mark Granovetter showed that many jobs come through weaker ties - people on the edge of our world, not our closest friends. That was a huge surprise to me when I learnt that, but it’s been true for me, so many of my opportunities have come through my broader network, not my ex boss or my good pals. I find this fact very life affirming - a kindness of strangers type thought.

Phase 3 (Days 61–90): Contribute & be visible

So now, you’re really ‘cooking with gas’. You’ve reignited your existing network, making the invisible more visble, and you’ve built on it, filling in some of the priorty areas, based on your ‘why’.

It’s not that phase 1 and phase 2 stop, they don’t - you’ll still be reaping the rewards of all that good connection.

But now, you have the opportunity to more conciously contribute and be visible. This is about the generosity of spirit.

Phase 3 is all about ‘ask not what your network can do for you, but what you can do for your network’.

How can you help others. Some ideas might be:

• Introduce two people who you know will really get on.

• Share something useful with someone who will gain value from it.

• Send a note saying, “I thought of you.” (Michael Melcher has a great one called ‘the art of the ping’ which is just sending a text to someone saying things like ‘reading this book and I thought of you’. No reply required.

• Offer help without an agenda.

• Invite someone along to an event

• Write something really thoughtful and/or supportive on their linkedIn (or repost their post, people LOVE that).

• Tell them you liked their writing and why

And I would give a particular shout out to the younger generation who perhap started their career in a box room on Zoom and maybe don’t know what really meaningful work relationships can be with. Be generous to them too.

The last bit (and it’s important)

Now, you need to keep playing your part in keeping your network in good nick. You don’t need to be everywhere. You don’t need to do tonnes. You need to be consistent, generous and clear (and definitely not flakey).

In Michael Melcher’s excellent book Your Invisible Network he has a list of 100 ways to keep up with your network - very simple things like remembering someone’s birthday. It’s amazing how valuable that is to others.

So that’s it.

And when the tough times come calling and you find yourself out of a job, or feeling totally out of the game after raising kids, your network is there to support, surprise and delight you.

We can talk another time about how to truly leverage your network, but go and build it first.

Over the last 7 years, my network has come to my aid so many times when I’ve needed it. It’s given me the most incredible opportunities and I’m still meeting the most brilliant people through it. I can feel a lump in my throat just thinking about where I’d be without it.

Here’s a wonderful thought to leave you with. From the social activistor, philsopher, author, Grace Lee Bloggs. Our lives are so deeply woven together, and our small generous acts can have such an effect on those around us. Both from others to us, and from us to others. That’s why networks are so magical. She wrote:

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the creative industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, get in touch at abi@adessa.io

Who enjoys having challenging conversations at work? Anyone….? Nope, I don’t either.

In fact, I built an early career on diplomacy - on creating the conditions so people could avoid difficult conversations. When I worked in advertising, the creatives would tell me what they really thought, the clients would do the same, and my role was to act as a go-between: helping them resolve their differences while sparing them the discomfort of a direct conversation.

When I worked at Girl Effect, where we had an unlikely partnership between Whitehall’s Department for International Development and Nike, much of my time was spent massaging very different cultures, objectives, and ways of operating, helping individuals avoid the clash of cultures.

And in my childhood, as I’ve written about before, I was the “peacemaker” between my hostile brothers - never actually succeeding in resolving their differences, but occasionally stopping them hitting each other by sitting in between them (a fun job).

It’s only in more recent years that I’ve been taught how to have difficult conversations directly. And it still doesn’t come naturally. But I’ve learned to see the price I pay when I don’t do it. Through co-parenting, leadership roles, and important relationships with friends and family, I’ve had plenty of practice - though it still feels a bit like cold-water swimming: you dread it, it stings while you’re doing it, you wonder if you’ll make it… and then you feel amazing afterwards.

There’s a universal avoidance of difficult conversations. We fear being seen as difficult, ungrateful, rude, or even disloyal. Many of us grew up being told off a lot, and that’s a difficult emotional place to return to. Just the thought of it can bring on the dread.

But difficult conversations matter because they are one of the greatest tools we have to repair relationships - and, even more so, to strengthen them. As my parent coach always reminds me, a well-repaired rupture is stronger than if there had been no rupture at all. The same is true in all our relationships. Repaired relationships are stronger. As Dan Siegel says:

They also bring other benefits: standing up for yourself, listening deeply to others, learning tolerance, staying in relationship even when you hold different views. This is the very essence of being human. It’s relational. And we all know that organisations that don’t air disagreements can grow into seriously toxic work environments.

And in an age of LLMs agreeing with everything we say, and huge swathes of the internet vehemently disagreeing with one another, this skill is needed more than ever.

So my advice is: practise it. It will change your life. After all, avoidance is a short-term strategy with long-term costs. As Susan Scott (author of Fierce Conversations) puts it:

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I’m sharing three different variants of conversation here, because context matters. A boss, a peer, a friend - it changes things, but not that much.

Most difficult conversations go wrong not because of what we say, but how we say it. A useful guide comes from the principles of Nonviolent Communication, which helps us speak honestly without escalating defensiveness. Describe what happened (without judgement), name the impact on you, identify what mattered underneath and make a clear, reasonable request.

There are several frameworks for having difficult conversations, from my mediation work, one I like working with the most is CLEAR.

C - clarify intention
L - lay out the facts
E- express impact
A - ask clearly
R - repair and reset

Here’s an example:

C - Clarify your intention
e.g “I want to raise something so we can work better together as I really value our working relationship.”

(You don’t always say this out loud - but you hold it.)

L - Lay out the facts (no judgement)
“In the last two team meetings, I shared an idea and there wasn’t any response before we moved on.”

Stick to what an observer could see or hear.

E - Express the impact
“I felt discouraged, and it made me hesitate to contribute again. It also affected my confidence in those meetings.”

This is about your experience, not their intent.

A - Ask clearly
“What would really help is a brief response to ideas before moving on - even if it’s just to say it’s not the right moment.”

Specific, reasonable, actionable.

R - Repair and reset
“I value working with you, and I’m keen for us to keep building a way of working where everyone feels able to contribute.”

This is where you orient back towards the relationship and the future.

Put together, it sounds like this:

“I wanted to raise something because I care about how we work together. In the last couple of meetings, when I shared an idea and there wasn’t a response before we moved on, I felt discouraged and less confident about contributing. What would really help is a brief response to ideas, even if it’s just to park them. I value our working relationship and want us to keep strengthening it.”

Easy, right? The thought of it might bring you out in a cold sweat but in my experience, if you’ve done your prep properly, the conversation itself isn’t as hard as you think - but prep is key.

Before you engage, get clear on what you want to get out of the conversation. We can’t control how others will respond, so this isn’t always about getting a resolution instantly, or perhaps even ever, but it is about saying what needs to be said to give the relationship the best chance of repairing and building.

Conversation One: Raising Something Difficult with Your Boss

It’s important to have a good relationship with your boss - but many bosses aren’t particularly good at managing people. In my work, this often means taking a leading upwards approach: playing a leadership role in the relationship, including having conversations they may be avoiding.

This matters because, otherwise, people can end up feeling miserable in their roles, living in fear of what their boss might be thinking - often without actually knowing - which makes them feel fearful and/or demotivated. And in my book, bad behaviour (which doesn’t mean someone is a bad person) needs to be addressed. Not just for accountability reasons but to give the relationship a chance. As Ester Perel writes:

Some things to remember

• No one is telling anyone off or making accusations

• The intention is to improve the relationship

• We’re not attached to outcomes - only to how we handle ourselves

• High hopes, low expectations: this isn’t about “winning”

Step-by-step

Prep for the conversation (the most important step)

1. Give a heads-up
   Almost always, it’s better to let your boss know in advance what you want to talk about. Our brains hate surprises, and defensiveness kicks in fast.

For example:

“I’d really value some time in your diary over the next few days. There’s something that’s been affecting my ability to do my best work, and I’d appreciate 30 minutes to talk it through.”

Or:

“I’d like to set up some time to talk about how we’re working together. It’s nothing urgent, but it would be helpful to get your perspective.”

2. Prepare what you’re going to say

   This is the essential part. Take the C-L-E-A-R framework and write out what you’re going to say in bullet points. It should be quite short, always clear and double check that the language is neutral. An LLM is actually a brilliant neutral language checker. Then practice what you’re going to say out loud to yourself, several times over. If you have someone you trust or a coach, share it with them for their input.

3. Show up regulated
   Once you have written your script. You need to take some time to feel your feelings. Why is this the thought of this so scary? Literally sit with your feelings and name them, and ask yourself what’s the worst that can happen. A friend or coach can keep you company with this part. This is what enables you to show up calm, composed, and grounded. You’re not late. Your hair’s not on fire. You’re present and ready to engage like the grown-up employee that you are.

4. Open the conversation

“Thank you for making the time. This conversation is important to me, even though I might find it a bit difficult. I value you as my boss and want to keep improving in my role. Something has been challenging for me recently, and I’ve noticed my motivation drop. Could I talk to you about it?”

5. Read your script.

   If you don’t know it off by heart, you can always say: ‘I’ve made some notes to help me which I’ll read from’. - Or if you’re on Zoom, you can have them up on your screen (but not screen sharing).

6. Then shut up and listen

   And really listen to what they say. And then play back to them what you heard them say - e.g. ‘I just want to check what I heard you say, I think I heard you say that … xyz, is that right? I have I heard correctly?’ and they will tell you if you have really got their point.

7. Discuss - and remember the goal isn’t total alignment, it’s about understanding and seeing if you can both come up suggestions of how you could do things differently in the future.

8. Agree how to move things forward - if you’ve got this far, you may both have things you’ve agreed to do differently in the future ‘Why don’t we put a standing meeting in the diary for a 30 minute coffee every fortnight?’ or ‘Why don’t we have a pre-meet to get aligned before going into the SMT meeting?’.

9. Follow up - Make a note and follow up in writing summarising next steps and if it went well enough, thank them for making time/listening well/understanding your perspective.. This will help you stick to your new plan.

And remember:

Resist the urge to fill silence (this is hard).

This isn’t about getting everything to go your way. It’s about being clear, standing up for yourself, listening well, and giving the relationship the best chance of success.

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Adaptation for resolving conflict with a peer

This can sometimes be even harder than talking to your boss. But if you can normalise healthy conflict and take a repair-focused approach, your work life will be transformed.

Here, there’s no formal authority - you’re equals. Peer conflict is often sustained by poor management structures, matrix systems, and/or an avoidant organisational culture (masked as ‘we’re all friends’ or even worse ‘we’re all family’ - usually a red flag for an unhealthy organisational culture).

Some things to remember

• Conflict is usually about misaligned needs, not bad intentions

• Repair matters more than being right

• Most peer conflict is sustained by silence rather than shouting

Step-by-step

The process is similar, with a few differences.

• Take a slightly more informal approach

• Still always prepare using the CLEAR process

• Give a softer heads-up, e.g.:

“Would you be up for a coffee this week? There’s something I’d value talking through with you about how we’ve been working. Our relationship matters to me and I’d like your perspective.”

Afterwards, if a repair has been possible, reward the relationship: invite them for a drink, share an article, reference a shared interest. The goal isn’t agreement - it’s tolerance, trust, and momentum.

Adaptation for having a difficult conversation with a friend at Wwork

This is often the one we avoid most, because the stakes feel personal. But friendships need boundaries too - especially at work. Avoidance here is often more damaging than honesty.

Key differences

• Name the dual relationship explicitly: e.g. “I know we’re good friends and we work together…”

• Be crystal clear about intention: e.g. “I’m raising this because I value our friendship.”

• Don’t rely on shorthand - spell out impact and requests just as clearly, don’t down play it or use humour to avoid seriousness. And just because you know them well, don’t rely on mind-reading (as we usually get it wrong).

• Allow space for repair, not instant resolution

As Esther Perel puts it:

Here are 10 principles for having a difficult conversation well

1. Get clear on your intention before you open your mouth

2. Always prepare well in advance, this is where the real work happens.

3. Describe behaviour; don’t diagnose character

4. Own your experience without making it the definitive truth

5. Be specific about what needs to change in order to repair the relationship.

6. Say your piece and then shut up and listen. And be geninuely curious.

7. Listen for what’s underneath the response

8. Let silence do some of the work

9. Aim for repair, not victory

10. And always think about the cost of not having the conversation.

The goal isn’t a better argument. It’s a stronger relationship. And relationships are the essence of what it means to be human.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or get in touch at abi@adessa.io

Bertrand Russell: an intellectual hero for this year’s Reith Lecturer

On New Year’s Day morning, I received a brilliant newsletter from my parent coach, Katy. She’d been listening to Rutger Bregman on a podcast and had been inspired. Rutger is a Dutch historian who talks about social change, learning from the past, and exploring what kind of work we want to build next. One of the ideas he’s been exploring lately is moral ambition - the notion that instead of chasing power, money, or status, we might ask ourselves how we can use our time and energy in ways that genuinely make the world a better place.

Katy wrote:

“So there I was, listening to Rutger talk about moral ambition - about whether we’re choosing paths that serve something bigger than ourselves - and feeling that familiar flutter of self-doubt. And then something landed. This is exactly what parenting is. At its heart, parenting is moral ambition. It may not be paid work. It may not come with status or recognition. And often it requires scaling back, rebalancing, or quietly reorganising our lives in ways that don’t show up on a CV. But raising children, and caring for them in any meaningful way - it’s some of the most morally ambitious work there is.”

I loved this for two reasons.

Firstly, I value any conversation that elevates the important role of parenting and the vital work of raising the next generation of humans (and I owe Katy an external debt of gratitude for helping me be a better mum). It spoke to many of us who aren’t smashing ceilings in the boardroom, but are instead constantly calibrating - trying to parent (well enough) while keeping a career on track (well enough).

Secondly, I was pleased to see the subject of moral ambition being spoken about more publicly. It’s something a few of my friends and I talk about - the importance to us of a moral framework in our lives - but it hasn’t been a particularly mainstream conversation (outside classic conservative circles, perhaps).

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So I looked up Bregman and realised I’d read his book Human kind last year. And then, in that amusing “something is suddenly everywhere” way, I realised he was also the author of December’s The Reith Lectures: Moral Revolution. So I went for some winter walks and had a listen.

The lectures are important listening. Bregman makes a rallying call for humans to rethink what we do with our talent, status, and working lives - and to aim higher, morally. He argues that we are wasting enormous human potential on “socially useless or harmful work” and that we should redirect our ambition towards solving the world’s biggest problems. He speaks with urgency about the rise of technology and immorality of those who lead us politically. It’s not listening for the faint-hearted, but it is important.

I particularly loved the fourth lecture, where he shared his intellectual hero’s guide for life (Bregman was encouraged to have an ‘intellectual hero’ by his university tutor - such wonderful advice). Bertrand Russell (the first ever Reith Lecturer) became a moral guide for Bregman when he was a young man. Russell had once written:

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course over a great ocean of anguish, reaching the very verge of despair.”
- The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell

In a BBC interview in 1959, Russell was asked what advice he would give to future generations. He offered two principles - one intellectual, one moral.

His intellectual advice was to see the world as it really is, not how you’d like it to be. His moral advice was to tolerate our differences. Or, in his words: “Love is wise, hatred is foolish.”

As someone who is not currently considering becoming a world leader (apologies to my late dad, who always thought I’d be Prime Minister - ideally a mini-Maggie), but who still wrestles with ambition, contribution, as well as my ‘red line’ to remain flexible and present for my still-young kids, parts of the lectures felt out of reach. But then, like my parent coach Katy, I started thinking about where most people can make a difference.

And, like Russell, I think the clue lies in love being wise and in tolerating our differences.

David Brooks, one of our greatest living journalists, wrote a powerful piece in The New York Times last week called The Great Detachment. “Another clear-eyed goodie from David Brooks,” as my friend Jess said when she shared it with me (Russell would have highly approved of the clear-eyed writing).

Brooks argues that love - especially the deep, committed connections found through marriage, family, community, faith, and friendship - is fundamental to a flourishing life, and that many Americans are experiencing a “Great Detachment” from these sources of connection.

Over the last 60 years, cultural emphasis on individual autonomy over collective commitments has grown. The pursuit of personal freedom has increasingly prioritised career and self-fulfilment over relational obligations.

Brooks suggests that love and deep relational commitments fuel energy, engagement, and meaning in life, and that a cultural shift towards prioritising individual independence over connection has contributed to widespread social disconnection. He argues for revisiting how we value and support loving attachments - not by forcing everyone into marriage, but by recognising the importance of love within dense social and emotional networks.

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In my coaching work, one of the reasons I love conflict-resolution frameworks so much is because I see them as one of life’s great tools - a tool for love (wise), not hatred (foolish).

I’ve recently been asked by the IPA (the Institute of the Practicioners in Advertising) to design a module for young creatives taking their new Creative Essentials Certification. My module’s focused on creative confidence & career craft - the module that comes after all the others (how to develop good ideas, sell them to clients, get them made, etc.). One of the questions I really want to ask the cohort is: what sort of person do you want to be at work? From there, I can share tools to help meet that ambition: Here’s how to have a difficult conversation. Here’s how to resolve conflict. Here’s how to repair relationships. Here’s how to say what you think in a way that’s clear and kind. Here’s how to listen well. He’s how to show up for your team mates. How to ask for help. AKA How to Be a Big Kind Brain at Work - a definition I like for how to be a true grown-up in the world: clear-eyed, capable, and contributing to making relationships better in the world.

And let’s not pretend any of this is easy. Whether you’re a young person starting out in a rapidly changing world, or you’re someone who’s been in the game for over two decades (ahem). The tools of how to relate well are never not needed.

Many of the brilliant leaders I work with, err on the side of self reliance. Part of the reason we all scampered up the corporate ladder so quickly is because we were really good at not bothering anyone and simply cracking on, shock-absorbing problem after problem ourselves. But I’ve found out the hard way that believing that is the best way, is a life-limiting belief. At some point it stops working.

And building and maintaining strong relational connections beyond work is also hard. Possibly harder for many of us. On a personal note, perhaps because my separation was difficult, and maybe because of everything that followed - my dad dying suddenly, the pandemic, my ex having a baby - I haven’t yet embarked on a new romantic relationship. I have many wonderful friends and a life-defining, loving relationship with my children. But at some point in the future, I hope I’ll be brave enough to build a new relational commitment - to love someone again and experience deep, mutual adult love. I know how life-changing it could be. Our relationships are the essence of our lives. Bertrand Russell had four marriages; perhaps I can manage one.

Before I sign off, I wanted to share something from this morning. I watched a wonderful short clip of Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl - one of the humans I admire most. Frankl illustrated how the way we view people shapes what they become. Essentially, he said that if we treat people only as they are - grounded in their current flaws and limitations - we hold them back. But if we overestimate them, seeing them as capable of more than they yet show, we help them grow into their potential. He attributed this idea to the great German writer, poet, playwright, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

And that’s what a good life asks of us - in how we parent, how we have difficult conversations, how we show up for others, how we build strong attachments - to overestimate what we believe people (and ourselves) are capable of. Perhaps then we have a greater chance of getting there.

That’s why I admire Bregman’s Reith Lectures. That’s why I listen to Amol Rajan’s Radical podcast. And why I follow Naomi Alderman’s work, such as her bitesite BBC Sounds series, Human Intelligence (like this wonderful episode on Simone Weil). These intellectual heros of mine focus on what humans are capable of, in service of helping us become greater.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or get in touch at abi@adessa.io

NICK CAVE – WILD GOD BY SEAN BW PARKER, 2025 - RED HAND FILES

A year ago I started writing on Substack. It was a new year’s resolution of sorts. I’d always found writing letters appealing, where you can be conversational and you know exactly who you’re writing to, but I’d found other writing quite hard. But, a year on, I’ve found it’s like lots of other things in life, it’s a skill you can develop, a muscle to build.

One of my favourite things about writing regularly is that it gives me a reason to think about thinking often. And I keep a note when I listen to something I find interesting, or watch something, or read something, or a friend says something wise. And now my list of wise nuggets collected is quite long so I thought I would share some of them as we head into a new year, looking for counsel on how we might best approach the year ahead.

I wondered if this was a bit of a lazy way to write a post - just to list all the quotes I’d heard from people I rate - but then I remembered that I always want to open articles that are titles things like ‘What I’ve learnt in my life’ or ‘wisdom I wish I’d known when I was young’, so perhaps it might appeal to you, as it does to me. This isn’t my wisdom, it’s all from other great minds. I’ve just done as the magpie does, and collected these shiny bits of gold and put them in a nest for safe keeping.

And perhaps this is particularly interesting to me as I think about the role that LLM’s will play in our lives in 2026, and what their merit will be going forward. When I started writing in January 2025, they were far less widely used, but have become rapidly adopted. And already, there’s a lot I see in my feed about how to spot AI-written work, and the increasing rejection of AI-written posts.

That’s what Alderman nails in this quote up top - when she writes that they ‘found just the right words so that for a moment I can touch their mind with mine’. It’s the antithesis to something predictedly written by an LLM.

In the same post, she goes on to say:

That’s why I don’t mind AI writing if someone just declares it. If there’s a ‘danger’ in undeclared AI writing…it’s because for me writing has an ethical dimension, a dimension of human minds reaching out toward one another, alleviating the essential alone-ness of being inside my own head and not anyone else’s. It works on the reader and the writer. And truthful writing about your life - I mean it’s a miracle that it works, and you do feel connected to other humans, but it really does.

So, here’s a few things I collected in 2025, definitely not written by AI, that have made me stop and think about what it is to be human, to experience life and strive for a richer, more eudaimonic life. And every time I read them (which I do regularly as I think about what I might write about next) they give me comfort, solace, they make me feel more alive, give me greater perspective and make me a bit braver about living my life as I would wish to. I hope they do that for you too. Many are from Substack, which I’ve found to be a great platform for being in the presence of smart thinkers, and some are from the books I’ve read (recommended to me by Substackers),some are from podcasts (yes, a lot from Radical!) , and of course, The Red Hand Files.

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Here goes:

On how to live a life

Patricia Routledge, who died in 2025, had previously written about her life in such a poignant, joyous way:

“I look back on my life with a heart that is both tender and astonished. My career was never a straight road.

In my thirties, I was still wandering. Testing myself. One day I was in musical theatre. The next, on radio. Then suddenly, Shakespeare. I often asked myself: Would this path ever find its shape?

And then, in my fifties, Hyacinth Bucket arrived. I thought it was nothing more than a light role in a little comedy. A small job. Something that would come and go. But Hyacinth stayed. She stayed with me for decades. She made people laugh in every corner of the world. She gave me a gift I never knew I needed — to be remembered with joy.

Every decade, I found a new chapter waiting for me. In my sixties, I began learning languages — not for work, but for love. Words fascinated me. The sounds, the rhythm, the challenge.

At seventy, I stepped back into classical theatre. Roles I believed were long behind me — and yet, there I was, breathing them alive again.

My eighties brought painting. I filled pages with gardens I had walked through. Faces I remembered. Colours that felt like faraway places. Painting, I discovered, was simply another way of telling a story.

And now… my nineties. Here, I find stillness. I write letters by hand. I walk slowly, listening to the birds. I watch the light move across the day. The quiet, I realise, is my greatest companion. I do not fear age. I welcome it.

Because each decade is a garden. And in that garden, flowers bloom that you never expected to see.

The secret? To keep showing up. To meet life with curiosity. With openness. With gratitude. That is enough. That is more than enough.”

Another brilliant homage to how to live a live by the inimitable Joan Didion I came across on Substack (in a wonderful article about the privilege of aging):

And I loved this from Nick Cave (#343 The Red Hand Files) about learning to stand in awe of life:

And then, connected to how to live a life (and what it’s all really about in the end), Jamie Oliver spoke to Amol on Radical about the false riches of fame (he’s said if he could go back and do it again, he’d not want to be famous) and where the real richness of life comes from:

“If you’re searching or craving for something that is maybe something up there, all I’m saying is if I did it all again it’s right in front of you. The beauty, the simplicity, the capacity, the happiness, the joy, the laughter, like what is luxury? What is money? So is it a pair of Nikes? No, everyone’s got them. Is it an iPhone? No, everyone’s got them. What is luxury? Knowledge. Connection.”

On how to gain perspective (a great resilience-building tool)

I enjoyed reading India Knight’s new book, Home, this year. As well as helping me with some great how-to-make-a-house-a-home advice (Zico lightbulbs, who knew), she also shared some of her life wisdom. I particularly liked points 45 - 49 which instantly helps with perspective setting:

45. Calm down. Very few things are catastrophes. The writer Jessica Fellowes remembers a relative saying that most things we think of as massive dramas at the time wouldn’t make a paragraph in our autobiographies - most of them wouldn’t even make a sentence.

46. And even catastrophes are eventually surmountable, because:

47. You are much more resilient than you think. You have no idea.

Any then she jumps to something entirely unrelated but just as wise and brilliant:

45. Emotional games are really boring and weird for everyone else.

This year I read Nathan Hill’s brilliant epic novel Wellness (an Elizabeth Day Substack reccomendation). There’s a great line about perspective in it. He writes ‘death had a way of recasting all other subjects as a party in comparison’.

On the importance of hope

Over Christmas, I finished Ben Penreath’s beautiful homage to the English home: An English Vision. He writes about the importance visual arts, nature & the required hopeful spirit of humans to better the world:

“Have faith in your abilities; look, learn, draw and express yourself. Believe, and I am sure it can happen. We are living in unsettled times, when the problems of the world can seem insurmountable, but I am convinced that with the dedication and skill of new generations, life will continue to flourish and our planet will become better, more resilient, and a more just and beautiful place, if we make it so.”

Much earlier in the year, I listened to another lover of English nature and conservationist (in a different way), Robert McFarlane. He was speaking on Radical talking beautifully about our relationship with rivers. He said something that I keep thinking about: ‘Despair is a luxury, hope is a discipline’.

I took that to mean that many people living on the planet don’t have the option of despair when their life, and their family’s lives, depend on it. In the context of our planet’s health, hope is essential as it provides us with the reason and the resolve to do better, to make things better.

Similarly, I read something just yesterday from Naomi Alderman on her Substack (one of my go-to sources for wisdom, as you may have noticed) which related:

I like this a lot. What are the things we can do to improve stuff, those are the right things to focus on and do. In the Robert Macfarlane episode, he talks about ‘just because we can’t do everything, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything’ (and at the end he references his favourite little trout stream in Norfolk I used to paddle in every summer with my children when they were small, so I like him even more now).

On keeping company with great human minds & learning

Another brilliant thought from Alderman this year was this:

One of the silver linings to me about the rise of AI is that it has made me thing much more about deep human thought. In India Knight’s book, Home, there’s another great piece of life advice she shares - a quote from James Baldwin, writing in Life Magazine in 1963:

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On where growth can come from

I can’t remember where I read this quote last year (probably Substack) but Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning might be the most powerful book I’ve ever read. This philsophy captures much of my last few years and learning to rebuild my life, staying in London. Things looking quite similar on the outside, though entirely rebuild on the inside:

Staying in London turned out to be one of the greatest areas of growth for me. Not really about life in the country vs life in London, but about what happens when you can’t leave and the growth that comes from staying and making it work. I imagine many of us feel a bit uncomfortable comparing our lives and context to what he went through in the death camps, but I’ve come to see that’s exactly what he wants us to do - look at our lives and approach it with the same philosophy & self agency that was so hard won for him.

On space to think & rest as productivity

Rest as a potent form of productivity. One of my favourite things about the holy nights between Christmas and Epiphany on 6th January, that my brain rests for a week or so. The ‘fertile void’ I remember it being refered too - that space when we don’t actively think, so we conversely think much more. Lying on the floor staring at the ceiling when I’m too full of thoughts, might be a new year’s resolution.

Then finally, perhaps the most powerful of them all. Something I read this year that instantly gave me a great sense of calm and weight lifting:

Yes, take in the wisdom. Yes, think big thoughts and look at the horizon. And then put it all down, return to your day; unload the dishwasher, put away the Christmas decs as that’s sometimes enough for today.

Happy 2026.

Abi

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or get in touch at abi@adessa.io

Joan Didion: a bastion of discernment

Almost everything Naomi Alderman writes on Substack is a wonderful counterweight to the doom-mongering.

I read a lot of articles that start with some variation of “the challenging times we’re living in.” Often several times a day if you add up a podcast, the radio, the newspaper or a Substack article. Sometimes the challenges are attributed to the war in Europe, the cost of living crisis, AI, Trump. Sometimes they’re just stated as fact, without attribution.

I’ve been trying to work out why this bothers me so much. It’s not because I think we should pretend things are great when they aren’t - I’m not immune to a difficult economy & political climate - but when legitimate observations about the state of the world slip into fatalism or anxious negativity, I think: well, this isn’t going to help us get where we want to go.

We risk sliding into fatalism, and fatalism is the death of both agency and creativity.

Margaret Heffernan captured this perfectly in a brilliant keynote for Cambridge Tech Week, particularly around the rhetoric of AI:

“Those early days of the Internet provided one of the richest experiences in my life. But the mood music has changed now. A lot. Where, initially, tech spoke a language of freedom, imagination and adventure, that has been replaced with a vicious language of inevitability: this WILL happen you have no choice; if you stand in the way, you will be roadkill. If you’re too stupid to get it, you deserve what’s coming. The language of inevitability is always the language of propaganda, because it seeks specifically to quash, inhibit curiosity, discussion or debate — in preference for submission and compliance. The language of inevitability is not unique to tech (the fossil fuel industry runs on it too) but it’s designed to be intimidating and it’s ugly. The rhetoric of inevitability is also - of course - untrue. There is nothing about AI that is inevitable.”

She’s not denying that AI (one of society’s favourite topics for doom-mongering) will bring seismic shifts; she’s calling bullshit on the idea that those shifts are fixed, predetermined or beyond our influence.

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This is what I love about thinkers like Alderman and Heffernan - they provide a counterweight to dominating narratives. Heffernan argues that the antidote to inevitability is self-agency: believing that we have choice and influence over our future, and that we can help shape it (which then leads to us making more wise decisions which improves our outcomes).

Albert Bandura, the foundational figure in self-agency thinking, put it beautifully:
“Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure.”

Building self-agency is at the core of leadership coaching - supporting others to lead themselves and then lead others. It’s a wonderful thing to see someone develop greater belief and agency in their life, along with all the life-transformative benefits that brings.

Dan Siegel, the relational neuroscientist, writes that self-agency emerges when the brain’s integrative circuits allow us to sense our internal states and act with intention. Through attuned relationships, we learn that our feelings matter, our actions have meaning and our minds can shape experience. As integration develops, a coherent sense of self arises - one that can choose, reflect and influence the world rather than simply react to it.

Although much of our self-agency develops when we’re young (if we’re lucky), throughout our lives we seek secure-base leaders who can help us continue to grow it. This is why it matters that we have strong, competent (and kind) political leaders - and why, when we don’t, we feel the absence so keenly and can slip into a more negative, fatalist mindset.

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Lately I’ve been thinking about how discernment is an essential part of our self-agency.

Another brilliant piece from Alderman was written as advice to parents worrying about their children’s future in the age of AI. She starts here:

“Do not believe the fairytales about AI. AI is not going to become a god or a monster. That stuff is science fiction, and as a science fiction writer I can tell the difference. AI is a normal technology. It’s just tech. Far and away the most likely thing is that the changes that will happen will be like those from all other tech. AI is going to do the things that technologies always do. It is going to make some jobs much easier, it’s going to mean some skills lose their currency while others need to be learned and it’s going to create new jobs.”

She then offers her most important piece of advice: discernment in the age of AI.

“I would suggest that the skills of discernment are those which always continue to have value. They would have had value in the Roman Empire and they have value today. They are the skills of sorting the wheat from the chaff.”

And crucially:

“And how do you develop the skills of discernment? This one is very very important: do not let the AI do the work for you before you have learned how to do it yourself.”

She talks about the importance of developing skills in research, taste, imagination, creativity, plausibility of sources - all the things that make judgement robust. And skills we often learn in our school years & early work life.

It took me right back to my early years in agency life. At JWT I learnt the basics of account management. I remember every contact report coming back covered in red ink until I’d mastered the craft. At W+K, I learnt what world-class work was, sitting in creative reviews for hours, often at weekends, slowly understanding what made a brilliant script, a standout design or a pitch-winning strategy. At Nike, I learnt what excellent brand-building looked like in action -surrounded by the brightest minds. During those years, I was gradually schooled in how to do things well, and how that made all the difference to the outcome you wanted.

Reading Alderman’s article, I thought, wow, what would have happened if I hadn’t had my 10,000 hours learning stuff the hard way?

Because often when I’m tempted to let an LLM write something for me, it comes back a bit shit. And that makes me more discerning. It might be helpful for proofreading but its real value is that it forces me to clarify why I don’t want to sound like that - what I do want to say instead - and to use the words I would naturally choose. That’s not to say I don’t get value from using AI, I do, but in a writing context it’s often just good grist for the mill that makes me think about what I would do/say/think instead.

I also love the way Alderman signs off her essay - another brilliant counterweight:

“Don’t panic. These technologies are incredibly easy to use if you have the background of skills. The thing that makes them so interesting is that they are so easy to use! If you have that grounding of excellent old-fashioned skills of discernment, then being able to do some parts of the work more quickly or more thoroughly will be a great benefit to you and you will pick it up in weeks. There is no hurry. AI is a normal technology. It will do the normal things. There will be new jobs, higher expectations and some jobs will become less common. It will not happen all at once. Be drawn toward what interests you. Learn the old-fashioned skills. When it is time to apply technology to them you will be ahead.”

Her point is that AI can be great, but you should use it to enhance yourself after you’ve developed your own judgement and skills. It’s never going to match your human discernment.

As Nick Cave wrote in his Red Hand Files about his creative process (in response to a Chat GPT-created song sent in by a listener in the ‘style of Nick Cave’):

“This is part of the authentic creative struggle that precedes the invention of a unique lyric of actual value; it is the breathless confrontation with one’s vulnerability, one’s perilousness, one’s smallness, pitted against a sense of sudden shocking discovery; it is the redemptive artistic act that stirs the heart of the listener, where the listener recognizes in the inner workings of the song their own blood, their own struggle, their own suffering.”

He goes on to say:

It’s a blood and guts business, here at my desk, that requires something of me to initiate the new and fresh idea. It requires my humanness.

Instead of seeing discernment as snobbery, I now see it as sovereignty - a power or authority through which we rule ourselves and lead our lives as we wish them to be led, as the human beings we are.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or get in touch at abi@adessa.io

One of the biggest questions we ask ourselves is: what should we do with our lives? What should our vocation be? And in the modern age, this isn’t simply a question we ask ourselves when we’re entering the work world - it’s a question we’ll ask ourselves throughout our lives, and increasingly so, as the world of work is reshaped and reshaped.

I’ve just been listening to Alain and Chris (the host of Modern Wisdom)’s recent conversation, and Alain describes this process. He suggests our true selves come in dissembled form, and one of the big questions is how to assemble our lives. He proposes that we are ‘archaeologists of the self’, where we have to build that life out - and build it out of the little bits of interest.

There’s a great analogy of a metal detector:

“I sometimes think of it as you’re passing a metal detector over the ground and very occasionally something will let off a little beep - a beep of intensity, of interest, of heightened thoughtfulness. And you think: there’s a fragment here below the ground of my true self. It’s buried, scattered over a vast area. And the task of my life is to recreate it from hints.”

One of the loveliest aspects of being a child is discovering those things that beep for you. And one of the great challenges of adult life is to keep on ‘metal detecting’ so you give yourself the chance to still discover those beeps of interest.

Because, in order to build a good life, I don’t think this assembly process never ends. Much of my work with clients is about considering how to pivot their career in midlife, or how a mother wants to rewire her work life to be able to work alongside the responsibilities of parenting young children. Much of my role is to help them ensure they are still assembling their evolving life out of some of those ‘beeps’ of interest, but in a way that works in the context of their lives.

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I’ve just finished reading India Knight’s brilliant new book Home, which is based on her best-selling Substack and is a homage to building a wonderful home that’s full of charm and life and ‘you-ness’. Towards the end of the book she shares some of her life wisdom that she’s received from others. She quotes a line from the great British designer Ben Pentreath:

“My friend George Saumarez Smith has got a great line: ‘You are, as an adult, who you were as a child.’ We often think we can reinvent ourselves in life, but I’m interested in exactly the same things I was at eight as I am at 53 - furniture, interiors, colours, old buildings and old places.”

India adds:

That eight-year-old self gets so buried by life stuff that you have to make a conscious effort to bring her back. When she reappears, though, bear her in mind when choosing paint swatches and kitchens. Give her a say.

Both India and de Botton observe the buried nature of what we truly love, and the importance of surfacing that so it can play a role in our lives - be it in how our home looks, or what shape our work life takes.

I remember when I first felt the real beep of interest about what I wanted to do in the work world. It related to something I’d done a few years earlier when I was 15. It was 1995 and there was a local skate park that my friends and I would go to every Saturday in the local town of Stevenage. It was in disrepair and was going to be closed down. I remember asking my dad what we should do and he said: get a petition, get 1,000 people to sign it, then hand it to your MP, and get yourself some local press coverage. So, that summer, a group of us got 1,000 petitions to keep the skate park open, then I phoned our local MP, Jim McGrath, and we got the local TV station and radio to cover a group of us handing over the petitions to him. It was a success: the local council found the funding to make the repairs, and the park was kept open. I felt proud of our work, but didn’t think about it much more until years later, when I was at a milk-round presentation from Saatchi & Saatchi at Leeds University (I hadn’t really wanted to go - I had little interest in advertising, but it was on the way to the pub), and I saw an account director speaking about his experience on the Malibu account (and a recent shoot in the Bahamas). I remember thinking, you’re a bit of a dick, but I love the sound of your job: reconciling the creative world with the business world - bringing creativity into the commercial arts and negotiating between those two worlds (creatives and clients). That had always been me - keeping company with the creative types, but interested in making shit happen. And I was a pro peacekeeper (which I’ve written about before), so account management felt perfect. I felt such a pique of heightened interest; I knew from that moment that that’s all I wanted to do as my first job. I thought back to my skate park–saving experience and realised that had been my first beep. Fast forward through a lot of rejection letters, and I was a temp inside a London ad agency (typing up scripts in the creative departments because none of the creatives had computers, lol).

Years later, I felt another strong beep when I started doing more social-change work with Nike whilst at W+K. We’d shot a documentary for UNHCR in a refugee camp in South-Eastern Uganda for a week, and I’d seen what the power of the agency’s best creatives, producers and a brilliant young Magnum photographer/filmmaker could produce when they applied their creative lens to social change. That in time led me to my role at the Girl Effect, where our mission was to take the discerning creativity and power of Nike’s brand building approach and apply it to building the self-agency of teenage girls living in sub-Saharan Africa under a dollar a day in partnership with DFID.

But then I became a Mum, with all the responsibility and complexity that it brought for me. The first decade of work and parenting actually involved dissembling some of the things I had loved to do but no longer could priortise (such as international travel for work, mid-week networking, long hours in the office, a job five days a week). In my particular circumstance, they weren’t going to work for me, so necessity became the mother of invention and I turned my interest to learning aabout leadership (I’d always liked leading others). How I could lead a company well in my fractional and flexible Managing Director roles, when I could no longer work long hours, or full time. How could I be really good at my role, given my limited time? A life-saver for me was learning about the psychology of leadership. That part of self-assembly was born out of a need to solve a problem. And after many years as a leader, I trained as a leadership coach myself, adding alongside my consultancy work.

It sounds nice and linear and well thought out, but often it was not. During those years of fractional MDing, I would often feel off course from my previous ambition in my role at the Girl Effect.

However, when I look back now on those years, there is a definite red thread through the work I have done from that first creative-script-typing role to the present day.

One of my favourite quotes is from Steve Jobs’s commencement speech at Stanford in 2005:

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.
You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path. And that will make all the difference.”

This thought gave me so much comfort over the years while I’ve been balancing work and parenting, trying to keep both as meaningful as possible, but often with huge compromise - that the dots do connect when I look back. That the things I have always been interested in (such as philosophy, creativity, problem solving, psychology, leading people, setting up something new, trying to do some good, sharing wisdom, learning new stuff, connecting people) are all present.

Aviva Wittenberg-Cox, longevity expert and coach, told me once: “Yes, you can have it all - you just can’t have it all at the same time.”

So when I work with clients, we look at what they want their next chapter to be - for example, their next role or promotion - in the context of their life. What else is important to them? Do they want to be able to have time for their kids, their partner? Do they have good support systems in place? What else do they need to make this next chapter of their life work well? How can they balance their ambition for their work with their ambition for their life at this current stage. My ex coach used to call this ‘coaching across the realms of life’. For myself, looking at my life in this way, has made all the difference.

In the same interview on Modern Wisdom, ADB spoke about the importance of envy in the quest for fulfilment in life. He said that envy gets a bad rep, but that actually it’s incredibly useful:

“People speak in a very low and embarrassed way about envy. You’re not supposed to feel envious. I think very often when you feel a beep of envy, it’s because there’s a fragment of your true ambition and your true self in the life of another person. And rather than go, oh, I must run away from it, go, no - this is a clue. What is there that you are envious of? And often envy is a very inaccurate emotion. We envy the whole of someone when actually it tends to be a part of them that we want. Drill into it. What really is core here? You might realise it’s actually not their fame, their money - it’s that they work with their hands, or it’s that they live in a log cabin somewhere far away from other people, or whatever it is. So the best thing to do with envy is to see it as a guide for your own ambition.”

There have often been times when I’ve been envious of others, and I love this reframing. Rather than feeling ashamed of feeling envious, you can use it as a part of your metal-detecting kit to help you build a life you want: a eudaimonic life, as Aristotle called it - a concept and roadmap wonderfully deconstructed and explained in the work of Robert Waldinger and The Harvard Adult Development Study.

And regarding the stuff you don’t want to do - well, that’s important to know too. One of my best bosses ever at Nike, Caroline Whaley, said to me early in our work life together: “Abi, work out what you’re great at, work out what you want to become great at, and then for all the other stuff, build a team around you that’s great at what you’re not.” Such good advice. And it doesn’t just apply to work - build life partnerships, friend partnerships, around your collective strengths to mitigate your weaknesses.

The notion of collecting parts of our true selves throughout our lives to assemble the lives we want to lead is reflected in the relational neuroscience of integration. Dan Siegel describes integration as the basis of well-being - the process of linking differentiated parts into a coherent whole. A healthy mind isn’t one that forces everything to be the same; it’s one that allows each part of us to be distinct, valued, and then woven together.

In many ways, this mirrors the lifelong work of assembling ourselves.

Those little “beeps of interest” Alain de Botton speaks of, the fragments of childhood joy that India Knight reminds us not to lose, the red threads that make sense only in hindsight, the envy that points to buried desire, they are all differentiated parts of us. They are clues to what Siegel would call the “essential self,” the part that remains even as the roles and responsibilities of adulthood shift.

In that sense, assembling a life isn’t a single decision or a vocational epiphany. It’s an ongoing neurobiological process. This to me is the lovely hope at the heart of adulthood: that we are never finished, the assembling continues, and there are always more beeps to be had.

And the life-long reward? As Siegel writes in The Developing Mind:

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Here are some takeaways:

• A fulfilling life isn’t about doing everything
  It’s about doing the things you’re naturally drawn to and gifted at and accepting what you’re not built for.

• Our vocation is not a single early-life decision
  It’s a question we return to across adulthood, especially as the world of work changes.

• We often discover our true selves in fragments
  Interests, intuitions, and small moments of excitement - the “little beeps” - can be clues to what matters.

• Childhood interests are often lifelong truths
  What captured our imagination at eight often still speaks to us at forty or fifty, if we let it surface.

• Life transitions reshape what is possible
  Parenting, caregiving, or midlife shifts don’t erase our passions - they demand that we balance them differently (the ‘you can have it all but not at the same time’ school of thought).

• Envy is a valuable signal, not a shameful one
  It points to a piece of ourselves we’ve suppressed or ignored. When examined specifically, it can point to something we dearly want in our own lives.

• Work out what you don’t want to do too.
  And build teams, partnerships and support systems around you to cover what we’re not best at.

• Necessity can be the mother of invention
  I became interested in the science of leadership out of necessity because I had to lead organisations with half the time I used to have.

• You can’t join the dots looking toward
  You join the dots by looking backwards - the red thread that connects our choices over time. Trust the dots will connect.

And my most recent beep? The piano. An interest that’s laid dormant since I stopped at grade 2 in 1990. The Beatles, Nick Cave, Schubert, here we come…

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or get in touch at abi@adessa.io

geckos excel at glomming

Am I the only person who didn’t know what glomming meant?

And, like many things, once I heard it once (and looked it up to find out what the hell it meant), I’ve heard it several times since. To glom: to stick to and not let go.

I first heard it when listening to the journalist and writer for The Atlantic, David Brooks, in his interview with Tyler Cowen. They were sharing stories about mentors and the roles they had played in their lives.

Brooks:

“I read this book, Snowball, about Warren Buffett. What’s remarkable about him was his ability to grab onto whoever could teach him. Early, when he was a socially awkward kid, he grabs onto Dale Carnegie. This guy provides him with a system to socialise. Then he gloms onto Ben Graham and his investing model. Then he gloms onto Charlie Munger. You think, ‘Oh, he’s still glomming on in his 40s.’ Then in his 50s, he gloms onto Catherine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post. She’s taking him to parties in New York and Washington, which are totally alien to him, and he’s loving it because he’s getting to sit next to Dolly Parton and Lady Di. He thinks, ‘This is great. I get to enter a new world.’ Then in his 70s, he gloms onto Bill Gates. He teaches him about philanthropy and tech.”

He continues:

“One of the things I admire most is people who are different in their 70s than they were in their 60s, different in their 50s than they were in their 30s. Warren Buffett is a guy who just gloms onto whoever can teach him. That would be an example of being mentored through life.”

I’ve been thinking about the importance of teachers throughout our adult life recently - and in particular, teachers & mentors with whom we have a strong relational connection.

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I’ve written before about some of the figureheads in society I’ve been drawn to in recent years - from surprising places. Nick Cave, for example, whose wisdom, humanity (and black humour) I find comforting, guiding, and life-affirming. Or Amol Rajan, whose grown-up curiosity and decent moral code I find inspiring and enlightening.

But in particular, what about those we can learn from who are in authority over us - those with whom we have a deeper relational connection?

Aristotle saw the teacher as both moral guide and rational cultivator - someone who nurtures the learner’s capacity to think for themselves, not merely to imitate. He called teaching a techne (a craft) - an art that requires both knowledge and judgment. In Politics and Rhetoric, Aristotle suggests education must be “lifelong” to align with the continual development of moral and civic virtue. A good citizen is always learning how to deliberate better, live better, and contribute more wisely.

That reminded me of Hemingway, who said:

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

One of the challenges of modern life is that we spend less time in the company of others. We know our neurobiology relates differently when we’re in physical contact. We also know that learning from those with whom we have a relational connection makes a profound difference. The holy grail is to learn from someone in person, with whom we have a strong bond - as we did when we were children. Attachment-based learning is something that continues throughout our lives.

In The Developing Mind and Mindsight, Siegel explains that “our minds are shaped, not just by the firing of our neurons, but by the firing between minds.”

I feel a pang of envy when I think of Warren Buffett glomming onto the good and the great in New York City. All that in-person glomming sounds quite amazing and highly effective as a learning mechanic.

But then I remind myself that, as a single working mother who greatly values being available for her kids - and whose number one priority is to be their attachment secure base (so they can glom onto me) - the modern world provides many opportunities to learn from others in a variety of ways. It may not always be the gold standard of day-in-day-out shadowing, but in a single day, primarily from the base of my own home, I can learn from a variety of well-selected, inspiring teachers (podcast hosts, expert course leaders, wise friends, authors, mentors in my network), my boss - all while putting my kids to bed and trying to teach them a little more about how to navigate their world.

And I think, when all’s said and done, a good reason why we glom onto others is in service of Hemingway’s view: that true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Aristotle understood this instinct to glom - to seek out teachers who help us refine not just what we know, but who we are. For him, learning was never abstract. It was the steady practice of becoming more human through relationship, observation, and habit - what he called phronesis, or practical wisdom. We learn by doing, but also by being with those who help us see and act more wisely.

I always liked that Socrates saw the teacher as a kind of midwife:

“My art of midwifery is in general like theirs; the only difference is that my patients are men, not women, and my concern is not with the body but with the soul that is in travail of birth.”
- Plato, Theaetetus

Someone to help you birth more knowledge and wisdom throughout your life.

I agree with David Brooks that I really admire those who keep learning and growing throughout their lives: they’re different in their 40’s to their 50’s and their 60”s. I hope this is me. As we’re all going to be living 100 year lives, I find the notion of evolving and changing throughout the decades a life-affirming thought. A little noblier each decade.

I’m not sure I have enough good teachers currently to glom onto. I always have my eyes open for who I may be able to learn from more. Recently, I’ve been looking into world-class female mediators who have put their conflict-resolution skills to good use - in both the context of workplace and international diplomacy, earning themselves high accolades. That’s the type of person I would like to glom onto. Someone like Scilla Elsworthy, founder of The Mighty Heart. And perhaps, just perhaps, become a tiny bit more noblier in the process…

As Siegel beautifully puts it:

“Our relationships are the crucible in which our brains are shaped and reshaped throughout life.”- The Developing Mind

I have a feeling that 2026 might be the year of the Glom. Finding those really wise teachers and holding on and not letting go.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or drop me a line at abi@adessa.io

A shorter one from me this week, as I’m mid–house move. The fact that I’m mid–house move is partly why I still wanted to write. For those who know me, it’s been a long time coming - and last night, I read something that made me realise what had been the catalyst for making this whole move possible.

A couple of months ago, a lovely thing happened. I discovered that one of my favourite Substack writers was actually a former advertising colleague. I’d been following The Ruffian closely - he writes thoughtfully, humorously, insightfully about all manner of human things, from The Beatles to the banality of genius.

So when someone pointed out that Ian Leslie - the Ruffian himself - was the same Ian I used to work with at J. Walter Thompson, I was delighted. A success story! One of the (many) bright sparks in that industry who’d evolved beyond the confines of advertising, applying his big brain to broader questions about how humans think and communicate. I dropped him a note to reconnect, and he sent a lovely one back.

I was also interested to see that he’d written a Times number-one bestseller called How to Disagree, which instantly appealed given my mediation and conflict coaching work. So I bought a copy, and each night I’ve been reading a bit side by side while my daughter does her reading (often reluctantly).

It’s a brilliant book (as I’d expected) but there was one idea in particular that really spoke to me when I read it last night:

Let go of the rope.

This is the notion of stepping back from unproductive conflict. Ian Leslie uses the phrase “letting go of the rope” as a metaphor for stepping back when both sides are locked in a tug-of-war.

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In his writing he suggests that when a conversation becomes a contest of wills - when each side is pulling harder to win - the only way to move forward is to stop pulling. Letting go of the rope doesn’t mean giving up or avoiding the issue; it means releasing the struggle so that curiosity, listening, and empathy can re-enter the space.

So simple to say. So incredibly hard to do.

And I know - because I was pulling a rope for a long time (for some pretty valid reasons). Then one day, I quite suddenly let go. I thought it would feel like conceding, but it felt like a victory.

For me, letting go of the rope meant not trying to leave London while my co-parent wanted to stay. It meant not going to court for a relocation order. It meant properly dropping the conflict between us, finally. And allowing, in that space, for some trust to be rebuilt and reparations to start that would benefit me and our kids for the long term.

I had valid reasons to want to leave - financial, family, educational - but I remember thinking on this particular day: what if I just stopped pulling this rope and let go?

And there’s a direct line between the moment I did that and this moment, two years later, as I move into my new home - my first ever house of my own. It’s right in the middle of the local community I’ve focused on building up since the day I let go (and decided to stay), and less than a five-minute walk from their dad’s house.

As Leslie says, conflict isn’t the problem - bad conflict is. Letting go of the rope is one way to transform bad conflict (defensive, ego-driven) into good conflict (open, exploratory, truth-seeking).

I’m not saying it was easy staying, and staying in London kept the pressure on many of the challenges I was facing - money, schools, distance from family - but once I let go of the rope, those challenges felt far less insurmountable than before. And all the effort that had gone into keeping that rope taut, that energy could go somewhere more constructive, and I’ve been able to reap the rewards.

Leslie says, once you let go of the rope, other approaches can come in. Here are a few he suggests for a productive argument:

Give face: The art of making your adversary feel good about themselves to avoid toxic status battles.

Check your weirdness (great line): How sometimes an underlying reason for conflict can be different cultures clashing - don’t assume yours is the ‘normal’ or right one.

Make wrong strong: mistakes can be positive if you apologise rapidly and authentically. They can repair and strengthen the relationship, increasing the odds of a positive resolution.

Golden Rule: make an honest human connection.

Giving the place a face lift

The first visit to the flat in the summer

Among my other coaching work, I currently volunteer as a community conflict coach for Poplar Housing Association in East London, helping people who are struggling with relationships with their neighbours to resolve their conflicts. Often, these disputes have life-limiting effects on their wellbeing.

We follow the R.I.S.E. model for conflict coaching - Recognise the problem, Identify new reactions, Structure action plans, Evaluate and reflect. I see, time and again, how hard it is for us humans to let go of difficult conflict - and how liberating it can be when we do. Perhaps even more so for the person letting go, than for the one left holding a slackened rope.

As one of my favourite human beings once said (and who had a pretty tough rope to let go of):

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or drop me a line at abi@adessa.io

Last week I took a dip in my local reservoir - it’s a bit nippy now, so it certainly wakes you up - and on my cycle home I listened to my new favourite podcast, Radical by Amol Rajan. He was interviewing one of his heroes, Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist and world-renowned thinker.

When asked what he considered the most revelatory insight of quantum physics, Rovelli said it was the discovery that nothing can be defined in isolation from the things around it - that there is no such thing as a single, separate entity. He writes:

“The world is not a collection of things. It is a network of events, and the relations between these events are what we call reality.”

I don’t pretend to know much about physics. But suddenly, perhaps magnified by my post cold-water euphoria, I felt I could relate to some of the theory of physics - because it echoed concepts I think about all the time.

I’ve spoken before about Dan Siegel’s work, the relationship neuroscientist whose concept of MWe (powerful concept, less strong name) explores the impossibility of separating “me” from “we.” We literally cannot develop as human beings without relationships. The notion of a completely separate self is an illusion - we are deeply interconnected and interdependent. For children in particular, this isn’t a nice-to-have: it is a biological necessity.

As Rovelli puts it beautifully in Helgoland (2022):

“Relational quantum mechanics tells us that we are not separate islands. We are knots in a web of relationships.”

MWe is Siegel’s shorthand for an integrated identity that holds both Me (individuality, agency, differentiation) and We (connection, belonging, mutuality) together. At the core of his work is a message about resisting the idea that we must choose between independence (“me”) and merging (“we”). Both are essential - and both can coexist.

Siegel places MWe within the broader framework of interpersonal neurobiology, which sees the mind as embodied, relational, and emergent - regulating energy and information flow in part through our connections with others.

He argues that cultivating MWe is crucial because it:

• Builds resilience & well-being. Connection (we) buffers and supports us; autonomy (me) gives us agency and direction. Together they create strength.

• Fosters belonging without loss of self. MWe allows us to feel part of something larger while staying fully ourselves.

• Strengthens relationships and communities. When we integrate me + we, relationships are healthier and communities more cohesive.

• Expands our identity and ethics. Seeing ourselves as part of a wider whole can shift how we respond to global challenges like division, inequality, and climate change.

• Encourages ongoing integration. Practices like Siegel’s Wheel of Awareness help us stay mindful of both individuality and connection.

Both Siegel and Rovelli are scientists - working in different contexts - and yet they are drawing similar, almost ancient, conclusions: that we are deeply interconnected.

This week I also read a Substack post about the extraordinary strength of sequoia trees, written by Rob Avis, an engineer-turned-permaculture designer:

“Most people think sequoias survive because they’re massive. But that’s not even close to the real reason.
... The tallest tree in the world has roots that only go 6–12 feet deep. That should be impossible. A 300-foot tree with shallow roots makes no sense from an engineering perspective.
But… sequoias don’t survive alone. Their root systems spread 50–80 feet wide and interweave with every other sequoia around them. They share nutrients, water, and structural support. When storms come in, they support each other.
The forest is the system — not the individual trees.
... The most resilient systems in nature are interconnected.”

The trees share resources, and this makes them resilient - able to do things that seem impossible.

Sometimes the notion of the essential nature of interconnectedness can be quite depressing - especially when loneliness statistics look so stark; the pressure of knowing the benefits of a strong relational network but not being in a position to have one for yourself or your family. The pandemic was a huge interrupter of people’s connection networks and the support they brought. It was a very difficult time for me personally.

On the other hand, there is great relief in remembering that we were never designed to do this life thing alone. As someone who always believed that strength came from independence, it’s totally changed my life to understand that strength comes from connection with others.

And what if we are more connected than we think?

I tried an exercise: I drew concentric circles on a piece of paper and plotted the people I’d had meaningful interactions with over the past seven days. In the centre were my two kids, Kit and Coco, and our cat Prince (who my children insist is a fully fledged family member). In the next circle: those I’d had close contact with and had seen in person - my friends I’d been to the theatre with or on a walk or talked on the phone with, my boss Mike, even my ex (who had given some useful advice on my soon-to-be new flat).

Then I worked outward: former Nike colleagues I’d spoken with on Zoom who had offered coaching insights; parents who helped with school runs; my brother, mum, and aunt; my parent coach; my listening partner; my business coaching leader and cohort; and my coaching clients. Further out still were the tradespeople helping with the flat, neighbours, friends sharing work opportunities, my accountant, and the Cub leader who hosted a weekend camp-out with my kids.

By the end, I counted around 45 people I had connected with in some meaningful way over the past seven days - from sharing tasks and services, to offering and receiving emotional support, to simply enjoying each other’s company.

If you’d asked me before I did this task, I might well have said I felt disconnected - working from home as a single parent can feel isolating. But the evidence was clear: my life is profoundly intertwined with others. It was a surprisingly powerful exercise and one that really made me appreciate just how many and how often. I also realised that for the majority of those relationships, they feel healthy and mutual. I could also see clearly the 1 or 2 where they weren’t relationships I would choose to have, but maintain out of necessity.

Building a strong network

This brings me to one of my favourite books this year that I’ve written about before: Your Invisible Network by Michael Melcher. He argues that building and tending your network - bit by bit - is one of the greatest forms of wealth you can create. His 20-minute daily practice helps strengthen these ties, and his final chapter offers 100 practical ideas.

One of my favourite practices he suggests is the art of the ping: send a message to someone just because you thought of them. No ask, no expectation - simply the gift of holding someone in mind. (As Siegel would say, that’s a core building block of emotional connection.)

Here are a few other 20-minute daily exercises for building a richer network across work, personal, and home life that I liked:

• Next time you’re in a boring place (an airport, school pick-up line), send a bunch of friendly texts to “weak ties” - not just the usual suspects.

• Craft your version of a “no response required” message: “Hey, I was thinking of you” or “Read this article and thought you might like it.” Do this several times a week.

• Spend time on LinkedIn looking up people from past jobs and see what they’re up to. If they’re doing something new, send a note of congratulations.

• Stock up on birthday cards. Keep a stack ready and send them out as birthdays approach.

• Send a “you can do it!” message to someone working on something hard — finishing a manuscript, training for a marathon.

• Make a list of your “A people” - those who give you energy. Put your top three on a Post-it note and keep it on your desk.

• Write a job description for a potential mentor - clarity helps you spot them when they appear.

• Ask a friend or colleague if they have sponsors or mentors, and how those relationships formed.

• Write a thank-you note for something you never properly acknowledged: “Many months (or years) ago you helped me by ____. I didn’t thank you at the time, but it meant a lot.”

• Initiate a group text or email to a set of friends you like but rarely see. Suggest a date and place to meet.

What I love about Melcher’s work is that it’s not just about professional networking - he knows our lives are far more interconnected than that. Some of my dearest friends are former colleagues, and some of my oldest friends from childhood have worked with me in advertising and beyond. Also, many of his ideas also work for those of us who can’t be out at London soirées every night.

One of the greatest gifts of the modern world, if used well, is that we can connect with others in ways that fit our busy, often remote lives. And how critical this is for our well-being.

As Carlo Rovelli reminds us:

“All things are continually interacting with each other, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about each other.”

I love this thought. We all bear the traces of each other, continuously exchanging ourselves with others.

So here’s an invitation: try your own version of the concentric circles exercise.

• Take a piece of large paper

• Draw 6 concentric circles

• Start in the middle with your core relationships

• Work outwards with decreasing levels of intimacy

Now notice how much of your life is made possible by those relationships - seen and unseen.

Or send one “ping” today: a short message to someone you haven’t spoken to in a while, just to say they’re in your thoughts.

These small acts are how we strengthen the web we all live in. And they’re how we make the world a little more connected - and ourselves a little more resilient.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or drop me a line at abi@adessa.io

Probably the most important thing I look for in a coach - or any leader - is unflappable strength - someone calm and unfazed by whatever you might bring them.

This is little different from what a child needs: a caregiver who is, as Janet Lansbury puts it, “unruffled” - someone steady in the face of the child’s emotional life, helping them build resilience. And even as we grow into adulthood, we still need that steadfast support from others.

An oak tree of sorts: strong, rooted, someone you can rest against, draw strength from, and lean on until you can think clearly again and return to good decision-making.

Being unruffled is not the same as being disengaged or indifferent, nor is it the same as dismissing someone’s feelings. A truly calm person understands your anxiety but can tolerate it - and that helps you tolerate it too.

Tolerating anxiety

Dr. Becky Kennedy recently wrote on LinkedIn:

Ever have a colleague turn to you and say, “I’m not sure I can handle this” or “I don’t think this project will go well”? My first instinct is to jump in with reassurance: “No need to worry, you’ll be great!”

But I’ve learned - both as a psychologist and a parent - that when someone’s anxious, trying to talk them out of it often backfires. It can make them feel like their emotions are too much or something to fix.

Instead, naming and normalising anxious feelings is powerful. It says, “Your feelings make sense - and I’m not scared of them.” That’s true at home. And it’s true at work.

Anxiety doesn’t need fixing. It needs a landing place.

Why it’s hard to find

Of course, being a secure base is not always easy. Even the most confident coaches can struggle to stay grounded, which is why coaches need coaches too.

As I tell my kids when we’re facing something tough: Someone looks after me so I can look after you. And someone looks after the person who looks after me. We all need someone steady - that’s how humans work.

It seems to me that finding that steadfast support is harder than it used to be. I wonder if that’s in part due to the “vulnerability to create connection” trend that social media encourages. Sharing vulnerabilities is a proven way to create closeness - and there’s nothing wrong with that in the right context - but I don’t know that I want my coach or therapist sharing their vulnerabilities with me.

I want to show up with whatever scary thought I’m having that week, knowing they will listen calmly, signalling “nothing to worry about,” so that I can infected, not by their anxiety, but by their calm.

If that resolute strength isn’t there, it’s hard to use them as a secure base - at least not a secure one. Instead, we might find ourselves holding back:

• If they mirror my anxiety, it will make things worse.

• If they hadn’t thought of my worry, what if I’ve just made them worry?

Rather than leaning on them, we can end up protecting them - thinking, If I’m not strong, who will be?

But having a secure base is essential for building resilience. When we have someone calm, unfazed, and encouraging - urging us to be brave when things are hard - everything shifts. As a coach, it’s my biggest priority that I can do this for my clients.

Coaches need support too

I spoke to a friend recently about the “curse of the new coach.” After finishing their training, many coaches feel a rush of anxiety about finding paying clients. They join peer groups with other newly trained coaches, share their fears, and unintentionally spread them. Confidence drops, and a self-fulfilling prophecy is born. I joined one of those groups one and then realised it was the last thing I needed.

In contrast, one of the best things I’ve done this year is join The Business of Coaching with Joanna Lott who helps coaches build viable businesses. She models calm confidence and creates a culture that is the opposite of panic. Her participants are held in a secure, steady environment, where they can be honest about challenges while still moving forward with confidence.

Something else I draw strength from is a listening tool I use in my parenting. I follow Hand in Hand Parenting, which includes a practice called “listening time.” Two parents (or me and my parenting coach) take turns sharing thoughts and feelings for a set time, simply listening without fixing. The rule is: don’t interrupt, don’t solve, just stay calm, present, and radiate “you’ve got this” energy. The result is remarkable - emotional clarity returns, and problem-solving becomes easier. As a single parent, this has been a lifeline for unpicking knotty parenting challenges.

In an increasingly complex and fast-moving world, having access to clear-headed, self-directed thinking is crucial.

A legendary secure base

Over the summer I watched the Netflix series Cobra Kai — the next-gen follow-on from The Karate Kid. Nearly every scene has Daniel referencing Mr. Miyagi’s wisdom. When we finished the series, we went back and watched the original films — they still hold up.

Mr. Miyagi is the ultimate calm, unwavering secure base: steady, wise, and quietly confident that Daniel can figure things out:

“Daniel-san, if come from inside you, always right one.”

And the best line from The Karate Kid films:

“Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything.”

As we step into the era of AI and its role in our lives, having human secure-base support will become increasingly important as we navigate more unknowns, at a faster pace, with the changes it will bring. Support that can help us regulate and think clearly, will become a true advantage in our work lives and beyond.

A coaching mindset for kids

The other day, I read an independent schools supplement that came with The Week. Among the glossy promises of enrichment activities and future success, one school stood out. They had embedded a coaching approach into both teaching and peer-to-peer development from a young age - teaching children to be curious, ask questions, invite reflection, and resist the urge to fix.

Children aren’t meant to be each other’s secure base - that’s the job of adults - but learning how to support others in this way struck me as a life-defining skill.

Finding role models

And secure bases don’t always have to come in the form of a coach, parent, or partner. I’ve found brilliant thinkers whose writing and podcasts I follow and who provide me with reassurance and build my resilience.

As my wise friend, Jess, speaking from the other side of the world said to me recently:

“I’m looking for people who take the world seriously, who are fully engaged, but not rattled by it.”

She referenced David Brooks as someone she great admires; I mentioned Amol Rajan’s excellent new podcast Radical. We agreed we’re drawn to people with both flexible thinking and strong conviction. They do share some of their own life experiences (I loved David Brooks’ recent Conversations with Tyler where he shared the difference between “being broken” and “being broken open” ) but they are primarily focused on learning, understanding and contributing to the world and, leaving it better than they found it.

The foundation of good coaching

A good coach does much more than simply act as a secure base - but for me, that is the number one foundation to get right. Once that’s in place, the sky’s the limit for what you can achieve together.

I’m Abi, an executive coach & advisor working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or drop me a line at abi@adessa.io

Arthur Schopenhauer understood the human condition.

Recently the podcaster and author Elizabeth Day interviewed the comedian Mae Martin about her anxiety-inducing dislike of small talk and a smart solution she'd come up with: to keep a list of rapid-fire questions on her person to be able to ask at parties. Questions like:

• What is your favourite thing about being alive?

• Dog or cat person?

• Is there life after death?

• What's your book recommendation?

• What would your job be in prison?

I liked this.

I don't know about you, but these days I often feel like in-person conversations (in real life!) are precious and I don't want to waste them on not being very good. Back in the day, pre-pandemic, pre-hybrid working, in-person conversations would be two a penny (commonplace). It mattered less to me if they were high quality, or simply some shoot-the-shit talk by the coffee machine that was totally forgettable. But now, I'm looking for more. It doesn't have to be heavy conversations, but I'm looking for conversation to gain some mutual human connection and understanding.

This made me think of Arthur Aron's study on 36 questions for increasing closeness and his brilliant methodology.

In 1997, psychologist Arthur Aron and his team at Stony Brook University set out to answer a deceptively simple question: Could intimacy between two strangers be created in a laboratory?

To test it, they designed a sequence of 36 escalating questions - starting light ("Would you like to be famous? In what way?") and ending deep ("When did you last cry in front of another person?") to be shared between pairs of respondents - followed by four minutes of silent eye contact.

The results were striking: participants reported feeling significantly closer after just 45 minutes of structured self-disclosure.

In one case, a pair went on to marry, inviting the researchers to their wedding.

For years the study remained mostly within academic circles. Then, in 2015, journalist Mandy Len Catron wrote about using the questions in a New York Times "Modern Love" essay, and by 2016 the experiment had exploded into the cultural imagination as "The 36 Questions That Lead to Love."

Here are the famous questions:

Set I

1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?

2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?

3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?

4. What would constitute a "perfect" day for you?

5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?

6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?

7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.

9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?

10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.

12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?

Set II

13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future, or anything else, what would you want to know?

14. Is there something that you've dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven't you done it?

15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

16. What do you value most in a friendship?

17. What is your most treasured memory?

18. What is your most terrible memory?

19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?

20. What does friendship mean to you?

21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?

22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.

23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people's?

24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

Set III

25. Make three true "we" statements each. For instance, "We are both in this room feeling…"

26. Complete this sentence: "I wish I had someone with whom I could share…"

27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for them to know.

28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you've just met.

29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.

30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?

31. Tell your partner something that you like about them [already].

32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?

33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven't you told them yet?

34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?

35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?

36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner's advice on how they might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.

The study worked because it used structured, reciprocal self-disclosure to build closeness quickly. The questions progressed gradually, starting light and becoming more personal and vulnerable, which mimicked the natural deepening of intimacy in relationships but compressed it into under an hour. Both partners shared equally, preventing an imbalance where one person overshared and the other withdrew. This process triggered a sense of being seen, known, and trusted, which are core ingredients of intimacy. Psychologically, it taps into the "self-expansion model" — we bond when someone gives us access to their inner world and allows us to expand ours.

In essence: it worked because it gave strangers a safe, accelerated pathway to the kinds of conversations that usually take months or years to unfold.

This approach is not just for romantic connection - it works equally well for friends, family, colleagues, or anyone with whom you want to build trust and intimacy.

I've started using the questions to make family car conversations more interesting (with adapted questions suitable for kids - though my kids seem to love questions about death - and question 24: How do you feel about your relationship with your mother, lol).

I have started dabbling in this approach (e.g. selecting some of the questions but not doing the 4-minute eye gazing) at networking events or when I've been introduced to someone via a mutual friend. It definitely helps get to more interesting questions quickly.

Now, that said, there's a lot I like about this methodology, but there are also a lot of times when being English means you can't just dive into questions that focus on our inner lives. And so I started to think about whether small talk is just small talk; what's its purpose and how can we make it better (aka lead to greater connection), rather than just avoiding it altogether which felt like perhaps throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Unsurprisingly, Alain de Botton had some wisdom to share on the merits of small talk, and the important and protective role it has to play in social society.

De Botton starts off agreeing that small talk can feel deathly:

"We resent parties for holding up an ideal of community and dialogue while trapping us in an unproductive and insincere banter; for making us more lonely than we would ever be in our own homes."

But goes on to advocate for it:

"But we are perhaps misunderstanding what small talk is for and how we might gently find an exit from its more airless corners. Small talk exists for a noble reason: it is designed to prevent hurt. It provides us with a rich source of information so we can safely ascertain the frame of mind of our interlocutor and therefore gauge what more-in-depth topic of conversation might be safely broached. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once darkly reminded us that we should always remember when meeting new people that they might be only a few steps from wanting to grab a weapon and end their own lives. A few moments of small talk gives us the signals we need to see who we have on our hands."

De Botton argues that this crucial time helps us circle the conversation before deciding which bigger conversations it may then be best to consider, given the context, leading to better conversation than if we hadn't had this triaging stage.

He also argues that there are ways of talking seriously about trivial things (the weather) or lightly about serious things (death) and small talk can be a sophisticated way to do just this.

"The skilled conversationist doesn't insist that atmospheric or traffic conditions or where a person has been at the seaside are inherently unworthy of discussion. They know that what a person feels about a cloudy afternoon might be a highway to their soul or that their experiences around parking might provide clues as to their attitudes to authority or their relations with their parents."

De Botton concludes that people's fear of small talk is understandably their fear of being stuck in a boring conversation, without being able to influence the flow, but he believes that we have much greater agency than we credit ourselves for in being able to make a conversation rich. He believes very few of us want to remain on the surface but that many of us don't know how to go deeper. Small talk can be the "first, understandable and never insulting steps towards the sincerity and intimacy that all of us crave."

Perhaps, the holy grail is still to be discerning about the quality of conversations we wish to have, but to acknowledge that the way to get there varies depending on the context we find ourselves in. As we continue to have fewer in-person conversations, the stakes can get higher for us, but so can the tools.

If you want to give Arthur Aron's study a go, here's how it works:

Choose Your Partner

Pick someone you want to feel closer to - this might be a friend, family member, someone you work with. Both partners need to feel comfortable sharing personal thoughts and feelings, so let them know what they're in for!

Set Aside Time

Schedule 20–45 uninterrupted minutes to conduct the practice in person.

Take Turns Asking the Questions by Set

Divide the time into three equal parts, one for each question set (I, II, III). In each phase, take turns asking and answering the questions - alternating who goes first - to ensure mutual engagement.

Progressively Deeper Questions

• Set I: Light and introductory (e.g., "Would you like to be famous? In what way?"; "What would constitute a 'perfect' day for you?").

• Set II: More personal and reflective (e.g., "What is your most treasured memory?"; "Is there something you've dreamed of doing for a long time?").

• Set III: Emotionally vulnerable (e.g., "Make three true 'we' statements"; "When did you last cry in front of another person?")

Eye Contact

At the end of the questions, spend 4 minutes where you look into each other's eyes continually.

That's it, you're done.

I’m Abi, an executive coach working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io or drop me a line at abi@adessa.io

I used to think I was good at planning.

I’ve always been fairly organised. My job often relied on business plans, status reports and production calendars, seeing around corners, and preempting problems. In my personal life, too, I planned ahead: travel, logistics, childcare. At one point, I was pretty single-handedly running a household in London and another with eight housemates in Norfolk.

But here’s the truth: I couldn’t plan. Not really. And learning how to do it - not practically, but emotionally - has been one of the harder things I’ve had to do.

When I say "planning," I more accurately mean intention-setting. That’s where the magic lies.

Because intention-setting can change your life. It’s changed mine.

It’s now central to my coaching work. Clients arrive with a desire: a new job, a promotion, business growth, conflict resolution. More often than not, the turning point comes when we write a plan together for how to get there and then we work together to remove obstacles and make the plan a reality.

It was the same for me when I started working with a coach a few years ago. But at the beginning, I had a big problem: I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know how to sit down and figure that out. And even when I thought I had clarity, I didn’t know how to write it into a plan.

So we’d sit together, screen-sharing a mind-mapping tool, and slowly, painfully, a plan would take shape. With a lot of hand-holding. Over time, like many things, intention-setting became second nature. My email inbox now has several plans I’ve written to myself in the past year.

So why Is Intention-Setting So Important?

Setting out your intentions in a plan gives your actions direction, meaning, and focus.

Here’s why that matters:

They Align You With What Matters

Intentions clarify your values. When you set an intention, you’re saying: This is who I want to be. This is how I want to live. That keeps you grounded, especially when circumstances shift.

They Create Conscious Focus

Intentions help you move from autopilot to deliberate attention and are more likely to act in ways that reflect your deeper aims.

They Build Resilience

When you’re anchored by intention, you’re less shaken by failure or feedback. You’re not just chasing outcomes. You’re choosing how to show up. That builds self agency, which builds resilience.

They Influence Habits and Choices

Intention-setting quietly shapes your decisions.. Over time, these micro-choices build lasting change.

How to Write a Plan That Sets Out Your Intentions

When I’m starting this process, for myself, or for clients, here’s how I approach writing a plan. It’s really simple. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a powerful piece of kit.

Here is the process to follow:

1. What does success look like to you?
   Define your objectives. What do you want to get out of this?
   

2. Work out your timeframe.
   A lot of my work is based around 90-day plans (inspired by The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins). Ninety days is enough to build momentum. You may not reach the finish line, but you’ll be well on your way. I tend to work in:
   

   • Short-term (90 days, often aligned to the seasons/terms)

   • Mid-term (1 year, ideal for senior job transitions)

   • Long-term (3–5 years, for major career pivots or life-stage transitions like becoming an empty-nester, business planning)
     

3. Choose your headings.
   Aim for 5 to 7 sections. For example:

   • A business development plan might include: Talent, New Business, Process, Client Growth, Commercial, Marketing

   • A job-hunt plan might include: Networking, Outreach, CV & LinkedIn, New Skills, Research, Self-Care
     

4. My 90-day life plan has had the same categories for four years: Me / Work / Health / Kids / Family / Finances / Home

Add 6 to 8 simple bullet points under each heading.

Here’s what a couple of sections from mine looks like right now:

Me:

• Strengthen my friendship and community network

• Engage with theatre, books, and films

• Write my life story, one anecdote at a time

Work:

• Deliver on my Grace & Co objectives and build relationships

• Grow my coaching business in line with my strategic goals

• Invest in strong network ties

• Volunteer for ADR to build mediation experience

• Keep writing fortnightly Substack articles
  

6. Keep your plan somewhere accessible.

   Some weeks you’ll focus on certain sections and neglect others. That’s normal. But checking in with your plan helps you rebalance over time.

7. Now move from planning into action

Many of us have spent time ruminating on a plan and getting stuck in the planning stage. This type of plan shouldn’t take more than an hour, two tops, to write. Then get out of planning, into action. Process over perfection, every time.

That’s it. If you can, create a short, medium and long term plan that you keep concurrently (this is gold standard planning). It’s the same process, whatever the time span.

Intention-Setting and the Science of Manifestation

This week I listened to a Mel Robbins episode featuring the late Dr. James Doty. A neurosurgeon, Stanford professor, and founder of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research, Doty spent his life exploring the neuroscience behind intention and manifestation.

At age 12, a chance encounter in a magic shop changed the course of his life. Living in poverty with an abusive parent, he was taught how to set intentions: to visualise, affirm, and write down what he wanted.

This led to his whole life's work being about the science of manifesting. He says there’s some woo-woo crap out there, but his type of manifesting is no magic, but pure science.

Why?

• “What fires together, wires together.” Bringing your awareness to something and writing it down activates brain circuits.
  

• Salience = Attention. Once something is embedded, your brain marks it as important - like a file labeled “essential.”
  

• The more you use all your senses to commit your plan to memory (writing it down, saying it out loud etc), the stronger it commits to your subconscious and the more chance the plan has to become a reality.

The Missing Piece: Mindset

So why did I find planning so hard at first?

Dr. Doty advises that you can’t set or embed intentions when you’re not in the right mindset. The science shows it doesn’t work. When you're anxious, stressed, or self-critical, your sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) is activated. That state narrows focus, shuts down creativity, and blocks insight.

To write and embed intentions effectively, you must access your parasympathetic state (rest-and-digest). That’s when your brain becomes flexible, open, and capable of integrating new patterns. That’s when you can see a plan more clearly, write it down, and commit it to memory.

When I first started coaching, I was going through a hard time: a separation, parenting alone, rethinking many of my closest relationships, re-balancing my hormones. Like many people, I’d sought out a coach because I needed some help. I wasn’t in the right mindset to create plans by myself. So I borrowed my coach’s mindset until I could build my own.

And I built that through working my way through my plans, one by one.

Which doesn’t mean I nailed every item on every plan. No way. And this is an important point: learning how to commit to a plan but being prepared that it won’t go exactly as you wish, is part of the planning.

After all, as Mike Tyson once reminded us all: “Everyone has a plan until they’re punched in the face.”

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Think of your plan as intentions, not goals.

• Build in breadth. If there’s a whiff of all-eggs-in-one-basket, it may not be the right plan.

• Revisit your plan at intervals and course-correct.

• Changing your mind is a really grown-up thing to do (something I only learned after I turned 40).

• Any good plan should also include important things that you are already doing - this greatly helps with a sense of accomplishment and balances out all the yet-to-be-tackled items on the plan.
  

I’ve written before about a series of hills I’ve climbed. My plans are the map that helps me get to the top. They’ve been invaluable. I keep my old plans. I look back at them and see the distance covered.

It’s not because I’ve achieved everything I planned for - there are some significant parts that didn’t happen, for all kinds of reasons. It’s less about the outcome, but about the sense that I was choosing where I wanted to go. As a wise woman once said to me: ‘Abi, we need to ensure you’re in the driving seat of your life’.

If you have a challenge to solve - at work or beyond - I’d love to help you write a plan.

With Q4 around the corner, September is your window to set out a clear plan. In a 50-minute Plan-Writing Clinic we’ll 1) get clear on where you are, 2) decide where you’re heading, 3) identify what’s in the way - so you know exactly what to do next.

August intro price £195. Standard £295. Book by 5pm Friday 29th August. DM me on LinkedIn or email abi@adessa.io.

I’m Abi, a leadership coach working with leaders in the brand & marketing industries to lead themselves and others with greater self-agency. If you’d like to know more about my work, visit adessa.io