Introduction

Elon University’s Imagining the Digital Future Center published a March report called Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the AI Age. They asked hundreds of experts what keeps a person intact as more and more of ordinary life gets mediated by machines, and published the answers as short signed essays.

The futurist Tracey Follows argues that resilience depends on sustaining what she calls the “un-machinable dimensions of human identity,” and names what to cultivate: judgment, meaning-making, ethical reasoning, imagination, intuition, and adaptability.

I agree, especially with the intuition part.

“Cultivate your intuition” is an instruction like “eat well” and “get more sleep”. Obviously right, and of no use at all to the person who is stuck with a junk food addiction or insomnia.

So here is one method I use when working with AI, and it starts earlier than you would expect.

Before the question

Almost every piece of advice about thinking better begins at the point where you ask the question; this begins before it.

If we are carrying stress, or something unresolved, the older parts of the nervous system stay switched on and affect everything we think. Not only how you feel about what surfaces, but what surfaces at all. And the conclusions come out with no mark on them to say how they were affected or changed; they arrive feeling like insight.

So the first move is to settle your mind and body. Slow down, drain some of the stress off, let the background chatter go. This is the first step of the work, and skipping it can make the rest unreliable.

The question does more than you think

What you end up creating depends enormously on what you ask. A question sets the scope of the enquiry. It decides what counts as relevant, what gets looked at, and what is excluded. We all know to watch out for the leading question; it turns out there is no other kind.

While that can be a problem, it can also be a creative advantage if used consciously. If no question is neutral, then its framing is powerfully formative, and an opportunity to exercise agency. What question do you want to ask to create what future?

As an example, here is a question I come back to when I suspect I have closed the question too much:

What do I need to know that I don’t know? What am I not even looking at?

Set it deliberately, then hold it loosely

Having primed your intuition with the question, let go of it.

I treat the part of me that answers as another party with a contribution to make, and I say: “I’d really like to know about this, but if there’s something you think is more important, I’m going to listen to that too.” Then I stop steering and let impressions arrive; images, half scenes, a phrase, a feeling about a direction.

They arrive in their own form and their own order, and I just allow them to do that.

Then bring the critic back

Intuition does not replace critical thinking. It works with it, and the partnership is the whole point.

So the impressions get examined. Is this pattern real, or is it something I haven’t processed? Does this feeling belong to the question, or something else? Some of what arrives will not survive that query, and what does are useful indicators.

Land it

Write it down, draw it, get up and move with it, say it out loud to somebody.

An impression that stays in your head stays vague, and it fades. Put it into the world, and two things happen: it becomes specific enough to work with, and it usually releases a further flood of material behind it.

That is the sequence. Settle, ask, frame, allow, evaluate, land. It takes a few minutes, and it can be learned.

Why now?

The report mentioned above expresses genuine worries, and rightly so. When answers are available instantly, in confident prose, for any question you can type, the effort of arriving at your own becomes optional. Usually nobody consciously decides to stop thinking; it just happens because a plausible-sounding, confidently delivered answer is instantly available.

The answer to that is not to hold out against the machines. It is to have somewhere of your own to come back to. A practice you trust, that you have used before, that produces something you recognise as yours.

Cultivating your intuition is where your own answers come from.

If you’d like to try the sequence with me, reply to this, and we’ll find a time.

Source: Tracey Follows et al in Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the AI Age, Chapter 1, “Cultivating Human Agency: Prioritizing Autonomy,” Imagining the Digital Future Center, Elon University, March 2026. https://imaginingthedigitalfuture.org/reports-and-publications/human-resilience-in-the-age-of-ai/cultivating-human-agency/

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Introduction

Imagine two people standing at the top of a mountain.
One has climbed it, the other arrived by helicopter. They are looking at exactly the same view, standing at the summit, looking out across the same landscape.

But they have not had the same experience.

Perspectives from the Mountain

The climber knows something about the mountain that the passenger doesn’t. They know what it was like to cross the lower slopes, where the ground became difficult, where they had to stop, which way they chose when the path divided. They know the changing weather. They know what their body felt like at different points in the journey. They know something more about the mountain because they experienced many facets of it on the way.

The person in the helicopter hasn’t done anything wrong. The helicopter is an extraordinary achievement. It has simply given them a completely different relationship with the mountain.
They have reached the summit without having travelled through the mountain.

And I think something rather like this is happening with AI.

The Overwhelm of Production Capability

A colleague recently told me about their experience running a business accelerator. People were using AI to create websites, documents and other materials for their businesses. They could produce things remarkably quickly.
And there was a recurring problem.

Once something had been produced, it could feel as though the work was finished.
I don’t think this was because people were careless or foolish, it’s a perfectly understandable response to what AI can now do.

So I wasn’t surprised to come across this article from MIT Sloan about one of the emerging problems with AI. The central point was simple: AI can now produce work faster than human beings can properly verify it.

The article describes a widening gap between cheap, rapid AI production and the slower human capacity to judge whether what has been produced is actually correct, safe or useful. The challenge for organisations, it argues, is not simply deploying AI, but being able to stand behind what it produces.

For most of our working lives, there has been a rough relationship between producing something and understanding something.If you built a website, you probably knew something about websites.If you wrote a substantial business document, you had probably spent some time thinking through the business, the audience and the purpose of the document.If you developed a product, you had probably encountered some of the problems involved in making it work.
The work of getting somewhere and the work of understanding how you got there were intertwined, but AI has changed that.

You can now describe what you want and arrive at a remarkably convincing version of it almost immediately.
And it is tempting to assume that all the work has somehow been done for us.But a website can exist without being the right website; a beautifully written document can exist without saying what actually needs to be said; a strategy can be coherent and still be pursuing the wrong objective.

The question isn’t simply whether the thing works; it’s whether it belongs. And to learn this, we need to ask:

• What is the thing actually for?

• Who is it for?

• What else does it need to connect with?

• What already exists around it?

• What matters here, and what doesn’t?

• What are we actually trying to achieve?

• And crucially, in many cases, who’s going to buy it?

These are questions that AI can help us explore, but not answer on our behalf.

We can climb together

Quite possibly we can use AI to help answer some of those questions.

AI can be a useful companion on the journey. It can help us explore the terrain, suggest routes, carry some of the equipment, point out possibilities we hadn’t noticed and help us get through difficult sections.
But there is still a human being on the mountain; someone who knows why they are there, who can recognise that the weather has changed. Someone who can say, “That’s an interesting route, but it isn’t where we’re going.” and can see how the mountain fits into the landscape beyond it.
And perhaps most importantly, someone who can ask:
Why are we climbing this mountain?

Perhaps the most important thing we can do before using an extraordinarily powerful production tool is become better at knowing ourselves. Knowing what we actually want, what matters to us, the environment in which our work has to live, what we already have, what is missing, and what we are responding to.

And sometimes realise the most important thing of all: that we don’t need to produce anything.

Developing this type of thinking is part of what Liminal Coaching does. The deep calm and reflective states that we work with aren’t simply a way of taking a pleasant break before getting back to the real work: the reflection is part of the work.

When we become quiet enough, we can step outside the immediate pressure to produce and perceive the wider environment. We can notice things we already know but haven’t had enough space to really consider.
We can distinguish what we genuinely want from what simply feels urgent and allow an intention to emerge before rushing to turn it into a product.

And sometimes we discover that the thing we thought we needed to make isn’t actually the thing we need at all.

So perhaps a better way of thinking about human AI collaboration is something like this:

This is what I mean by orientation before acceleration.
The point isn’t to slow everything down. Once we know where we are going, AI can help us move at super speed and hooray for that. The point is to avoid accelerating before we have had the chance to understand where we are, where we are going, and why.

The Same Applies to Organizations

And this way of working isn’t only relevant to individuals, the same pattern applies at an organisational level. Organisations can become just as captivated by the helicopter.
Someone sees what AI can do and suddenly the question becomes:

How quickly can we use this?
The next thing you know, one team begins generating proposals, another starts building prototypes. Then a strategy appears (rather too quickly? but it looks convincing), and a new system is commissioned.

All of this can look reassuringly like progress. It also plays directly into the destructive culture of needing to be seen to be productive at all times.

The productivity and superficial polish of AI can make it surprisingly easy to move before anyone has properly paused to understand the landscape.

At an organisational level, the questions are different in scale, but not in kind;

• What are we actually trying to do?

• What problem are we trying to solve?

• For whom?

• What already exists here?

• What does this need to connect with?

• What are our customers, colleagues and wider environment actually telling us?

• What will change if we introduce this?

• And is this really the mountain we need to climb?

An appropriate process for making sure we aren’t just producing something that looks good but doesn’t really achieve anything could looks something like this:

The same principle applies.

Orientation before acceleration.

Pausing does not mean paralysis, it means creating enough space to understand what is happening before applying enormous new power to it.
Because AI doesn’t only make it possible for one person to head rapidly in the wrong direction. It can put an entire organisation on a fleet of helicopters, all moving efficiently towards the wrong mountain.

Conclusion

When you are next thinking of deploying AI or heading off to start building, maybe try running this simple formula first:

pause → listen → understand its environment → recognise what matters → clarify intention → AI helps explore or produce → check to see how the result fits back into the whole.

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It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

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Introduction

The hardest part of a bad day is often the question you asked yourself about it:
Why does this always happen to me? is a real question, and your mind will go and build an answer out of every other time something like this seems to have happened, until you end the day convinced there is something inevitable at work. A character flaw. A lapse of attention. You didn’t decide to feel worse, but you did ask a question to which one or both of these would be the answer.

The Question Funnels Attention

We treat our circumstances as the thing acting on us, but often the question we ask about it does more to create our perception; it decides where we point our attention, which memories we call up, what we count as evidence. A question is not a neutral request for information. It’s an instruction about where to look, and we hand ourselves these instructions all day without thinking about them very much, if at all.

There is good news here as well because, if a cruel question aims you at everything that has gone wrong, a better one aims you somewhere you can actually stand. Not necessarily a cheerful one; bad is bad, and pretending rarely survives contact with a real problem.
But an honest question that leaves room for hope can point you in a direction you can do something about. What do I actually want to be different here? When has even a little of that already happened, and what did I do that helped? What would be the first small sign it was turning? These have real answers too, built from real evidence, and your mind will fetch those just as faithfully.

“What’s one thing that went better than I feared, and how did I manage it?” are both honest questions about the same event. They leave you something to do, to try and move towards in the morning. The skill to practice is to catch which kind of question you’ve reached for out of habit, and to decide if it serves you or if there is a better question leading to a different outcome.

You don’t have to answer

Which brings us to a critical decision point: you do not have to answer the question you catch yourself asking. You can notice it and let it go by. You’d never let a friend sit and marinate in why do I ruin everything — you’d gently, almost without thinking, ask them something kinder and more useful. You’re allowed to do that for yourself. Often, just noticing you asked is enough to loosen its grip.

And then there’s the question that could be underneath the apparent one; sometimes the trouble isn’t inside the question you asked, it’s outside it, in the part of the situation you never looked at. So the most freeing thing to ask is often the widest: what am I not even looking at here? What if the thing I’ve been trying so hard to fix isn’t the thing? Widening the frame can produce more insight.

The questions you ask yourself are part of a habitual daily dialogue. However, whatever is happening around you or to you, the questions are yours to change today, without waiting and without anyone’s permission. Which future you go looking for tomorrow depends a great deal on which question you decide to carry there.

Conclusion

So next time you catch yourself asking why this always happens to you, try treating it as an invitation you’re free to decline. And then ask, gently, what you’d actually like to be true, and what the first small sign of it might be.

This is one of the processes we can help to anchor and facilitate in sessions.

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The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

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1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

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Introduction

A lot of what happens in a Liminal Coaching session comes down to which question gets asked next. It decides which part of a person’s own account they are able to reach.

I have spent the past few weeks watching the same thing happen in the published evidence of a parliament, which has no wish to please anybody. What follows is what that showed, how it confirms my view that the question is the most formative act in any inquiry, and what that means for the person doing the asking.

What a question does in a Liminal Coaching session

Solution-focused work leans on this quite deliberately. Ask about exceptions, the times the problem was absent, smaller, or somehow got handled, and people find them. Those instances were always in their history; nothing new arrives. What changes is that they become available to think with, and once they are available, the account someone gives of their situation is different.

The obvious objection is that this is just two people getting on well. I am there, I am interested, and the person may be telling me what they sense I would like to hear. A session has two people in it and plenty of room for that explanation.

The same effect, with the rapport removed

Which is why I have found the past few weeks unexpectedly clarifying. I have been working with the published record of the Welsh Parliament’s committees, a little over a quarter of a million contributions, from thirty-six committees across forty-eight committee terms, running from November 2017 to July 2026. The process finds passages by meaning rather than by keyword, so you can ask it something in ordinary language and it returns what is closest to what you meant.

We put two sets of twelve questions to the process, on the same subject and in entirely different words. One set was written by a language model, the other was derived from published systems thinking: Meadows, Senge, Ackoff, Checkland. Twenty-four questions altogether, no two alike. Each set returned a pool of about a hundred passages out of the same quarter of a million.

They shared nine. Ninety percent of what either set found, the other never saw.

The record has no rapport. It cannot sense what I want, has no wish to please me, and does not shift according to how the afternoon is going. It is inert, identical on every reading, and it still gave two substantially different answers to two honest versions of the same question. Whatever the record “contains” about a subject turned out not to be a fixed quantity waiting to be retrieved. It was a function of how we reached for it.

Two pools, different in kind

The pools also differed in the sort of passage they contained, which I had not anticipated. We tested every passage against a list of a hundred and sixty-one word forms: feedback loop, unintended consequence, root cause, and the rest. In the pool the model’s questions found, thirty-one of the hundred and eight used at least one of those terms; the other seventy-seven used none. In the pool the sourced questions found, four of a hundred and ten did.

So the model's questions reached passages that named what they were talking about, and the sourced questions reached passages describing the same things in ordinary words without ever naming them. A keyword search would have found the first group and missed almost all of the second.

What the question is really doing

I don’t think the investigation process and the session are the same activity. The record cannot be helped and does not want anything, and that is exactly what makes it useful here: it strips out every interpersonal explanation and leaves the mechanism on its own. Questions are selective; in my view, they create reality, whether they select from an archive that has no feelings about it, or they select from a person who has plenty. Framing a question creates the boundaries of what follows; it is as much about what it excludes as anything. This is a familiar theme in Systems Thinking.

Choosing the question

Which leaves how you choose the question. This is where developed intuition is important, though not as a single faculty. The word covers a number of different things: a survival reflex, a fast read of the person across the table, rapid matching of a situation against everything you have met before, and the making of something that was not in the material to begin with.
My own view is that the subconscious recruits whatever it needs from every part of the brain and nervous system, rather than running one dedicated mechanism, and that the reservoir it draws on is a great deal larger than the parts we have names for. What is at work when a good question arrives is often the output of that process. A question that opens a field nobody has looked at can be the start of developing novel insight.

There is a sequence I teach for working with this, and the striking thing is where the question sits in that sequence. First comes calming and draining stress, then the question, and the note I have written beside that step is that it establishes a scope: a sphere of inquiry. Then framing a field, letting impressions arise, evaluating them critically, and finally doing something with what survives: drawing it, writing it, acting on it.

The calming comes before the question rather than before the insight, which says the state you are in matters at the moment the boundary is drawn, not later when you are interpreting what turned up. And there is a reason it has to come first: the survival end of the system gets its hands on incoming experience before the higher processing does, and when it is running hot (through stress, or through something older than the present situation), it colours what follows strongly enough to distort it. What you get then are the questions of someone under threat. They are narrow, they are the same ones as last time, and they return what they always return. Thinking harder does not help, because thinking harder produces a more elaborate version of the same question.

And critical evaluation has its own step, after the impressions rather than instead of them. Intuition here is not the opposite of rigor and does not ask you to suspend it. The two work in reciprocity, and the reciprocity happens inside the field the question drew.

Which is why the sequence also asks you to let the question go once you have formed it; to say, in effect, this is what I would like to know about, but if something else turns out to be more worth having, I am listening. The field is set deliberately and then held loosely. And it is why the most useful question I know is the one aimed squarely at its own blind spot: what am I not even looking at?

The questions you no longer notice

What follows from all of this is not a resolution to ask better questions. It is to stop treating an answer as a report on how things are, and start treating it as what became reachable, asked that way, on that day. When the answer to a question is discouraging, one move is to push harder on the same question. Another is to notice that the question has a shape, and that a different shape may produce different insights.

The place I would look this week is at the questions nobody asks anymore because they have become automatic. Every organization has a set of them, built into a monthly report, a standing agenda item, a form. They were chosen once, often years ago and often by someone who has since left, and they now quietly determine what the organization is able to see about itself and what it cannot. Whatever falls outside them is not there to argue its case, because it was never inside the frame that would have let it. Nobody experiences them as questions, so they feel like normality.

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Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

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1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

Being stuck is rarely a shortage of thinking. It’s usually thinking with nothing to push against. A thought checked only against itself keeps agreeing with itself, and that feels like clarity right up until someone asks a question and the whole thing rearranges.

It rarely helps to think harder. What can help is to put the problem in relationship with something outside your own head.

The Value of Rubber Ducking

There’s a footnote in The Pragmatic Programmer, a 1999 software book by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, describing a programmer who carried a rubber duck and, when the code wouldn’t work, explained it to the duck line by line. The name stuck. Programmers have been rubber-ducking ever since, and most of them will tell you it works.

What’s striking is how little the duck contributes. No expertise, no question, no advice, not even a nod, only the requirement that you assume it knows nothing and say the whole thing anyway. That turns out to be enough.

The reason isn’t mysterious. Held in your head, a problem can stay half-formed indefinitely. You can carry three incompatible assumptions at once quite comfortably, because you never have to put them in the same sentence. Saying something aloud forces a shape, and saying it to something that knows nothing means having to outline the whole shape. The gaps turn up in the telling.

A good deal of what happens in a session is this, though we don’t usually name it so plainly. I’m not there with the answer. Nobody arrives because I know their business or their decision better than they do. What I offer is a context for the thinking; outside interest that encourages the account to develop.

Unlike the duck, I can notice that you’ve said “obviously” four times about the one thing you’re least sure of, and I can ask what you meant by “fine”. That’s the difference between rubber-ducking and being met by someone. But the direction is the same in both. There is value in how someone responds, but probably even more in how the telling clarifies the problem.

The Conversational River

A river cuts its own banks. The bends aren’t imposed on the water from outside; they’re a record of where it has already been. Containers work like that too. The steadiness of a good conversation accumulates from what has already been let through it, which is why a friendship of twenty years can hold something a workshop exercise can’t.

Practically, this changes what you reach for when you’re stuck. The instinct is to find more information, or more time. Both are usually available, and neither is usually what’s missing.

What’s missing is an outside influence or sounding board.

So, this week: when you’re stuck, pause and ask, what or who could meet me in this?

It might be a person. It might be a page, a walk, a voice note you never send. The requirement is small; it has to be outside you, and you have to say it out loud.

You probably already do this: explaining something to someone who couldn’t possibly help, and coming away helped anyway.

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The service describes how to get started in the online manual in the left-hand control bar.

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Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

Given my deep engagement with imagination and liminal space, working with AI might seem incongruous. In my coaching practice, I sit with individuals or groups in a session, where a story told in the right shape can change what they feel and know. In a new endeavor, I have used AI to explore and build a system that indexes passages of text by meaning based on relationships. Last Thursday, I set the two ways of working side by side for two hours in a collegial workshop kindly sponsored by the Schumacher Institute, which is what prompted this article.

They both have roots in meaning as a function of relationship.

The Same Principle in Three Fields

The same principle engages me from three directions, each independent of the others:

Firstly, in trance work, a suggestion only does something when its shape matches the situation it describes. The clearest case is glove anaesthesia: a suggestion of numbness that stops cleanly at the wrist, along a line no nerve actually follows. The nerves of the hand and forearm are arranged nothing like a glove. What the body takes up is the shape of the idea, overriding its own anatomy. The correspondence does the work, not the content of the story.

Secondly, Alfred Korzybski put it starkly: structure is the only content of knowledge. A map shares no substance with the ground — only arrangement. It is useful because the relationships between the marks on it mirror the relationships between things in the world. You may have had the moment, with a paper map in an unfamiliar city, when the streets on the page suddenly swing into line with the streets under your feet. That click is the relationships matching.

And thirdly, in systems thinking the same thing turns up as a rule of thumb. Donella Meadows found that changing the elements of a system does little, while changing the relationships between them can change everything. Fritjof Capra went further: a part, he said, is not a thing but a pattern in a web of relationships; the web is the unit, not the part. Picture a flock of starlings turning at dusk. No bird leads, and each is only tracking the handful nearest it. Ten thousand separate wingbeats power the turn, but that they turn together, as one shape, rather than scattering, is entirely in the relationships between them.

The Application in Groups

This translates to a group of people. A team can hold all the same facts and still be stuck, not because they disagree about the facts, but because the facts haven’t yet been arranged into a structure the group holds in common. The work is not getting agreement on content; it is finding that shared arrangement of the already shared elements.

A piano illustrates this nicely. Put the pedal down, strike one string, and every other string is free to vibrate as well, through the bridge and the soundboard and the air between them. What decides which strings vibrate is sympathetic resonance, and that has an arithmetic relationship: a string will sound when the note struck is a whole-number multiple of its own frequency, the octave above it, and a fifth above that again. And so strings that are not the same pitch as the single string that was struck will move – and move each other – readily if they are in that mathematical relationship. Shift the frequency of the struck string even slightly and all of those strings will sit there silent. The relationship has to be exact.

Which is an interesting way to look at what a group needs. Each person’s reading has to stand in clear relation to a structure all of them can reach; it does not have to be the same reading, which is neither achievable nor much use. Vague overlap will not do it. What travels between people is not the words; it is the relation the words stand in.

In Coaching Sessions

In a coaching session, what helps my clients change what they feel and know is the correspondence between the shape of a suggestion and the shape of a situation. In the software I’ve created, it is the correspondence between a user’s question and the passages in their uploaded document store that stand in the right relation to their query. Different material, same principle: meaning is in how things stand in relation to one another.

Take this seriously, and it changes how you listen. I stopped waiting for the decisive fact or the perfect phrase, and started listening for the shape that holds a set of things together. A story lands when its shape fits. A group finds its feet when it finds the arrangement it can share. An argument that would not resolve turns out to have been about the meaning of structure all along.

The melody is not in the notes but in the intervals between them. The meaning is in the relationship.

An Invitation

After Thursday, I wrote the whole thing up at length: the thinking behind the build, the mechanism, and the sources. If you’d like a copy, reply to me at mike@liminalcoaching.com, and I’ll send it.

You can also sign up for one of several free trials:

Get Thinking Partner Free Trial

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

There are times when the usual chatter (deadlines, opinions, the hum of competing priorities) drops away, and for a short while, a team feels different; lighter, and more open. That’s a kind of liminal space: the threshold where something new can emerge, and groups remember what they’re actually here to do.

Liminal Coaching is about creating the conditions for that threshold to appear and helping alignment become natural. When the internal noise clears, what matters becomes obvious, and when a whole group experiences that clarity together, something shifts—decisions land differently, collaboration feels easier, and the work itself starts to flow.

Here’s how it works in practice.

The Shared Field of Clarity

Most team off-sites begin with goals and end with action plans. Sessions begin with opening this creative liminal space . I use guided relaxations (sometimes referred to as “napitations”) to lower the collective stress level. These are designed to be listened to passively, even while drifting off. The body relaxes, the nervous system resets, and the mind stops trying so hard. What’s left is a shared field of calm, where people can hear each other and themselves.

In that space, we work with simple, symbolic frameworks: a table where each person places what they’re carrying, a boat that carries the team toward its vision, a mirror that reflects what’s truly important. These are tools to help the subconscious reorganize itself. When the noise clears, the shared clarity of the group’s direction crystallizes

What Groups Experience

Teams who’ve gone through this describe it in practical terms:

• Alignment without consensus. People don’t have to agree on everything; they just stop arguing over the wrong things.

• Creative flow. Ideas emerge faster, with less second-guessing. The usual friction around brainstorming disappears.

• Resilience under pressure. When stress spikes, the group has a shared language for settling, recordings they can use before big meetings, and even in the middle of a tough day.

• A sense of “we.” A quiet recognition that everyone is in the same boat, rowing toward the same horizon.

I’ve run this with the team at a highly successful PR Agency, twice, with an innovation consultancy’s entire team over the course of a year, and with groups at the Schumacher Institute, and in the UK public sector.

Dan Rose, a founder of the innovation consultancy The Moment, described it to his own readers like this:

“Our entire team has been working actively with Mike Parker to develop this practice. Mike’s focus is the relationship between neuroscience and personal leadership. His practice involves working with individuals at a subconscious level to calm the part of the brain that is driven by fear and stress in order for the higher order brain functions to be more engaged in restructuring information and new possibilities.”

Andy Pray, then CEO and Founder of Praytell:

“Liminal offered refreshing, needed perspectives. Mike and Jordan taught us both about ourselves and each other, a truly rewarding experience. Be it the academic aspects that were intellectually fascinating or the quiet time engagements that always left us with a smile and a charged battery, it was just right.”

When This Fits Best

This approach works well for groups who:

• Are stuck in repetitive cycles—same conflicts, same stalled decisions.

• Need to align around a new direction, but don’t want another forced “visioning” exercise.

• Are creatively blocked, whether in product development, strategy, or innovation.

• Want to reduce burnout without adding another wellness program.

• Are navigating change—mergers, leadership transitions, or shifts in purpose—and need the team to move as one.

It’s a reset for the group’s collective being, so the work can happen from a place of steadiness.

A Simple Invitation

If you’ve ever been in a room where everyone is talking, but no one is really listening, you know how rare and how powerful true alignment can be. It doesn’t come from more meetings or better agendas. It comes from relaxing and connecting with others.

I’m offering a short, focused session for teams who want to experience this—no long-term commitment, no jargon. Just a chance to settle, reconnect, and see what emerges when the usual pressure drops away.

Below is a six-minute recording. It’s an introduction to the technique rather than a full session, but it’s enough to get a sense of what it does. Try it now. And then maybe start your next team meeting with it: play it before the agenda and see what’s different in the first 10 minutes.

Get the Drift to Peace Moment

If that sounds like something your group could use, reply to this email. We’ll set up a time to talk.
For more information, see liminalstrategist.com

Workshop: AI as a Thinking Partner

Most of the AI we use is built around one objective: keep you here. Attention is the resource being harvested, and these systems are tuned with real sophistication to hold it. That serves engagement well and reflection very badly.

This free workshop looks at a different way of using the AI we have been served up to adjust that balance.

The session includes a live look at the Thinking Partner in action today. It is a real application in daily use, not a mock-up, and there are currently a limited number of free trials available so you can judge for yourself whether the claims hold up.

Thursday, 23rd July, 16.00 BST (15.00 UTC).

Register for the Workshop

If you want AI that helps you think rather than another thing competing for your attention, I would be glad to have you there.

Workshop: The Beach of Creative Insight

The third in a series of three workshops on accessing creativity.
This session is focused on filtering and selecting material from your energized creative processes. It encourages selecting the best, most relevant ideas and insights from the vast creative well of the subconscious.

Thursday, 16th July 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

Book your place now

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the Third in a three-part sequence, designed to connect with the subconscious wellsprings of creativity.

The Thinking Partner: Launched and Live

If you’d like to see exactly how it all works before you try it, the complete User Guide is here to read first: the full Thinking Partner User Guide.

The best way to know if this is for you is to try it. Right now, the first 50 people to sign up can do so on a week’s free trial. Bring your own material and find out whether it earns a place in how you work. You can take everything with you at any time, and remove your material whenever you ask. Nothing here holds you in.

Hit the button to sign up.

Thinking Partner Sign Up

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Most of the AI we use is built around one objective: keep you here. Attention is the resource being harvested, and these systems are tuned with real sophistication to hold it. That serves engagement well and reflection very badly.

For some time, I have been building something with a different aim. The Thinking Partner is designed to support your own reflection rather than to capture your attention, and to do so without assembling a hidden profile of you in the background. On the 23rd of July, I am running a workshop in association with the Schumacher Institute on what that means in practice, and why I think it matters.

The question underneath the whole project is one I keep returning to. Can a tool help you reflect without building a model of who you are? The dominant pattern says no: personalization means profiling, and profiling means an ever more detailed picture of you, held somewhere you cannot see and used for purposes you did not choose. The approach I have been working towards treats you as the integrator. The tool holds the material, and you hold the meaning.

The workshop draws on three things that shape how I think about this. From systems thinking, the recognition that an intricate network of influences is at work, shaping the interaction, whatever the conscious intentions of the people who build it. From appropriate technology, the tradition the Schumacher Institute has carried forward for decades, the idea of tools built to human scale and in service of human capacity. And from contemplative practice, which has long known that reflection often means thinking about nothing in particular. There is a strand of neuroscience in there too, around the Default Mode Network and the reflective, wandering state of mind that an engagement engine is designed to interrupt.

The session includes a live look at the Thinking Partner in action today. It is a real application in daily use, not a mock-up, and there are currently a limited number of free trials available so you can judge for yourself whether the claims hold up.

Thursday, 23rd July, 16.00 BST (15.00 UTC).

Register for the Workshop

If you want AI that helps you think rather than another thing competing for your attention, I would be glad to have you there.

Workshop: The Beach of Creative Insight

The third in a series of three workshops on accessing creativity.
This session is focused on filtering and selecting material from your energized creative processes. It encourages selecting the best, most relevant ideas and insights from the vast creative well of the subconscious.

Thursday, 16th July 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

Book your place now

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the Third in a three-part sequence, designed to connect with the subconscious wellsprings of creativity.

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

There is a kind of thinking that only arrives when you stop trying to think. You know it from the shower, the walk, the long drive when the road goes quiet: the mind loosens, wanders, and begins connecting things that had been sitting apart. Every so often, it hands you something you had been chasing for hours at your desk: a piece of insight, a shift of perspective, a sudden clarity about what actually matters. It comes when nothing is being asked of you.

The Default Mode Network

That mode has a name. Neuroscientists call it the Default Mode Network, and for years it was cast as the brain’s idle setting, the system that comes on when you rest and shuts off the moment you get to work.

The picture has turned out to be richer. A growing body of work shows the Default Mode Network is active during inward-facing reflection and also during outward-facing tasks like language comprehension and social perception, and a study published earlier this year1 mapped some of the structure behind this: within the network sit distinct subregions with different leanings – some biased toward taking in information from the world, others toward memory-guided thought. This is a substantial faculty of mind, long associated with self-reflection and meaning-making, and it is at work in far more of our lives than the old “switches on when you rest” account allowed. Much about how it operates is still being mapped, and that is worth saying plainly. What is already clear is that this is no mere idle mode.

It is worth pausing to consider what that implies, because it corrects a habit that is easy to fall into. We give these systems tidy singular names, the Default Mode Network among them, and before long, we picture them as fixed parts, small organs each with one settled job. The reality is more fluid. A network of this kind is a pattern of coordination that forms and re-forms, its membership and its internal wiring shifting with the moment. “Default mode” is a useful label for a recurring pattern rather than for a thing or a fixed location. Much about how any of it works is still being mapped, and holding our ideas about that lightly is part of taking it seriously. Treat the label as an object, and you end up with neat stories that outrun the evidence. Hold it as a living process, and something truer comes into view: a capacity that behaves differently depending on the purpose for which it is deployed.

The Underused Capability

Which raises a question. If this reflective capacity is so valuable, why does it go so underused? Part of the answer is cultural. Much of modern working life rewards constant output and treats stillness as waste, so we learn to keep the meaning-making mode in the background and the doing mode in charge.

John Miles has recently written about this with real clarity. In his piece on what he calls the Snap-Back Effect2, he describes how high performers become, in his phrase, addicted to the task-focused “Fixer” mind, pulled back again and again to being useful because stillness has come to feel like vulnerability. His conclusion is one we share: a genuinely valuable capacity of mind is being crowded out by a culture that mistakes ceaseless activity for worth. In fact, the DMN has been described as causal in creative thinking.

Naming that trap is important, and it is where our coaching work begins. Because the pull Miles describes runs deeper than a cultural habit. For anyone who has spent years treating rest as exposure, the whole system braces against the reflex to rest when the pressure to perform mounts. The very thing – rest – that can alleviate the pressure registers instead as a threat.

Viewing rest as vulnerability is learned behavior. But what is learned can be unlearned, and new behavior can take its place

The Way Forward

You cannot force your way into this mode. Effort is the very thing the reflective mind stands down for, so meeting a braced system with more discipline keeps the door shut. The way in is through safety instead, showing your system slowly and patiently that quiet and rest can be trusted. That is a matter of practice, and practice can be taught.

This is the part we care about most: actively strengthening this mode of mind and putting it to use. The reflective capacity can be exercised like any other, and its value compounds, in clearer judgment, in a steadier sense of what matters, in the kind of insight that does not arrive on a deadline. Helping people cultivate that, and draw on it deliberately rather than by accident, is the work we do.

If the question of how to make room for this mode of mind and then actively build it interests you, that is the conversation I would most like to be having.

Workshop: The Beach of Creative Insight

The third in a series of three workshops on accessing creativity.
This session is focused on filtering and selecting material from your energized creative processes. It encourages selecting the best, most relevant ideas and insights from the vast creative well of the subconscious.

Thursday, 16th July 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

Book your place now

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the Third in a three-part sequence, designed to connect with the subconscious wellsprings of creativity.

The Thinking Partner: Launched and Live

If you’d like to see exactly how it all works before you try it, the complete User Guide is here to read first: the full Thinking Partner User Guide.

The best way to know if this is for you is to try it. Right now, the first 50 people to sign up can do so on a week’s free trial. Bring your own material and find out whether it earns a place in how you work. You can take everything with you at any time, and remove your material whenever you ask. Nothing here holds you in.

Hit the button to sign up.

Thinking Partner Sign Up

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

Interesting things happen when a group steps into a liminal space together. First the noise begins to settle and disperse, and then a shared sense of alignment emerges from highly-focused guided relaxation work. The group becomes coherent as each person finds their own ground, and in doing so contributes their unique perspective to a shared field of endeavour.

It is about creating the conditions for a team to reconnect with what matters individually and collectively. Decisions become easier, collaboration feels more natural, and the group’s creative energy flows without friction. The effect is quiet and far-reaching: less effort, more impact. Some people are so accustomed to equating effort with effectiveness that they take ease as a sign that nothing much is happening.

What Groups Experience

The feedback from teams who have gone through this process speaks to a few consistent outcomes:

A reset for the nervous system. Many people describe feeling lighter, more present, and less reactive after our coaching sessions. The guided relaxations work by allowing the mind to drift, which paradoxically helps it reorganise. They ask for no focus and no effort. We sometimes call them “napitations” – a nap and a meditation in one. For teams under pressure, this can feel like a collective exhale.

Deeper connection without forced intimacy. The conversations that follow surface insights that arise naturally when the mind is settled. People often discover they are aligned on priorities they did not realise they shared. These conversations identify key metaphors that become the basis for later guided relaxation sessions, making them uniquely specific to the group and their aims.

Creative and strategic alignment. The path forward becomes clearer, and teams report feeling more aligned on decisions, more open to new ideas, and more resilient in the face of uncertainty. The work feels more fluid.

How It Works in Practice

Liminal Coaching for groups is structured around a few simple principles:

Settle the system first. The guided relaxations create a shared baseline of calm, reducing the cognitive load that hinders clear thinking.

Open the field. The metaphors and imagery used in the sessions create a symbolic space where the subconscious can engage with the group’s challenges. This is where the real work happens, and insights develop.

Let alignment emerge. The conversations that follow focus on identifying where the group is already aligned and where there is room to move forward together.

What This Looks Like for Different Groups

Leadership teams can use these sessions to recalibrate after periods of high stress or before major decisions. The process helps them reconnect with their shared purpose and dissolve the noise that can cloud judgment.

Creative teams find that the sessions unlock new ideas and ease the friction that can come from overthinking. The guided relaxations help them access states where creativity flows most naturally.

Innovation and strategy groups use the process to cut through complexity and surface the insights that matter most. The sessions help them distinguish what is urgent from what is important, and to act from a place of clarity.

A Few Words from Those Who Have Experienced It

Andy, former CEO of Praytell, described it this way: “Liminal offered refreshing, needed perspectives. Mike and Jordan taught us both about ourselves and each other, a truly rewarding experience. Be it the academic aspects that were intellectually fascinating or the quiet time engagements that always left us with a smile and a charged battery, it was just right.”

Beth, a senior leader at a communications agency, added: “After what was a stressful year for all, our leadership team was looking to shake things up and try something new to bring us closer together, while also developing ourselves as creatives, leaders, and problem solvers. Liminal created a safe space for open discussions as well as truly incredible guided meditation sessions that were not only restorative but also developed specific skills. It was surprisingly powerful, and I’d encourage others to step outside their comfort zone and give it a shot.”

Greg, then a co-founder of The Moment, shared: “Our work requires us to maintain a high level of empathy, deep listening, and quick thinking. Our weekly sessions with Mike have empowered us to maintain and develop this state of mind on a more consistent basis throughout the week. We are more resilient to stress and more able to tap into a creative and collaborative mindset.”

Why This Matters Now

In a world where teams are often spread thin across time zones, priorities, and competing demands, alignment becomes a necessity. Our work is delivered remotely, so it reaches a distributed team wherever its members happen to be, sparing the expense and disruption of off-sites and travel. Where an in-person gathering is the right choice, we are glad to run sessions that way, too.

When a group is aligned, it works smarter. The energy that was once spent managing stress or navigating miscommunication can be redirected toward what actually moves the needle for your business.

When the internal noise clears, the path forward becomes obvious. And when a group experiences that together, something shifts in how they work and in how they relate to one another.

If you are curious about how this might work for your team, it might be worth exploring. Sometimes the most powerful changes are the ones that feel almost effortless.

For more information, see liminalstrategist.com

Workshop: The Beach of Creative Insight

The third in a series of three workshops on accessing creativity.
This session is focused on filtering and selecting material from your energized creative processes. It encourages selecting the best, most relevant ideas and insights from the vast creative well of the subconscious.

Thursday, 16th July 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

Book your place now

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the Third in a three-part sequence, designed to connect with the subconscious wellsprings of creativity.

The Thinking Partner: Launched and Live

If you’d like to see exactly how it all works before you try it, the complete User Guide is here to read first: the full Thinking Partner User Guide.

The best way to know if this is for you is to try it. Right now, the first 50 people to sign up can do so on a week’s free trial. Bring your own material and find out whether it earns a place in how you work. You can take everything with you at any time, and remove your material whenever you ask. Nothing here holds you in.

Hit the button to sign up.

Thinking Partner Sign Up

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Connecting with Nature

I’m pleased to announce the latest addition to the Liminal Coaching shop.

We are deeply embedded in nature in every respect. Evidence shows that a 20-minute walk in the forest can reduce stress levels by up to sixty percent. Research into forest bathing showed that people who spent three days and two nights in a forest environment saw a 50% increase in killer T cells and a 47% increase in granulysin in the immune system compared with a control group. Yet our modern way of life has made us increasingly alienated from nature, which is detrimental to our physical and mental health. The Universal Tree is designed to reconnect us to the depths of nature in ourselves

See More Details

If you would like any more information about Liminal Coaching, feel free to email me. mike@liminalcoaching.com

Introduction

You know the kind of place: a café tucked between home and office, a bench in a quiet park, a corner of the library where no one expects anything from you. It’s somewhere you go to think without pressure, to let ideas breathe. These third spaces are where perspective arrives, because you gave it room.

What if you could build that kind of space inside your own mind?

A mental third space is a space you cultivate through habit where your brain can wander, connect, and synthesize without the usual constraints of deadlines or performance. This is about creating the conditions where your mind can do what it already knows how to do, just more deliberately.

The Shape of a Mental Third Space

This space often appears when you’re doing something else: showering, walking, staring out a window. The key is the way you allow your mind to move, letting your brain sort through layers of information, memories, and patterns in the background, the way a river smooths stones over time.

The habits that build this space are simple, but not always easy. They involve:

• Repetition without pressure: Returning to the same peaceful activity (a morning walk, a daily sketch, a few minutes of journaling) to signal to your brain that this is a time for unstructured thought.

• Low-stakes attention: Engaging in tasks that occupy your hands or body but leave your mind free to drift (gardening, knitting, driving a familiar route).

• Rituals of transition: Small, consistent acts that mark the shift from “doing” to “being” (a deep breath, a phrase you say to yourself, a specific place you sit).

Over time, these habits train your brain to recognize when it’s time to step into this third space. It becomes a place you can access at will.

The Role of the Default Mode Network

Neuroscience offers a way to understand what’s happening in this space. The default mode network (DMN) is a large-scale brain network that becomes more active when you’re not focused on the outside world, when you’re daydreaming, reflecting, or letting your mind wander. It’s not idle, but working, making connections, processing memories, and generating insights. Research suggests the DMN plays a key role in creativity, problem-solving, and even how we construct our sense of self.

The DMN doesn’t respond to force. It thrives in states of relaxed attention, the kind you find in that mental third space. When you cultivate habits that invite this state, you’re giving your brain the conditions it needs to do its most integrative work. The solutions, ideas, and perspectives that emerge often feel as if they came out of nowhere, but they were there all along, waiting for the right space to take shape.

The DMN’s work is subtle, and its outputs aren’t always immediate or obvious. But with practice, you can learn to trust the process, to recognize when you’re in that third space, and to let it do what it does best. The breakthroughs will come because you made room for them.

Use our Liminal Strategist experience and receive insights into how to increase your capacity and peace of mind.

Workshop: The Beach of Creative Insight

The third in a series of three workshops on accessing creativity.
This session is focused on filtering and selecting material from your energized creative processes. It encourages selecting the best, most relevant ideas and insights from the vast creative well of the subconscious.

Thursday, 16th July 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

Book your place now

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the Third in a three-part sequence, designed to connect with the subconscious wellsprings of creativity.

The Thinking Partner: Launched and Live

If you’d like to see exactly how it all works before you try it, the complete User Guide is here to read first: the full Thinking Partner User Guide.

The best way to know if this is for you is to try it. Right now, the first 50 people to sign up can do so on a week’s free trial. Bring your own material and find out whether it earns a place in how you work. You can take everything with you at any time, and remove your material whenever you ask. Nothing here holds you in.

Hit the button to sign up.

Thinking Partner Sign Up

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation to use in your ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

There’s a kind of strength that has nothing to do with ambition or charisma. It’s the certainty that arrives when you don’t perform power; you simply inhabit it. Most of us learn early to be a little ashamed of our own force; of wanting; of taking up room; of saying plainly what we mean to do. The question this week is: how about setting that shame down? Your wanting isn’t a fault to be managed. It’s part of the same current that moves through everything you do.

Strength like this waits for the right context and moment, and then it moves without hurry and without doubt. It is as if we said, “I will, because this feels inevitable,” rather than “I suppose I should.” It’s the difference between alignment and obligation, between flow and strain.

What it looks like in practice

In our work, we begin to see the things we’ve made as manifestations of our ongoing focused presence rather than one-off events. Our outward language aligns with our inner state, so how we present ourselves is the inside becoming visible.

In our body, the holding posture eases; the shoulders and the upper back relax, and our breath deepens. The weight that was never really ours to carry can be put down. The nervous system settles into a state of relaxed alertness rather than being tense. You move at the pace of your own rhythms, and the different things you do begin to flow together instead of pulling against each other.

In our relationships, a boundary becomes a clear edge rather than a defense. We can say no from a steady place, without anger and without fear, and people tend to adjust quickly, because clarity gives them something to meet. We can bring an idea to someone with more power than us and stay at ease, offering it from fullness rather than asking for approval. We trust that what’s ours to give will be recognized by the people it’s for, and stop diluting it to keep everyone comfortable.

Three small ways to meet it

Tighten exchanges. Read back over a few recent emails or offers and notice anything written from a place of lack. Can we see over-explaining, apologising, or hoping-this-helps? Rewrite one line so it gives plainly, from fullness. “I hope this helps, let me know if you need anything else” can become “This is what feels clear to me, please adopt what’s useful.”

Pause before you act. Before doing something that matters, such as a conversation, a piece of work, or a request, stop for a moment. Sit or stand with a straight spine and an easy breath, and let it drop into your belly. Ask quietly: where does action feel inevitable here, rather than forced? Do whatever you are going to do from there without rushing or hesitation; the timing is right because it’s aligned.

Set down one “should.” Write down a single obligation you’ve been carrying, for example, “I should follow up with X,” “I should be posting more.” Look at it clearly, and if it isn’t truly yours, let it go. Do only what feels genuinely aligned.

Where to stand this week

The sun doesn’t question whether to shine, so if you see it, spend a little time feeling the warmth on your skin. Notice where you’re holding tensions and let them go –along with the language of “should” and “have to” – and ask instead what wants to move through you.

This is the quiet work of remembering what you already are. And allowing that current to move through you.

Use our Liminal Strategist experience and receive insights into how to increase your capacity and peace of mind.

Workshop: Mountain Treasure
The second in a series of three workshops on accessing creativity.
This session includes looking at models of group creativity and the collective unconscious, and why it doesn’t matter whether you think it exists…

Thursday, 18th June 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

BOOK YOUR PLACE NOW

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the Second in a three-part sequence, designed to connect with the subconscious wellsprings of creativity.

The Thinking Partner: Launched and Live

If you’d like to see exactly how it all works before you try it, the complete User Guide is here to read first: the full Thinking Partner User Guide.

The best way to know if this is for you is to try it. Right now, the first 50 people to sign up can do so on a week’s free trial. Bring your own material and find out whether it earns a place in how you work. You can take everything with you at any time, and remove your material whenever you ask. Nothing here holds you in.

Hit the button to sign up.

Thinking Partner Sign Up

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation for you to use in an ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

For years, I have kept everything I think scattered across notes, half-finished essays, and passages from books that had a deep impact. The pile grew faster than I could manage. I knew there were threads running through it that I had lost. I could not see them, because I cannot read years of my own thinking at once.

Solving that problem is one of the things I built Thinking Partner for. You give it the material you actually think with: the real, messy working pile, or just a few things that matter to you. Then you work with it in two ways.

Ways of Working With Thinking Partner

In the first, you create. You draft, you explore tensions, you take something half-formed and work it into shape. You can come to it with a clear idea of what you want, or with no more than a direction you sense you should follow. Either way, your own material is there as you work, so the result is grounded in your sources and your language. And while it is working from everything you have provided, it will sometimes surface something you did not expect, your own context meeting you with something you had not consciously recognized.

In the second, you can intuitively navigate what your material holds. You open a note and find the passages that sit nearest it in meaning. You follow a thread without settling in advance where it leads. The work here is not to ask and receive. It is to be met by your own material in novel arrangements, and to see for yourself what they hold.

Both of these move with a sense of direction toward a destination you may not yet see clearly. You can navigate by feel, following what pulls. Most tools require a definite goal before they can do anything. Here you can set off with only a heading and find the rest as you go.

Free Association

On top of these two ways of working, we are building a family of more specific tools, each a different way of being met by your own material. Free Association is the first you can use today. When you ask and receive a reply, you can add a single passage, drawn by genuine chance from across your whole vault, set beside the answer. The passage sits there as itself, a piece of your own material you had not thought to place next to this question. Sometimes it sparks an immediate insight. Either way, you can ask the AI model to suggest how the two might be related, and see if that feels compelling.

Free Association is the first; more are coming as we develop, and they share a spirit. Each surfaces something to follow, and the value of that is yours to determine. The system does not pronounce.

Background

I built Thinking Partner myself, over months of work that draws on decades of thinking. It is an expression of Liminal philosophy made into something you can use. The interface owes a great deal to Jason Cranford Teague, who brought decades of design experience to it. The thinking it embodies is mine. I am sharing Thinking Partner more widely now, while it is still early and still growing. How people use it will shape where it goes next. I use it every day on my own material. I think it is ready for yours.

You can give it as much or as little as you like. A few pieces you care about are enough to begin, and it works as well on a small, deliberate collection as on years of accumulated material. What you give it may be personal or proprietary, so let me be plain about the arrangement. Your material is yours. It is never sold, and it is never used to train anything. It builds no profile of you, and nothing it holds steers what it shows you. You remain the subject. That is the promise in plain words. The Privacy Policy sets it out in full, and it says the same thing.

If you’d like to see exactly how it all works before you try it, the complete User Guide is here to read first: the full Thinking Partner User Guide.

The best way to know if this is for you is to try it. Right now, the first 50 people to sign up can do so on a week’s free trial. Bring your own material and find out whether it earns a place in how you work. You can take everything with you at any time, and remove your material whenever you ask. Nothing here holds you in.

Hit the button to sign up. The first 50 people can get a week’s free trial.

Thinking Partner Sign Up

Workshop: Mountain Treasure
A single session to explore the wellsprings of creativity.
The second of three on creativity.

Thursday, 18th June 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

Sign up here

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

The second in a series of three workshops on accessing creativity.
This session includes looking at models of group creativity and the collective unconscious, and why it doesn’t matter whether you think it exists…
This includes a Guided Relaxation session

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation for you to use in an ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

The work I do has always found its home in individual sessions; those calm, focused spaces where we meet. You come in, we move together, and something shifts. You leave with a recording, a practice, a new way of relating to what once held you back. The change doesn’t stop when the session ends. It continues in the listening, in the settling, in the way your system gradually adopts the new state as its default. This has been enough for many, and it has always been the right place to begin

Extending Reach and Impact

For years, there has been a question of reach. The work I do with individuals is real; I’ve seen it change people I care about deeply, including many of you.

What would it look like to bring that same quality of integration to the communities and organizations that transformational leaders are building?

That question led me to Liminal Strategist.

Liminal Strategist is the partnership model I’ve been building toward. It takes the methodology that has changed how you sleep, how you recover, and how you access your own thinking under pressure, and extends it outward.

For a leader to establish a deep state of integration for their team, they need to model it on and derive the energy for it from access to their own state of integration. The work begins with the leader: their clarity, their resilience, their capacity to be fully present. From that foundation, it extends into their community

I want to introduce you to someone who is building this partnership model with me.

Introducing Michelle Royal

Michelle Royal came to this work in August 2024. At the time, she was professionally uncertain, socially withdrawn, and struggling to find her footing. Six months later, she had reconnected to her professional identity, found language for what she uniquely brings to the world, and rebuilt a resilience she described as structural rather than motivational.

In her words, “the work became surprisingly easy once I was ready to invest in my own integration as the foundation for everything I am building for others”.

Michelle is a strategist with twenty years of experience helping organizations grow across healthcare, fintech, nonprofit, and innovation environments. Her specific expertise is in AI operationalization: helping leadership teams turn AI from a pilot into a practice that creates measurable business value.

She is the CEO and AI Operating Partner of Liminal Strategist. She experienced the work personally before agreeing to build the business around it. She knows firsthand how it works.

We are now working with a small number of community leaders, retreat creators, and organizational builders who want the change they create to last.

People who are ready to invest in their own integration as the foundation for everything they are building for others.

I’m sharing this with you for two reasons.

The first is that you may know someone carrying the weight of meaningful work and watching its impact fade between events. A community leader who is the primary energy source for everything they’ve built. A retreat creator whose participants leave changed but subsequently return to the same patterns.

If someone comes to mind, I’d be glad to have a conversation with them.

The second is that some of you have done deep work with me and then let it integrate. If you are in a season of transition, building something new, leading under pressure, or simply ready to go further, the door is open. Michelle handles the initial conversation.

She will tell you honestly whether what we are building is a fit for what you need.

With warmth,

Mike

Find out more here.

Workshop: Mountain Treasure
A single session to explore the wellsprings of creativity.
The second of three on creativity.

Thursday, 18th June 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

Sign up here

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

The second in a series of three workshops on accessing creativity.
This session includes looking at models of group creativity and the collective unconscious, and why it doesn’t matter whether you think it exists…
This includes a Guided Relaxation session

The Liminal Brain: Now The Liminal Strategist Thinking Partner

The Liminal Brain has been rebranded as above, and the first public release is due this week. Watch out for the special Newsletter later this week.

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation for you to use in an ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

In lieu of this week’s newsletter, I have a free online book to give you.

For about eighteen months, beginning in the early part of the pandemic, I drew a hexagram from the I Ching most mornings and wrote a short reflection. Not a commentary on the hexagram — the texts already do that, and far better than I could. Just whatever the day’s hexagram opened in me, set down before the day asked anything of me. A photograph from a walk usually went with it.

I never recorded the hexagrams themselves. I didn’t want the work to become an argument with the long tradition of interpretation, and I wasn’t trying to teach the I Ching. I was using it as a door, a daily, randomly chosen door, and walking through to see what was on the other side.

Free to Read

The first hundred and twenty-six of those mornings are now a book: Reflections Seeded from the I Ching, Volume One.

It’s available to read freely on a companion site, where you can read sequentially, dip in, or let the site choose for you. The random draw uses the NIST quantum beacon as its source; the closest contemporary equivalent I could find to the spirit of the yarrow stalks. Pseudo-randomness felt wrong for the purpose. Real chance, of the kind physics has been forced to take seriously over the last seventy years, felt closer to what the I Ching has always been doing.

The book is shaped by the same things this newsletter is: the practice of pausing, of not gripping, of letting paths emerge rather than forcing them. It also has things to say, here and there, about where we are, the problems we face, collaboration, and what the next stretch of human time may require of us.

You’re warmly invited to come and read.

Read the Book

Workshop: Drift to Peace
A single session to restore access to creative flow and internal ease.

Thursday, 21st May 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

BOOK YOUR PLACE NOW

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the first in a three-part sequence, designed to release what has been held too tightly and restore movement where it has stalled. The work is practical, contained, and built for immediate effect. like pouring water into a vessel, it just flows.

The Liminal Brain: a place for continuity

The Liminal Brain is delayed for further developments before general release. Watch this space.

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation for you to use in an ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

There is a movement that happens when we stop trying to force the new. A deliberate shift from the familiar shore of what you already know to the open water of what is waiting to emerge. We don’t abandon skill or discipline but allow the mind to settle, the body to relax, and the attention to soften, so that what has been obscured by effort can rise to the surface.

Creativity and Pressure

Creativity does not really respond well to pressure, contrary to myth. It doesn’t thrive in cluttered spaces or overworked systems. It appears when there is room to breathe, to wander, to notice what is already present but unseen. The challenge is not to generate more ideas, but to create the conditions where the right ones can find us.

This is not a solo act. Even when the work feels solitary, it is shaped by everything around us. The conversations we’ve had, the spaces we’ve moved through, the quiet moments of reflection. Creativity lives in the dance between us and the world. It is relational, collective, and alive. The work is not about control, but listening.

What to Do

When the mind feels crowded:
Begin by naming what is taking up space. Not to judge it, but to acknowledge it. Then set it aside, just for now. The cup can be empty for a while..

When the body feels restless:
Move without an agenda. Walk, stretch, breathe. Let the rhythm of the body guide us back to stillness. Creativity often returns when the nervous system feels safe.

When the next step feels unclear:
Start with one small thing that feels true. just the first mark, the first word, the first gesture. The rest will follow when it is ready.

Workshop: Drift to Peace
A single session to restore access to creative flow and internal ease.

Thursday, 21st May 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

BOOK YOUR PLACE NOW

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the first in a three-part sequence, designed to release what has been held too tightly and restore movement where it has stalled. The work is practical, contained, and built for immediate effect. like pouring water into a vessel, it just flows.

The Liminal Brain: a place for continuity

The Liminal Brain is delayed for further developments before general release. Watch this space.

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation for you to use in an ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

The Mountain of Enduring Energy

Stimulating Energy and Stamina

I’m pleased to announce the latest addition to the Liminal Coaching shop.

Landscapes and natural features have been used as metaphors for human qualities and energies for millennia. They are a powerful means of encouraging different states of mind and behaviors. The Mountain of Enduring Energy uses key natural metaphors to boost energy and stamina.

See More Details

If you would like any more information about Liminal Coaching, feel free to email me. mike@liminalcoaching.com

Introduction

There is a way of moving through work (and life) that doesn’t rely on noise or force. Instead, it flows like water poured from a vessel, clear and measured, each drop finding its place. This is the work of measured integrity: not the dramatic leap, but the steady rhythm of small, finished actions. Each one stands on its own. But together, they create something greater that feels inevitable and alive.

Building Enduring Systems

This approach resists the cultural obsession with speed and spectacle. We’re conditioned to chase milestones, to equate progress with visibility, and to mistake urgency for importance. Yet the most enduring systems, whether in creativity, relationships, or organizations, are built differently. They emerge from the accumulation of complete, self-contained moments, each one a point of light in a larger pattern. There is no need to force the outcome; the shape reveals itself when the pieces are allowed to settle.

Alignment and Flow

The practice here is not about exertion, but alignment. Trusting that the next right action is sufficient, let each step be both whole and part of something unfolding. This is how stagnation dissolves, not through struggle, but through attention to what is already moving and a return to flow. Not through pushing harder, but by meeting the moment as it is.

How to Apply This

When the way forward is unclear:
Instead of demanding certainty, take one step that feels true. The rest will follow.

When energy is depleted:
Focus on the single next action. Momentum returns when we let it gather naturally.

When creativity feels blocked:
Begin with one central idea. Place a few others around it, as an open pattern, a space for what wants to emerge.

This is patience as active wisdom that knows how to build without straining, and create without depleting.

Workshop: Drift to Peace
A single session to restore access to creative flow and internal ease.

Thursday, 21st May 2026
9 am Pacific | Noon Eastern | 5 pm UK | 6 pm Central European Time

Free to School of the Possible Members

Cost: $30.

BOOK YOUR PLACE NOW

Complimentary places available—email mike@liminalcoaching.com.

This session is the first in a three-part sequence, designed to release what has been held too tightly and restore movement where it has stalled. The work is practical, contained, and built for immediate effect. like pouring water into a vessel, it just flows.

The Liminal Brain: a place for continuity

The Liminal Brain is delayed for further developments before general release. Watch this space.

**************************************************

Free Mini Course

The Mental Tools for Neurodivergents (MTND) mini course is a free email series designed to help you deal with “normal” when it’s not designed for your brain.

Initially written for neurodivergent people, but helpful for anyone stressed by navigating neurotypical systems, it’s not a reset like one of our Guided Relaxations or Moments.
It’s a set of precise, field-tested strategies for coping with overload, executive function challenges, sensory strain, and expectations that don’t match how you work best.

You’ll get one short email a day for 5 days. Then, if it’s helpful, you can go deeper.

Join the FREE MTND Course Here

P.S. As always, we're interested in your feedback. If you have questions or want to discuss any aspect of Liminal Coaching, including 1-to-1 and group coaching programs, please book a complimentary half-hour chat.

Liminal Coaching Services

1-to-1 Coaching Sessions

These sessions can help with various areas, including reducing stress and anxiety, setting boundaries, managing overwhelm, and accessing your natural abilities for ideation, synthesis, innovation, and problem-solving.

All sessions include solutions-focused cognitive coaching, followed by a customized Guided Relaxation session. You will also receive a downloadable recording of the Guided Relaxation for you to use in an ongoing practice.

If you would like to know more, please book a FREE half-hour introductory session.

Introduction

There is a moment that many of us recognize. You exhale, and the breath moves deeper than it has in hours. Your shoulders settle. The tension you didn’t realize you were holding in your hands, your jaw, your chest; it softens a little. Sometimes this isn’t relief from conscious effort. It’s relief from the extra weight we’ve learned to carry: holding back what wants to move, what already exists.

The extra weight is made up of cultural reflexes, absorbed through workplaces that reward endurance over ease, fields that equate struggle with legitimacy, and social norms that treat rest as something to justify rather than a natural part of creative life. Over time, the body learns to hold back what wants to emerge because it has been taught to.

How This Pattern Lives in the System

The suppression shows up in small, everyday ways:

• Ideas are held back before they’re fully formed, as if waiting for permission to exist.

• Play or rest is labeled as indulgent, something to earn rather than a natural part of life.

• Creative energy is treated as a finite resource to be managed.

• Fatigue lingers from holding back what wants to move.

This isn’t about external constraints. It’s about the extra layer of internal suppression we add on top of already-difficult circumstances. The weight we carry is often the weight we’ve learned to add, ourselves.

The Subconscious as a Source, Not a Problem

Western culture often treats the subconscious as a vault of unresolved material. As if it is something only to be cleared, analyzed, or controlled. But the subconscious is also the vast intelligence that regulates breath, heartbeat, and the subtle choreography of thought and feeling. It is the source of creativity, where memory and imagination meet, where new patterns form long before we notice them.

When we suppress ease, play, or creative flow, we’re not just blocking ideas. We’re blocking the natural circulation of the subconscious itself. This type of fatigue isn’t from doing too much. It’s from holding back what wants to move.

Notice Where It Lives in You

The way out of this cycle is about noticing where these patterns live in our own system. The question to ask:

Where am I adding an extra layer of suppression on top of already-difficult circumstances?

The weight we carry is often the weight we’ve learned to add, ourselves. Noticing it is the first step toward letting it go.

Workshop: Drift to Peace

The Drift to Peace workshop offers a structured way to restore circulation and ease. The session is designed as a practical counter-conditioning kit:

• Identifying patterns of suppression.

• Short interruptions to those patterns that reopen permission.

• A guided relaxation tuned to release accumulated stress and tension and enhance the perception of possibility.

• Experiments and questions at the end.

Workshop Details: Drift to Peace A single session to restore access to creative flow and internal ease. Thursday, 21st May 2026 9 am, Pacific Time; Noon, Eastern Time; 5 pm, UK Time; 6 pm, Central European Time

Booking details in next week’s Newsletter

The Liminal Brain: a place for continuity

The Liminal Brain is delayed for further developments before general release. Watch this space.

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