“Speech is the mirror of the soul; as a man speaks, so he is.” Publilius Syrus

Before we get into the quote, let me tell you who said it.

Publilius Syrus was a Syrian slave, brought to Rome in the first century BC. His master was so struck by the quality of his mind that he educated him and eventually freed him. Syrus went on to become one of the most celebrated writers of his time.

A man who used language to transform his circumstances left us a line about the power of language.

That’s not a coincidence.

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What It Actually Means

We tend to think of speech as the output.

The thing that comes after the thinking, the feeling, the deciding.

But Syrus was pointing at something more fundamental.

The way we speak doesn’t just describe who we are. It reveals us.

Before we’ve consciously decided what we believe about ourselves, our language has often already told the room.

Listen to how someone talks about their past and you’ll know whether they’ve made peace with it or are still fighting it.

Listen to how they talk about other people and you’ll learn something about what they believe about human nature.

Listen to how they talk about their future... whether they say “if” or “when”... and you’ll know whether hope is still alive in them.

The mirror doesn’t lie.

It just shows you what’s there.

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The Inside Lens

I’ve sat across from hundreds of men in prisons and detention centres.

And I can tell you something...

Without reading a file. Without knowing a charge. Without knowing their history.

Give me five minutes of conversation and I can often tell you something about where that person is in their journey.

The man still performing for the room.

The man who has lost his way.

The man who has begun to rebuild.

They don’t announce themselves.

But their language does.

I’ve watched men arrive using the vocabulary the institution assigned them... hard, deflective, self-protective.

And I’ve watched some of those same men, months later, speak differently.

Not because someone told them what to say.

Because something inside had shifted... and the language followed.

That’s the thing about Syrus’ mirror.

It works in both directions.

If speech reflects the soul, then changing how you speak... deliberately, consistently... can begin to change the way you see yourself.

Not as performance.

As practice.

The man who starts saying:

“I want to” instead of “I have to.”

“I made a mistake” instead of “I got caught.”

“I can” instead of “I can’t.”

“I will” instead of “maybe someday.”

Something is moving underneath the language.

Every time.

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You don’t need to have been inside a prison to recognise this.

Think about the last time you caught yourself saying “I can’t” when what you really meant was “I won’t.”

Or “it’s complicated” when the truth was simpler... and more uncomfortable.

Or “I’m fine” when you were anything but.

We all do it.

Sometimes our language protects us from something we aren’t ready to face.

And sometimes it protects us from something we already know.

The gap between what we say and what we mean is often the exact size of the thing we haven’t faced yet.

That’s why paying attention to your language matters.

Not because every word needs to be analysed.

Not because positive thinking will magically fix your life.

But because the words you repeatedly use become the story you repeatedly hear.

And eventually, the story becomes the way you see yourself.

Syrus was a freed slave who understood that words are not decoration.

They are architecture.

They build the space you live inside.

Change the words...

And slowly, you can begin to rebuild the space.

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This Week’s Challenge

Listen to yourself speak for one day.

Not to correct anything.

Just to notice.

Notice the words you reach for when things go wrong.

Notice how you talk about yourself when nobody is asking you to impress them.

Notice whether you take ownership or hand responsibility away.

Notice whether your language points towards the future... or keeps returning to the past.

And pay particular attention to the little words.

Can’t.

Have to.

Never.

Always.

If.

Maybe.

Sometimes a single word can reveal an entire belief system.

The mirror is already there.

The question is whether you’re willing to look.

And perhaps, once you’ve looked...

whether you’re willing to change what you see.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

Has my writing made a difference?

If something I’ve written has ever made you think differently, encouraged you through a difficult time, or simply become part of your week, I’d love to hear your story.

I’m building a page of reader testimonials for my website and would be incredibly grateful if you’d consider sharing a few words. A short written testimonial is wonderful, but if you’re comfortable, a 30–60 second video is even better.

Simply send a Google Drive or YouTube link to stephen@unshackledproject.com.

Your story won’t just help me grow as a writer. It will help future readers and clients understand the impact that honest, thoughtful writing can have.

By sending a written or video testimonial, you acknowledge that I may publish it on The Unshackled Project website, social media channels, and other promotional material associated with my writing. If you’d prefer your testimonial to remain private, or you’d like it published anonymously, simply let me know when you send it.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

There are problems in life that we can solve.

And there are problems that we can’t.

Some can be fixed with a conversation.

Some require a decision.

Some require an apology.

Some require us to change direction completely.

And some simply leave us with consequences we have to learn how to live with.

But before any of that can happen, there is something we have to do first.

We have to face the problem.

Over time, I’ve come to think there are four stages to that process. This became my Unshackled framework. All of my work .. the books, the app, the 1:1 mentoring … they all came from this foundation.

Four A’s.

Awareness.
Accountability.
Agency.
Action.

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They sound simple.

They aren’t always easy.

1. Awareness

The first step is recognising that there is actually a problem.

That sounds obvious.

It isn’t.

We can become incredibly good at avoiding things we don’t want to deal with.

We know the relationship isn’t working.

We know the conversation needs to happen.

We know the decision needs to be made.

We know the behaviour needs to change.

We know we’re unhappy.

But knowing something isn’t the same as being willing to face it.

This is where decision paralysis can take hold.

We sit with the problem.

We think about it.

We analyse every possible outcome.

We tell ourselves we’re waiting for the right time.

Sometimes we’re not waiting.

Sometimes we’re avoiding.

And the longer we avoid something, the larger it can become in our heads.

Awareness is the moment we stop pretending the problem isn’t there.

“Something needs to change.”

That’s the first A.

2. Accountability

Once we recognise the problem, we have to be willing to look honestly at our part in it.

And this can be uncomfortable.

Our instinct is often to look outward.

Who else caused this?

Who else contributed?

Who else let me down?

Who else is to blame?

Sometimes other people absolutely do carry responsibility.

But accountability isn’t about taking responsibility for everything.

It’s about being willing to take responsibility for your part.

For someone who has committed an offence, that might eventually mean being able to say:

I did it. It was wrong. I can’t undo it. But I can decide what I do with the person I become afterwards.

That’s very different from:

I am a bad person and therefore nothing can change.

Accountability isn’t self-punishment.

It’s ownership.

And ownership leads us to the third A.

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3. Agency

This might be the most important one.

Because taking accountability for something doesn’t automatically mean you believe you can change.

You can spend years thinking:

I fucked up.

I ruined everything.

I deserve this.

There’s nothing I can do now.

That’s accountability without agency.

Agency is the moment we realise:

I still have choices.

Maybe I can’t change what happened.

Maybe I can’t change the sentence.

I can’t get those years back.

I can’t undo the hurt I caused.

I can’t make the relationship what it once was.

But I can decide what happens next.

That’s agency.

It’s recognising the difference between what is within my control and what isn’t.

And that distinction can be liberating.

Because once we stop wasting energy trying to change the things we can’t control, we can start putting that energy into the things we can.

Our behaviour.

Our attitude.

Our choices.

Our relationships.

Our effort.

Our future.

Agency doesn’t mean having control over everything.

It means recognising that you still have some control over something.

And sometimes that’s enough.

4. Action

Then comes the hardest part.

Do something.

Because awareness without action can become overthinking.

Accountability without action can become guilt.

Agency without action is simply potential.

At some point, something has to move.

Make the phone call.

Have the conversation.

Apologise.

Ask for help.

Change the behaviour.

Leave the relationship.

Start again.

Repair what can be repaired.

Accept what can’t.

Take the next step.

It doesn’t have to be a huge step.

Sometimes the most important action is simply deciding that today will be different from yesterday.

You Don’t Have To Change Everything

There’s something else I’ve learned about facing problems.

Facing something doesn’t mean you can change it.

And it certainly doesn’t mean you have to fix everything at once.

Sometimes facing a problem simply allows you to see it clearly.

To separate the things you can control from the things you can’t.

To take responsibility for your part.

To recognise that you still have choices.

And then to take one step.

That’s why I keep coming back to that quote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Maybe we spend too much time asking:

“How do I fix this?”

when the better question might be:

“Am I willing to face this?”

Because once we face it, we can become aware of it.

Once we’re aware of it, we can take accountability for our part.

Once we take accountability, we can begin to recognise our agency.

And once we recognise our agency...

we can act.

Awareness.

Accountability.

Agency.

Action.

Four simple words.

But perhaps, when life gets difficult, they give us somewhere to start.

And sometimes...

somewhere to start is all we need.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends

Stephen

Has my writing made a difference?

If something I’ve written has ever made you think differently, encouraged you through a difficult time, or simply become part of your week, I’d love to hear your story.

I’m building a page of reader testimonials for my website and would be incredibly grateful if you’d consider sharing a few words. A short written testimonial is wonderful, but if you’re comfortable, a 30–60 second video is even better.

Simply send a Google Drive or YouTube link to stephen@unshackledproject.com.

Your story won’t just help me grow as a writer. It will help future readers and clients understand the impact that honest, thoughtful writing can have.

By sending a written or video testimonial, you acknowledge that I may publish it on The Unshackled Project website, social media channels, and other promotional material associated with my writing. If you’d prefer your testimonial to remain private, or you’d like it published anonymously, simply let me know when you send it.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Last week, I invited readers of The Unshackled Journal to share their own stories. I said that, from time to time, I’d publish those that captured the spirit of what Unshackled is all about. Stories that remind us of our shared humanity. Stories that make us stop, think, and perhaps see the world a little differently.

One message, shared anonymously by a mother, stayed with me.

She wrote:

“This was the first time I had been outside in the fresh air with my son for over a year.”

I read those words several times.

Not because they were dramatic.

Because they were ordinary.

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Outside.

Fresh air.

Blue sky.

Things most of us experience every single day without giving them a second thought.

The message came from a mother.

Like so many families navigating the criminal justice system, her week had been consumed by fighting. Fighting for adequate healthcare. Fighting to be heard. Fighting against a system that too often leaves families feeling invisible.

She refused to stay silent.

She contacted her local Member of Parliament, who in turn contacted the Minister for Justice. Progress was made, she told me. But there were still miles to walk.

Then something unexpected happened.

During a family visit, she, her son, and a close family friend looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the exercise yard outside. It was one of the hottest days of the year. They joked about how nice it would be to step outside.

Then the officers opened the door.

For most people, that would barely register.

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For them, it became magic.

She walked into the sunshine.

She felt the warmth on her face.

She looked up at a blue sky she’d taken for granted for most of her life.

Then she looked at her son.

For the first time in more than a year, they stood together outside.

She noticed a half-broken foam football lying on the ground and kicked it towards him.

He kicked it to their friend.

For a few precious minutes, they weren’t a prisoner, a visitor and a support person.

They were simply three people laughing together.

Three people playing football.

Three people sharing the same patch of sky.

She wrote that in that moment, the grief of missed birthdays, Christmases and family adventures simply disappeared.

Not forever.

Just long enough to breathe.

That story has stayed with me because it reminds us how easily we overlook the ordinary.

Most of us wake each morning with the freedom to step outside, feel the sun on our face, breathe deeply, call someone we love, or walk wherever our feet choose to take us. Yet those moments often pass unnoticed because they are woven so seamlessly into everyday life.

Sometimes it takes someone else’s experience to remind us just how extraordinary the ordinary really is.

So today, wherever you are, take a moment.

Step outside if you can.

Feel the warmth of the sun.

Look up at the sky.

Take a slow, deep breath.

Call someone you love.

Laugh with your children.

Kick a ball around.

Go for a walk.

Watch the sunset.

Not because life is perfect.

But because these small moments are, in many ways, what freedom looks like.

The greatest gifts in our lives are often the ones we stop noticing until they’re taken away.

Perhaps that’s what this mother’s story really offers us.

Not pity.

Not politics.

Just perspective.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

This story has been shared with permission by a mother who asked to remain anonymous. While it tells the story of one family, it quietly speaks for countless others navigating the criminal justice system. Thank you for trusting Unshackled with your words.

Has my writing made a difference?

If something I’ve written has ever made you think differently, encouraged you through a difficult time, or simply become part of your week, I’d love to hear your story.

I’m building a page of reader testimonials for my website and would be incredibly grateful if you’d consider sharing a few words. A short written testimonial is wonderful, but if you’re comfortable, a 30–60 second video is even better.

Simply send a Google Drive or YouTube link to stephen@unshackledproject.com.

Your story won’t just help me grow as a writer. It will help future readers and clients understand the impact that honest, thoughtful writing can have.

By sending a written or video testimonial, you acknowledge that I may publish it on The Unshackled Project website, social media channels, and other promotional material associated with my writing. If you’d prefer your testimonial to remain private, or you’d like it published anonymously, simply let me know when you send it.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Imagine you receive a phone call from Netflix.

They have an unusual proposition.

For the next thirty days, a documentary crew will follow you everywhere.

Not to interview you.

Not to tell your story.

Simply to observe.

Every conversation.

Every meal.

Every workout.

Every hour spent scrolling.

Every act of kindness.

Every moment of frustration.

Every promise you keep.

Every promise you quietly break.

There’s just one condition.

No interviews.

No narration.

No opportunity to explain yourself.

The audience won’t hear what you meant to do.

They won’t hear about the person you’re trying to become.

They’ll only see the person you repeatedly choose to be.

Thirty days later, the documentary is released.

As the credits roll, here’s the question.

What would the audience conclude matters most to you?

Not what you say matters.

What actually matters.

Would they see someone who values family?

Health?

Purpose?

Learning?

Integrity?

Kindness?

Or would they reach a completely different conclusion?

Have you ever noticed how easily we change depending on who’s watching?

Think about the last time you went out for dinner or met friends at a bar.

Two hours earlier you were probably sitting on the couch in old clothes, half watching television, wondering whether you could even be bothered going.

Then something changed.

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You had a shower.

Picked an outfit.

Checked yourself in the mirror.

Walked through the door.

Your posture lifted.

Your smile became a little bigger.

Your stories became a little funnier.

Your confidence quietly arrived.

None of that makes you fake.

It makes you human.

Psychologists have understood this for decades. We all adapt to our audience. We speak differently to our boss than we do to our best mate. We behave differently at a funeral than we do at a football match.

Carl Jung called it the persona. The social mask we wear to navigate different parts of life.

The mask isn’t the problem.

The problem is when the mask becomes more important than the person wearing it.

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For the last five out of six years, I’ve lived in places where being watched isn’t a metaphor.

It’s reality.

CCTV cameras.

Correctional officers.

Detention officers.

Other prisoners.

Other detainees.

Privacy becomes something you learn not to expect.

At first, it feels intrusive.

Eventually, it teaches you something unexpected.

Being watched doesn’t create character.

It reveals it.

Because after a while, you stop performing.

You get tired.

The mask slips.

What’s left is simply... you.

The truth is, all of us are already living our own documentary.

Not on Netflix.

But in the minds of the people around us.

Our children are watching.

Our partners are watching.

Our colleagues are watching.

Our teammates are watching.

The stranger you smile at each morning is watching.

And perhaps most importantly...

We’re watching ourselves.

Here’s what I find fascinating.

Actually... you know me by now.

Lots of things fascinate me… I’m fascinated by being fascinated and sit in a world of my own pondering as a full time hobby.

We spend an extraordinary amount of energy managing our reputation with strangers...

...while often giving the least polished version of ourselves to the people we love most.

We smile at the waiter.

Then snap at our partner.

We’re patient with clients.

Then impatient with our children.

We hold the door open for a stranger.

Then ignore someone we’ve lived with for twenty years.

Not because we’re bad people.

But because somewhere along the way, we started performing for approval instead of living from our values.

A football coach doesn’t judge a player by the speech they give before the game.

They watch whether they chase back in the 88th minute.

An employer doesn’t decide who you are because of a great interview.

They watch what you do on a slow Tuesday.

Children rarely become what we tell them.

More often, they become what they repeatedly see.

People don’t experience our intentions.

They experience our patterns.

That’s why this thought experiment is so confronting.

A documentary doesn’t capture your best moments.

It captures your ordinary ones.

The workout you nearly skipped.

The apology you finally made.

The way you speak to someone who can’t offer you anything in return.

The promise you kept to yourself when nobody would have known if you hadn’t.

Those moments rarely make headlines.

But together, they tell the story of your character.

The good news?

Documentaries aren’t made in a single day.

They’re made one scene at a time.

Tomorrow’s scene hasn’t been filmed yet.

Neither has next week.

Or next year.

Every conversation.

Every decision.

Every act of courage.

Every quiet choice that no one applauds.

They’re all becoming part of your story.

So perhaps the real question isn’t whether Netflix would make a documentary about your life.

It’s this...

If they did...

Would the people watching come to the same conclusions about your values that you have about yourself?

Because in the end, the most honest biography you’ll ever write won’t be made from the words you chose.

It will be made from the life you lived.

Have a think about that.

I’d genuinely love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to leave a comment below or send me a DM. I always do my best to reply.

Stay Unshackled, My friends.

Stephen

Has my writing made a difference?

If something I’ve written has ever made you think differently, encouraged you through a difficult time, or simply become part of your week, I’d love to hear your story.

I’m building a page of reader testimonials for my website and would be incredibly grateful if you’d consider sharing a few words. A short written testimonial is wonderful, but if you’re comfortable, a 30–60 second video is even better.

Simply send a Google Drive or YouTube link to stephen@unshackledproject.com.

Your story won’t just help me grow as a writer. It will help future readers and clients understand the impact that honest, thoughtful writing can have.

By sending a written or video testimonial, you acknowledge that I may publish it on The Unshackled Project website, social media channels, and other promotional material associated with my writing. If you’d prefer your testimonial to remain private, or you’d like it published anonymously, simply let me know when you send it.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

The last couple of weeks on Unshackled have been some pretty deep pieces.

We’ve talked about systems, identity, prison, and the uncomfortable questions that come with trying to understand why people change... or why they don’t.

So this week, I thought we’d look at something a little different.

Not because it’s any less important.

Quite the opposite.

Sometimes the simplest ideas are the ones that stay with us the longest.

Recently, I found myself thinking about a framework built around just three buckets.

Physical.

Mental.

Emotional.

At first glance it sounds almost too simple to be useful.

But the more I sat with it, the more I realised this wasn’t a framework exclusive to athletes, executives, or high performers.

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It was a framework for anyone trying to rebuild a life.

Because whether you’re recovering from addiction, leaving prison, navigating detention, grieving a loss, rebuilding a relationship, or simply trying to become a better version of yourself... every day you’re filling those same three buckets.

The question is whether you’re filling all of them.

Let’s take the physical bucket first, because it’s the one everyone instinctively understands.

Inside, this is obvious. The body has to be maintained regardless of what’s happening around it. Training, however limited the equipment. Eating properly, however limited the choices. Sleep, however broken the routine. The physical bucket doesn’t ask whether your circumstances are fair. It just needs filling, consistently, or everything built on top of it becomes unstable.

Most people get this one. It’s the easiest to see and the easiest to measure.

Outside, it’s identical. The body that carries you through a difficult season of life needs the same basic maintenance whether you’re stressed, grieving, fighting a legal battle, or just trying to survive a hard year at work. Skip it long enough, and the other two buckets start leaking too.

The mental bucket is where it gets more interesting.

For someone trying to rebuild a life, this is the actual toolkit. Not vague hope. Specific knowledge. What does the parole process actually require? What does rebuilding trust with a partner actually look like in practical steps? What does a business plan need to contain before anyone will fund it?

I’ve watched men fill the physical bucket diligently while completely neglecting this one. They train their bodies and never train their minds for the practical reality of what comes next. They leave detention or prison physically capable and strategically lost, and the gap between those two things is where a lot of reoffending quietly begins.

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The mental bucket is the toolkit. Without it, physical readiness has nowhere useful to go.

And then there’s the third bucket.

Emotional.

This is the one almost nobody trains deliberately, and it’s the one that decides almost everything.

You can have the same skills, the same preparation and the same knowledge, yet perform completely differently depending on what’s happening underneath. Emotional volatility is part of being human. The goal isn’t to eliminate it. The goal is to minimise its influence.

I know this bucket intimately. It’s the one prison tests hardest and trains least.

The emotional bucket determines whether bad news breaks you or simply bends you. It’s what decides whether a setback becomes a spiral or just becomes information. It’s the difference between the version of a man who hears “not this time” about his parole and quietly comes apart, and the version who hears it, feels the full weight of it, and still gets up the next morning to do the work anyway.

Nobody fills this bucket by accident. It takes the same deliberate attention as the other two, except almost nobody gives it that attention because it doesn’t show up on a fitness tracker or a transcript.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after watching men try to rebuild themselves in here.

Most people, inside or outside, are running on one or two full buckets and one nearly empty one.

And the empty bucket is almost always the same one.

Emotional.

We train bodies. We pursue qualifications and strategies. We rarely, deliberately and consistently train the part of ourselves that has to absorb the hits along the way. Then we’re surprised when someone who looks completely prepared on paper falls apart at the first piece of bad news.

The 4A Method, the framework I built from inside this place, exists largely to address that third bucket.

Awareness.

Accountability.

Agency.

Action.

Every part of it is emotional bucket work. Learning to notice the spiral before it becomes a freefall. Learning to take ownership without collapsing into shame. Learning that you still have agency even when the outcome isn’t yours to control.

That bucket isn’t filled once.

It’s filled daily, just like the physical one.

Most people simply never realised it required the same discipline.

So here’s the practical version of all this.

If you’re trying to rebuild anything... a life, a career, a relationship, or a sense of self after something broke it... don’t just ask whether you’re training your body and sharpening your strategy.

Ask what you’re doing, specifically and consistently, for the bucket that determines whether the other two even matter.

Because a strong body and a sharp strategy will only carry you so far before life reminds you that you’re human.

The question isn’t whether adversity will come.

It’s whether you’ve prepared yourself to meet it.

Fill all three buckets.

Especially the one nobody talks about.

Stay Unshackled, My friends.

Stephen

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Has my writing made a difference?

If something I’ve written has ever made you think differently, encouraged you through a difficult time, or simply become part of your week, I’d love to hear your story.

I’m building a page of reader testimonials for my website and would be incredibly grateful if you’d consider sharing a few words. A short written testimonial is wonderful, but if you’re comfortable, a 30–60 second video is even better.

Simply send a Google Drive or YouTube link to stephen@unshackledproject.com.

Your story won’t just help me grow as a writer. It will help future readers and clients understand the impact that honest, thoughtful writing can have.

By sending a written or video testimonial, you acknowledge that I may publish it on The Unshackled Project website, social media channels, and other promotional material associated with my writing. If you’d prefer your testimonial to remain private, or you’d like it published anonymously, simply let me know when you send it.

Thank you for being part of this journey.

Growing up, I knew what a criminal looked like.

The tabloids made sure of that.

Big, bold headlines. A face that looked like it was built for doing wrong. Eyes that never quite met the camera. The kind of person you could spot immediately because they looked different from the rest of us... didn’t they? They felt different. They belonged to a world most decent people would never touch.

That’s what I believed.

Not because anyone sat me down and taught me. Because I’d absorbed it long before I was old enough to question it.

The headline never just told you what someone had done.

It told you who they were.

Or so I thought.

Then life took a turn, and I found myself on the inside.

Everything I thought I knew about what a criminal looked like started falling apart... quietly... one cup of tea at a time.

Off With Their Heads

This isn’t new.

Long before newspapers, television or social media, crowds gathered in town squares to watch public executions with the same anticipation people now gather around a breaking news story or a viral scandal.

The mechanics were different.

The impulse was identical.

Someone had been declared the villain. The thief. The heretic. The transgressor. The one whose existence threatened the social order.

It didn’t always matter much what they’d actually done.

Steal a loaf of bread to feed a starving family. Be born into the wrong religion in the wrong place. Fall on the wrong side of a powerful person’s judgement.

Off with their heads.

The crowd roared. Justice had been served. Order had been restored. And everyone went home reassured that evil had a face... and thankfully, it wasn’t theirs.

Fast forward a few hundred years.

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The town square has become a screen. The executions are digital. But the crowd still gathers with the same hunger. Comment sections. Talkback radio. Twenty-four-hour news. Algorithms that reward outrage because outrage keeps us watching.

Someone becomes the designated villain of the day. The monster. The predator. The criminal. The one who deserves everything that’s coming to them.

The technology changed.

The impulse didn’t.

We’ve become better at sharing outrage.

Not necessarily better at understanding people.

What changes — if we’re lucky, if we’re paying attention — is our willingness to ask the question the medieval crowd never did.

Who is this person, really? And what happened before they became the headline?

The Cup of Tea

A couple of weeks into my sentence in 2020, I got talking to a lifer.

I’ll let that word sit there for a moment. A lifer. The tabloid version of that word carries a particular weight. Maximum danger. Minimum humanity. Someone so fundamentally different from the rest of us that the only rational response is to lock them away forever.

He was somebody’s dad. Somebody’s grandad. He talked about football the way my mates back home always had… with the kind of tribal, cheerful, completely irrational passion that you either find hilarious or exhausting depending on the day. He was cheeky. He was warm. He laughed at himself.

In almost every way that mattered, he reminded me of people I’d known my entire life.

That was the first crack in the picture.

Years later, here in immigration detention, I met another man.

He was in his seventies. He’d been convicted of three murders. He’d spent forty years in prison.

Pause on that for a moment. Forty years of waking up behind locked doors. Forty years of routines decided by someone else. Forty years of birthdays missed. Forty years to sit with the worst decisions of your life.

When I met him, he reminded me of one of my uncles. Easy company. A dry sense of humour. The sort of man who makes a room feel comfortable without ever trying to be the centre of it.

His favourite moment each week wasn’t recreation. It wasn’t meal time. It wasn’t even the activities they put on like Bingo and board games.

It was a phone call from his grandson.

A little boy who would excitedly give his grandad the full match report from his weekend football game. Every pass. Every tackle. Every goal. Every refereeing… the whole picture from an excited young boy who loved his Pop.

His grandfather listened as though nothing else in the world existed.

Because, in that moment, nothing else did.

I grew up believing men like him were a different species. The headlines had taught me that. They taught me he was nothing like me. Nothing like the people I loved.

They were wrong.

Not about what he did.

About who he was.

That realisation didn’t erase his crimes. It simply made it impossible to pretend he wasn’t still human.

What I’ve Learned From the Inside

I’ve lived inside these systems. I know what it feels like to be reduced to a headline. I also know the gap between a headline and a human being is almost always wider than the story suggests.

Over the past few years, I’ve shared cells, exercise yards, classrooms and more cups of tea than I can count with thousands of men across prisons and immigration detention. Murderers. Drug importers. Armed robbers. Fraudsters. Men serving sentences longer than some people have been alive.

I’ve trained beside them. Laughed with them. Sat with them after phone calls from home. Watched them celebrate the birth of grandchildren they couldn’t hold. Watched them grieve parents they couldn’t bury.

And underneath the offences... underneath the headlines... underneath years, sometimes decades, of consequence... I found something that surprised me.

Not innocence.

Humanity.

They laughed like everyone else. Loved like everyone else. Worried about their families like everyone else. Missed home like everyone else. Felt shame. Felt hope. Felt regret.

That shouldn’t have been a revelation.

But it was.

Because I’d spent most of my life believing criminals were fundamentally different from the rest of us.

They weren’t.

Serious harm rarely emerges in a vacuum. Sometimes it’s greed. Sometimes it’s entitlement. Sometimes it’s addiction. Sometimes it’s untreated trauma. Sometimes it’s years of violence. Sometimes it’s simply a lifetime of terrible decisions. Usually... it’s all of those things tangled together.

Human beings are messy.

Which is precisely why headlines never tell the whole story.

None of that removes responsibility.

But it does provide context.

And context doesn’t erase accountability. It explains how accountability became necessary.

That’s the difference between understanding someone and excusing them.

They’re not the same thing.

On Consequences

Before we go any further, I want to be clear about something.

Nothing I’ve written is an argument against consequences.

And I understand… genuinely, not performatively… why punishment will never feel like enough for some people. If you’ve lost someone to violence, if a crime shattered your family, if someone took from you something that can never be returned, the idea that the person responsible is somewhere having cups of tea and writing essays may feel unbearable.

That anger is real. I don’t get to tell anyone how they should feel about it.

Vengeance is one of the oldest human impulses we have. When we have been profoundly harmed, the desire for it doesn’t make us cruel. It makes us human.

But once the sentence has been imposed, once the courtroom is empty, once the prison gate closes, a different question begins.

What do we want to happen next?

Do we want someone to emerge more damaged than when they entered? More traumatised. More institutionalised. More isolated. More convinced they have no place in society except the margins.

Or do we want them to leave less likely to hurt another human being ever again?

Those aren’t the same outcome. One satisfies our anger. The other serves our future.

And right now, too many of our systems confuse the two.

The question isn’t whether consequences matter. They do. The question is whether consequences alone are enough to create the safer society we all want.

Say Hello to the Bad Guy

There’s a reason Tony Montana’s most famous line has outlived the film itself.

“Say hello to the bad guy.”

It has become part of popular culture because every society understands the role of the bad guy. Stories need villains. Politics needs villains. Headlines need villains. Villains make the world feel simple. They reassure us that evil belongs somewhere else. Somewhere over there. Inside them. Not inside us.

Tony Montana wasn’t just talking about himself. He was talking about the role society had assigned him.

Psychologists call this othering. The process of turning another human being into something fundamentally different from ourselves. Not someone who made terrible choices. Something else. A monster.

And once someone becomes a monster, curiosity disappears. Compassion disappears. Context disappears. The story ends.

The easiest way to believe in monsters is to forget they were once children.

Not because childhood excuses what someone becomes. It doesn’t. Not because understanding removes responsibility. It doesn’t.

But because nobody enters the world as a murderer, a fraudster, or an addict.

People become. Through choices. Through circumstances. Through experiences. Through a thousand moments, some chosen and some imposed upon them.

We talk about monsters as though they’re a different species.

They’re not.

They are human beings who have done monstrous things.

And that distinction matters.

Monsters don’t rehabilitate.

People do.

The Lucifer Effect

By the time I came across Philip Zimbardo’s work on what he called The Lucifer Effect, I’d already seen its central idea play out countless times inside prisons and immigration detention.

His research didn’t tell me something I didn’t already know. It gave language to what I’d been witnessing.

Zimbardo spent decades asking a question most of us would rather avoid. How do ordinary people come to do extraordinary harm? Not monsters. Ordinary people. People with families. People who laugh. People who love. People who, under different circumstances, might have lived entirely different lives.

His conclusion unsettled a lot of people. Because it challenged something we desperately want to believe. That evil belongs to other people. That the line between good people and bad people is obvious. That we’d recognise it if we saw it.

Zimbardo found something more uncomfortable.

The capacity for harmful behaviour isn’t confined to a particular type of person.

It is part of the human condition.

Whether that capacity emerges depends on far more than character alone. Environment. Identity. Pressure. Isolation. Power. Shame. Hopelessness.

The situation matters. Far more than we’d like to admit.

That’s uncomfortable. Because if circumstances shape behaviour more than we realise, then the distance between “people like them” and “people like us” is much smaller than we’d like to believe.

History has been teaching us that lesson for centuries.

Psychology simply gave it a name.

The Epiphany

This is where Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) changed something for me.

Not because it excused what people had done. Because it challenged the story they believed about who they were.

It asks a question punishment alone never asks.

Not: what did you do?

Not even: why did you do it?

But: who do you want to become? And what are you willing to do, today, to become that person?

I’ve watched men sit silently after hearing, perhaps for the first time in their lives, that they are not the same thing as the darkest chapter of their lives.

Nothing dramatic happens. No tears. No sudden breakthrough. Just silence. Then something shifts. Almost imperceptibly. The weight they’ve carried for years begins, however slightly, to loosen.

One of ACT’s central ideas is called cognitive defusion. It teaches people to notice the stories they’ve fused with.

I am a criminal. I am worthless. I’ve ruined everything.

Those thoughts feel like facts. ACT teaches people to hold them differently. Not to deny them. Not to excuse them. Simply to recognise that a thought is not the same thing as an identity. That the mind is capable of telling stories... and not all stories deserve to become a life sentence.

You can acknowledge a story without living inside it forever.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy arrives at a similar destination from another direction. It asks people to pause. To examine the thought before it becomes the feeling, before it becomes the behaviour.

Is this thought true? What’s the evidence? Would you say this to someone you love?

Most of the men I’ve met inside have never been asked those questions. But when they answer them, the response is remarkably consistent.

“I’d tell them they’re being too hard on themselves.”

“I’d tell them one mistake doesn’t define an entire life.”

“I’d tell them they still have something worth living for.”

The quiet miracle isn’t that they forgive themselves. It’s that, for the first time, they begin to believe they might be more than the label they’ve been carrying.

Not absolution. Not forgetting. Not avoiding responsibility.

Simply recognising that accountability and humanity were never meant to be opposites.

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I sat across from a man in his seventies whose favourite moment each week was a phone call from his grandson. A little boy giving his grandad the full match report from his weekend football game. Every pass. Every tackle. Every goal. Every refereeing decision that was, according to him, completely wrong.

I grew up reading headlines about men like him.

Those headlines told me everything I needed to know. They told me he was dangerous. They told me he was different. They told me his inner world would be nothing like mine.

They were wrong.

Not about what he did.

About who he is.

That distinction… between what a person did and who a person is — is the most important thing I’ve learned inside these walls.

Because a person can be responsible for terrible harm and still be human. Those two truths can exist together. We don’t have to choose between accountability and compassion. Between justice and humanity. Between consequences and the possibility of change.

The medieval crowd gathered in the town square. The modern crowd gathers in comment sections. The technology changed. The impulse didn’t.

We still search for villains. We still reduce people to their worst moments. We still convince ourselves that the line separating “people like them” from “people like us” is wider than it really is.

The headline is usually accurate.

It’s just almost never complete.

Somewhere between the headline and the human being is a story nobody bothered to read. The story of what came before. The story of what happened along the way. The story of the person they were before the world decided who they were.

Somewhere today, another headline is being written.

Another photograph.

Another name.

Another crowd deciding they already know the whole story.

Perhaps they do.

Perhaps they don’t.

But before we confuse the worst thing a person has done with everything they are...

it’s worth remembering something.

Nobody is born the headline.

And perhaps the most important question we can ask is not only:

What did this person do?

But: who could they become?

That is the question that changes things. That is the question that makes rehabilitation possible. That is the question that allows people to become more than the worst chapter of their lives.

Because freedom isn’t only found when the prison gates open.

Sometimes it begins the moment a person realises they are more than the worst thing they have ever done.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

So, I’ve recorded it in my voice late at night in the detention centre gym. If this is something you like, rather than the written form article with the ai audio, then I’ll make an effort to create more of these … when I get the opportunity in here, of course… which is not always easy!!!

Let me know if you’d like more podcast versions coming through in my own voice!

Have a great week and Stay Unshackled, My Friends!

Stephen

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Voluntary Donation

During my time in prison and immigration detention, I lost count of the number of times I heard someone say:

“He’ll be back.”

Usually it was said as someone walked out through the gates, smiling, convinced this time would be different.

It was never said with hope.

It was said with certainty.

What if that certainty tells us less about the individual and more about the system that keeps producing the same result?

Because if more than half the people leaving eventually come back, we should at least have the courage to ask whether that’s a failure.

Or a feature.

If you’re a regular reader of Unshackled, you’ll know my usual format: a scene, a story, a pivot to the universal. This week is different. This week I’m making an argument… a serious one… shaped by data, psychology, philosophy, criminology, and eleven years of lived experience spent watching the inside of a system that knows exactly what it’s producing and keeps producing it anyway.

Let’s begin.

The “Damning” Deming Problem

A quote often attributed to management thinker W. Edwards Deming has followed me for years:

“Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”

If that’s true, and the data we’re about to examine suggests that it is, then perhaps we should stop asking why so many people return to prison and start asking a more uncomfortable question:

What exactly is our prison system designed to produce?

The Numbers

Norway: roughly 20% of released prisoners reoffend within two years (Kristoffersen, 2024, Kriminalomsorgen)… If you think that is high, it’s best that you keep reading.

In the 1980s, Governor Are Høidal, who began working in Norwegian prisons that decade, described the recidivism rate as “around 60-70%, like in the US.”

Over the following decades, as Norway reshaped its correctional philosophy, the rate fell to where it sits today (Høidal, cited in BBC, 2019). Something changed, and it wasn’t accidental.

Now the comparison.

Australia: 52.5% of released prisoners returned to corrective services within two years in 2023-24, either to prison or community corrections (Productivity Commission, Report on Government Services, 2025).

United States: 43% at one year, rising sharply thereafter.

Ireland: 57% reoffended within three years of release, with a one-year rate of 44% (Central Statistics Office, Prison Re-offending Statistics, 2025; Department of Justice, 2025).

Same planet as Norway. Wildly different outcomes.

These aren’t marginal differences. They are different philosophies producing different results, exactly what Deming would predict.

The Civilisation Test

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote:

“The degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” (Dostoevsky, 1860)

By that measure, we have questions to answer.

The Design Problem

Michel Foucault argued in “Discipline and Punish” (1975) that prisons were never built to reduce crime. They were built to manage it, to classify, contain, and control those labelled a criminal. Rehabilitation wasn’t a flaw in the design.

It was never the design.

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“Delinquency is the vengeance of the prison on justice.” (Foucault, 1975)

A system built around punishment produces people who are more damaged, more alienated, and more institutionalised on exit than on entry. Those people reoffend. Their reoffending justifies more prisons. The cycle continues.

The product is predictable because the design is predictable.

The Psychology of the Label

In 1971, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment raised fundamental questions about what happens when you call a place a prison and put people inside it.

Although aspects of the study have since been criticised on methodological grounds, it helped spark decades of subsequent research into a core question: does the environment shape the person, or does the person shape the environment?

Subsequent research has consistently shown that environments exert a powerful influence on behaviour, even while individual differences continue to matter (Haney & Zimbardo, 1998).

Call something a prison. Design it like a prison. Staff it like a prison.

The dynamics of punishment and dehumanisation emerge almost automatically, not because anyone decided to be cruel, but because the label carries instructions that everyone inside follows without realising they’re following them.

The Identity Problem

Erving Goffman’s work on total institutions showed how prisons systematically dismantle identity (Goffman, 1961). Inside, you become:

Prisoner. Number. Risk category.

Not father. Not son. Not mother. Not daughter. Not… potential.

Voluntary Donation

That dismantling doesn’t end at the gate. It walks out with the person.

And then we wonder why reintegration is so difficult.

A Voice From Inside the System

Robert Cullen, criminologist and author, wrote something I haven’t been able to shake since I read it:

*“I healed despite prison, not because of it.”* (Cullen, 2025)

That line stayed with me because it’s true for me too.

I’ve changed enormously across the years I’ve spent inside this system. I’ve rebuilt my thinking, confronted myself, found purpose, completed a counselling qualification, and discovered work that matters.

But almost none of that happened because the system was designed to help it happen.

It happened despite the system.

That makes me fortunate. It also makes me unusual. I’m writing these words in a yard of imprisonment right now, surrounded by men who desperately want their lives to be different but don’t yet know how to get there.

The real question isn’t whether some people can transform despite prison. Human beings are remarkably resilient. Some always will be.

The question is how many more would transform if the system were intentionally built to help them do exactly that.

How many of the men sitting around me right now would become better members of society if the system were designed to help them succeed rather than simply punish them?

What Actually Changes People

I was disillusioned when I entered this system. I wasn’t the man I am now. I was someone running from himself, reckless in making choices that hurt people.

Punishment didn’t change me. Punishment removed me from the world that I’d built. It didn’t build anything in its place.

What changed me was finding meaning. Purpose. The slow work of deciding who I wanted to be on the other side. Writing. Studying. The realisation that I had something to offer the world that it actually needed.

I’ve sat across from men I would trust with my daughter today, despite the crimes that brought them here years ago. I’ve also sat with men who arrived broken and left even more broken. I’ve sat with men who arrived drug free and left battling addiction. I’ve sat with men who walked out carrying more anger, less hope, and fewer opportunities than when they arrived.

I’ve never been able to predict who will change by looking at their sentence or their paperwork.

The difference is almost always whether someone… anyone… helped them imagine a future version of themselves worth becoming.

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The Cultural Irony

We live in a culture obsessed with transformation. Weight loss. Fitness. Therapy. Coaching. Self-help. Reinvention. New weight-loss medications are rewriting the conversation around obesity. The global gym industry is worth hundreds of billions. Self-help is one of the fastest growing publishing categories on earth. Podcasts, courses, coaches, all of it built on one fundamental belief.

That people can change.

We celebrate transformation. We fund it. We follow accounts dedicated to it.

Until the person seeking transformation has a criminal record.

Then we suddenly become deeply suspicious of the whole idea.

In a culture fixated on personal change, we actively resist investing in it where the returns to society are highest and the need is most acute.

The transformation industry is worth billions. The rehabilitation gap costs billions more, in reoffending, reincarceration, policing, courts, victims, families, and the intergenerational damage of children whose parents cycle back through a broken system.

We don’t lack belief in transformation.

We simply fail to direct it where it would do the most good.

Psychology Has Known the Answer for Decades

Carl Rogers wrote:

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” (Rogers, 1961)

Punitive systems say: we’ll accept you once you’ve changed.

Rogers spent his career demonstrating that this is precisely backwards. People change because they are treated as capable of change, not after they’ve proven it, but before.

That doesn’t mean removing accountability. It means refusing to reduce a human being to the worst thing they’ve ever done.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory identifies three needs essential for human flourishing: autonomy, competence, and relatedness (Deci & Ryan, 1985).

Now look at Norway.

Prisoners cook their own meals:

autonomy.

They study, work, and build trade skills:

competence.

Voluntary Donation

Officers are trained not only as security professionals but also as mentors and role models:

relatedness.

It is almost a textbook implementation of the psychology of human growth.

They are deprived of liberty. They are not deprived of humanity.

“The Criminology of Change”

Shadd Maruna’s research showed that people who permanently stop offending do so by rewriting their identity, what he called the Redemption Script. Behaviour doesn’t change first.

Identity changes first. Behaviour follows (Maruna, 2001).

Fergus McNeill adds that desistance requires external recognition. Society must update its view of who a person is (McNeill, 2006).

Which brings us back to the label.

Howard Becker’s Labeling Theory argues that labels don’t merely describe reality, they help create it (Becker, 1963).

Call an institution a prison, organise it around punishment, and you signal its purpose. The language, the culture, and the design reinforce one another. Staff respond to the institution they’re asked to run. Prisoners respond to the institution they inhabit. Society responds to the labels it has created.

And then we express genuine surprise when people struggle to become anything other than the identity we’ve handed them.

A Practitioner’s Voice

Nils Christie, one of Norway’s most influential criminologists, argued in “Limits to Pain”(1981) that the criminal justice system is, at its core, a pain delivery system and that the amount of pain a society inflicts through its prisons is not a technical necessity.

It is a political choice. A moral one (Christie, 1981).

Norway heard that argument. It chose differently.

Governor Are Hoidal of Halden Prison, one of Norway’s flagship rehabilitation facilities, was once asked to justify conditions that critics called too comfortable. His response was direct.

“We are releasing your neighbour. If we treat inmates like animals in prison, then we will release animals on to your street.” (Hoidal, cited in BBC, 2019)

That is the philosophy in one sentence.

Rehabilitation Is Crime Prevention

Here is the line I keep returning to:

Rehabilitation isn’t principally about the person who committed yesterday’s offence.

It’s about the person who never becomes tomorrow’s victim.

The safest community isn’t the one that punishes most harshly. It’s the one that creates the fewest future victims.

Every prevented offence represents:

A family that never receives a late-night phone call.

A child who isn’t traumatised.

A police officer who isn’t dispatched.

A hospital bed that isn’t needed.

A courtroom that sits empty.

A prison cell that stays vacant.

This isn’t left-wing or right-wing. It’s arithmetic.

The Only Metric That Matters

Imagine if hospitals measured success by how many patients they admitted rather than how many recovered.

We’d conclude they had completely misunderstood their purpose.

Yet corrections systems routinely celebrate throughput over outcomes, programmes delivered, prisoners processed, beds occupied.

The only statistic that ultimately matters is this:

How many people leave and never come back?

The Choice Ahead

I’ve been inside this system across 11 years comprised of bail, prison, parole, and immigration detention. I’ve watched men trying desperately to become someone their past no longer recognises.

Some succeed. Many don’t.

Not because they lack potential. Because transformation requires more than punishment. It requires opportunity, identity, hope, purpose, support, and accountability.

Those things aren’t opposites. They’re partners.

Taken together, the work of Dostoevsky, Foucault, Christie, Goffman, Rogers, Maruna, and Becker points in a remarkably consistent direction.

Norway’s outcomes, while no two justice systems are directly comparable and no single study proves causation, are difficult to ignore.

We’ve had the evidence for decades. The philosophy for longer. The proof of concept for a generation.

The only thing missing is the decision.

Viktor Frankl believed that the final human freedom is the power to choose who we become despite our circumstances (Frankl, 1946).

Perhaps the next evolution of criminal justice is recognising that society has a choice too.

We can continue building institutions around who people were.

Or we can start building them around who they might yet become.

Prisons will continue producing prisoners if producing prisoners is what they’re designed to do.

The day we begin designing them around rehabilitation as well as accountability, the evidence from Norway suggests the numbers will begin changing too.

Not because we’ll have become softer.

Because we’ll finally have started measuring success by the people who never return.

And by the victims who never have to be created.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

This article owes its spark to my friend, Robert Cullen, whose essay “The Post-Release Identity Crisis” introduced me to a sentence I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: “I healed despite prison, not because of it.”

While the arguments and conclusions here are my own, that simple observation became the seed from which this essay grew. Read Robert’s work at Medium.

References

Becker, H. (1963). *Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.* Free Press.

Central Statistics Office Ireland (2025). *Prison Re-offending Statistics 2022.* CSO.

Christie, N. (1981). *Limits to Pain: The Role of Punishment in Penal Policy.* Martin Robertson.

Cullen, R. (2025). *The Post-Release Identity Crisis.* Medium.

Deci, E.L. & Ryan, R.M. (1985). *Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior.* Plenum.

Department of Justice Ireland (2025). Prison re-offending rates. *Dáil Written Answer,* 18 November 2025.

Dostoevsky, F. (1860). *The House of the Dead.*

Foucault, M. (1975). *Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.* Gallimard.

Frankl, V. (1946). *Man’s Search for Meaning.* Beacon Press.

Goffman, E. (1961). *Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates.* Anchor Books.

Haney, C. & Zimbardo, P. (1998). The Past and Future of US Prison Policy: Twenty-Five Years After the Stanford Prison Experiment. *American Psychologist, 53*(7), 709-727.

Høidal, A. (2019). Cited in BBC News: How Norway turns criminals into good neighbours (July 2019).

Kristoffersen, R. (2024). *Correctional Statistics of Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.* Kriminalomsorgen (Norwegian Correctional Service).

Maruna, S. (2001). *Making Good: How Ex-Convicts Reform and Rebuild Their Lives.* American Psychological Association.

McNeill, F. (2006). A Desistance Paradigm for Offender Management. *Criminology & Criminal Justice, 6*(1), 39-62.

Rogers, C. (1961). *On Becoming a Person.* Houghton Mifflin.

Productivity Commission (2025). *Report on Government Services 2025: Justice: Corrective Services.* Australian Government.

Zimbardo, P., Haney, C., Banks, W.C., & Jaffe, D. (1971). *The Stanford Prison Experiment.* Stanford University.

Author’s Note

I wrote this article a week ago.

I scheduled it for publication for today before I knew the outcome of my Federal Court case, which came yesterday.

After two years and one month in immigration detention, my application was dismissed.

For a few moments I wondered whether this article still rang true.

It is very eerie for me now … that I wrote this last week… You’ll understand soon enough why.

Then I realised this is exactly the day it needed to be published.

Everything below was written before I knew the outcome.

I haven’t changed a word.

What Do I Do That For?

When doing the right thing doesn’t get you the result you were promised.

I was watching Tom Brady on a podcast this week with Gary Neville, Roy Keane, Ian Wright… the usual sharp, unforgiving panel, except this time turning their attention to American football instead of theirs.

Full Podcast here: worth a look!

And Brady said something that stopped me.

He was talking about culture. About the early days of trying to build discipline into a team… telling players to go home early, skip the parties, put in the extra film study, do the unseen work. And when that work turned into wins, the lesson reinforced itself perfectly. Discipline produces results. Results validate discipline. The culture builds itself on its own evidence.

But then he said the part that actually matters.

What about the times you do everything right and still lose?

You went home early. You skipped the party. You did the extra hours. You followed every rule the culture demanded of you.

And you still lost.

He said he felt for those players, because what do you tell them? What’s left of the argument when the thing you promised them… do this and it works… doesn’t hold every time?

I sat with that for a long time after the episode ended.

Because I’ve lived that sentence. Word for word. Just in a different uniform.

In here, the message is the same one Brady was describing.

Do the courses. Get the certificates. Show remorse. Build a case for who you’ve become rather than who you were. Demonstrate, consistently and over years, that you are someone worth letting back into the world.

And for a long time you believe, because you have to believe something, that this is how it works. Effort in, justice out. A clean equation.

Then you watch it not happen.

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You watch a man do everything asked of him… every course completed, every box ticked, years of visible change… and still not get his visa back. Still not get parole. Still sit exactly where he started, except older, and more disillusioned than before.

And the question rises up in him, the same one Brady described from a different world entirely.

What do I do that for?

I don’t have a clean answer. Anyone offering one is probably selling a bridge or something.

But here’s what I’ve come to, slowly, after watching it happen more than once.

The work was never a transaction with the system.

It felt like one. It gets framed like one. Do this, get that. But systems are not vending machines. And treating them like they are sets you up for a very specific kind of disappointment when they don’t dispense what you think you’ve paid for.

The work was always a transaction with… you’ve guessed it… with yourself.

Viktor Frankl wrote about this from a place far darker than detention or sport. Meaning, he argued, cannot depend on outcome, because outcome is not fully within your control. What is within your control is your stance toward what happens to you. Who you choose to become inside it.

That is not comforting in the moment. It is actually quite brutal when you are sitting in the gap between effort and result.

But it is also the only thing that survives contact with a system that sometimes gets it wrong. Because if your sense of self depends entirely on outcome, you have handed your worth to something inconsistent by design.

The courses you did. The discipline you showed. The person you became while doing it.

That happened.

No decision can undo that.

And I think this sits far beyond prison.

Voluntary Donation (Any Amount You Like)

It’s the employee who does everything right and still gets passed over. The parent who follows every piece of advice and still watches things fall apart. The person who does everything right for their health and still gets the diagnosis nobody expected.

Effort and outcome are related. They are not the same thing. And the space between them is where a lot of people quietly break, because we were taught by sport, by culture, by neat stories, that good process guarantees good results.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes it just produces a better version of you standing in the same place, having to decide again whether the work was worth it.

If you’re the man who has done everything right and is still waiting, still hasn’t got the visa, still hasn’t got the parole, still hasn’t got the answer you thought your effort would buy you.

The work wasn’t wasted.

It built something in you that no decision-maker can take off you. And whatever comes back on paper, that part has already changed.

Keep going.

Not because it guarantees the outcome.

Because it is still the only thing you fully get to own.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

We started trying to extend life. Somewhere along the way, we stopped living it.

I use a tracking app. Bevel, in my case.

It measures sleep, strain, recovery, calories, macros… the full suite. And for a while, I’ll be honest, there was something satisfying about it. Numbers don’t lie. A good score feels like proof you did something right. A bad one feels like a problem you can solve.

But after a while, something shifted.

The measuring itself started to feel exhausting. Not the underlying habits, the sleep, the movement, the eating well. Those are good things and I still believe in them. What got exhausting was the constant audit running underneath everything. I felt like I was living in the app, constantly inputting data. Was I optimising, or am I just living, and is there even a difference anymore?

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That last question is the one that stuck with me.

There’s a story happening in culture right now that I think is worth paying attention to.

For the best part of a decade, we’ve been sold a particular vision of what a good life looks like. Wake at five. Track everything. Optimise the body like a piece of software that simply needs the right inputs. Sleep score, recovery score, HRV, macros, supplements, the full architecture of relentless self-improvement.

Bryan Johnson has become the most extreme public face of this. A tech entrepreneur running what he calls a project to not die, an enormous daily regimen of supplements, biomarker tracking, and a team of doctors managing his body like a piece of long-term infrastructure. Whatever you think of the project itself, it’s the purest expression of where this culture has been heading. Optimise everything. Measure everything. Extend everything.

And recently, something has started to crack in the culture’s relationship with that whole idea.

People are getting tired.

Not tired of looking after themselves. Tired of the audit. Tired of the quiet sense of failure that creeps in when the recovery score comes back amber and the whole day feels somehow tainted before it’s even started.

Here’s the thing nobody quite says out loud.

You can hit every macro and still miss the moment that actually mattered… the dinner, the phone call, the conversation that didn’t fit neatly into the schedule because connection rarely does.

You can have the perfect morning routine and spend the entire year feeling like you’re failing, because the metrics kept telling you that you were, even while the actual texture of your life was fine. Good, even. Just not measurable in the way the app wanted it to be.

I think about this a lot in here, where time and the body take on a strange new significance. You’d think a place like this would make tracking feel more important, not less. Control over something, anything, when so much else is out of your hands.

But I’ve found the opposite is true.

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The more I measured, the further I got from actually noticing. There was a disconnect drift.

There’s a psychological term for part of what’s happening here. It’s called the quantification trap… the tendency to assume that if something can be measured, the measurement is the thing that matters. The number becomes the goal. The lived experience underneath it becomes almost incidental.

Marcus Aurelius never had a sleep score. He had a notebook and a mind he was trying to keep honest. The Stoics were obsessed with self-examination, but the examination was always in service of character, not metrics. Did I act with integrity today. Did I meet the moment well. Not… did I hit eighty-five on recovery.

Those are very different questions, even though they can look superficially similar from the outside. Both involve attention. Both involve discipline. But one points you toward your actual life, and the other points you toward a dashboard about your life.

I want to be clear about something, because I don’t want this to read as an argument against health altogether.

Eat well. Train. Log your calories and macros if that genuinely helps you… there’s nothing wrong with the tools themselves. The problem was never the data. The problem is what happens when the data starts running the show instead of supporting it.

I caught a Colin Cowherd segment recently that put this better than I’ve managed to so far, particularly from a sports analyst I rarely agree with. He was talking about longevity… the obsession with extending life… and he flipped it. What he was really arguing for was something he called “loungevity”. Not living longer for its own sake. Living in a way that’s actually enjoyable along the way.

He finished with a line that struck.

A life healthy enough to enjoy, and enjoyable enough to be healthy.

That’s the whole argument, in twelve words. Health in service of a life worth living… not a life rearranged entirely in service of health.

I’m not telling you to throw away the band or delete the app. I still wear mine.

What I’m saying is that somewhere in the last decade, a lot of us.. me included… started treating the dashboard as the destination. We got so focused on extending our lives that we quietly stopped living the one we already had. You can optimise yourself into a longer life and still spend most of it managing metrics instead of being present for the people and moments that the metrics were supposedly all in service of.

The point was never to live longer for its own sake.

The point was to have more of an actual life to live.

So here’s the practical version of all this, for anyone who recognises themselves in it.

Keep the habits that genuinely serve you. Sleep matters. Movement matters. What you put in your body matters. None of that is in question.

But notice the moment the measuring becomes the point. Notice when you’ve cancelled something that mattered because of a number on a screen. Notice when a good day got quietly ruined by an amber score that had nothing to do with how the day actually went.

That’s the moment to put the dashboard down and ask the older, simpler question instead.

Remember why you want to stick around longer. If it’s to be with your loved ones for longer, then maybe be with them right now. That’s what is in your control.

Not how do I optimise this life.

How do I actually live it.

A life healthy enough to enjoy. Enjoyable enough to be healthy.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

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Empathy is a word that gets thrown around constantly these days.

Workplaces want more of it. Relationships supposedly run on it. Social media demands you perform it publicly or risk being accused of lacking it entirely. It’s in every leadership course, every couples’ counselling session, every well-meaning LinkedIn post.

And yet, ask ten people to define it precisely, and you’ll probably get ten different answers. Some overlapping. Some contradicting each other outright.

Try that with anger. Or sadness.

People might describe those emotions differently, but they’re not confused about the basic territory. Anger is anger. Sadness is sadness.

Empathy should be just as simple.

It isn’t.

And I think the reason it isn’t tells us something important.

The dictionary defines empathy as the ability to understand another person’s feelings or experience. Simple enough, right?

Brené Brown pushes back on one part of that. She argues empathy isn’t imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes at all. It’s listening to their account of what life is like in those shoes and believing them, even when it bears no resemblance to your own experience.

That difference might seem small.

I don’t think it is.

So why does empathy get to be ambiguous when anger doesn’t?

Here’s my theory.

Anger and sadness are states. You either feel them or you don’t. They live entirely inside one person, and that person is usually the best authority on whether they’re experiencing them.

Empathy isn’t a state. It’s a relationship.

It requires two people. One person’s internal experience, and another person’s attempt to accurately receive that experience without distorting it through their own lens.

That second part is where most of us get it wrong, usually without even realising.

Most of us think we’re being empathetic when we’re actually translating.

Someone tells us about their pain.

We immediately search our own memory for the closest match.

“I know exactly how you feel...”

Except… we don’t.

We know how we felt during something that reminds us of it.

Brown describes moments like this as empathy misses. They feel like connection because they’re familiar, but they’ve quietly shifted the focus. The conversation is no longer centred on the other person’s experience. It’s centred on ours.

Genuine empathy doesn’t require you to have lived the same thing.

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It requires you to sit with someone else’s account of their experience without needing it to match yours before you accept it as real.

That is a much harder skill than the dictionary definition makes it sound.

I’ve thought about this a lot in a place where the word gets used constantly and demonstrated rarely.

There is a particular kind of false empathy that shows up in institutions. The trained, careful, professionally appropriate kind.

“That must be really difficult for you.”

It’s often delivered with genuine warmth and genuine intention, yet somehow still lands as distant.

Not because the person saying it is dishonest.

Because they’re trying to approximate an experience they’ve never lived from the outside looking in.

Then there’s the other kind.

The kind that never announces itself as empathy at all.

The person who stays in the room when things get uncomfortable.

Who asks a real question instead of a rehearsed one.

Who doesn’t flinch when the answer is worse than expected.

I know which one actually lands.

It’s never been about finding the perfect words.

It’s been about whether the other person felt believed.

That, I think, is the closest thing to a working definition I can offer.

Empathy is the act of believing someone’s experience without requiring it to resemble your own.

Not feeling what they feel. You can’t, not exactly.

Not imagining your way into their shoes. Brown is right that this often imports your assumptions into someone else’s story.

Just believing them.

Without the quiet asterisk that so many of us attach without realising it.

I believe you, but surely it wasn’t that bad.

I believe you, but I would’ve handled it differently.

I believe you, but...

The moment the asterisk appears, empathy quietly leaves the room.

Maybe that’s why empathy refuses to fit neatly inside a dictionary definition.

Anger belongs to one person.

Sadness belongs to one person.

Empathy exists between two.

It asks one of us to suspend our own frame of reference long enough for another person’s reality to exist without correction, comparison or qualification.

That isn’t a passive feeling.

It’s an active, often uncomfortable discipline.

Maybe that’s why so many of us mistake sympathy, reassurance or shared experience for empathy.

From a distance they look remarkably similar.

Up close, they’re doing completely different jobs.

The dictionary will always give you the simple version.

The work begins when you notice the difference.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

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I was delighted to wake up this morning to a published interview about me, written by Michael Toebe of

What makes this one special is how it came about. Michael wasn’t an editor who found me through a press release or a pitch… or a friend of a friend… he found me right here on Substack, as a regular reader and commenter on my work. A connection built one comment at a time turned into a feature interview, “Writing From Inside the Fire.”

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It’s a good reminder of what this platform can actually do. You show up, you write honestly, and sometimes someone on the other side of the world is quietly paying attention… closely enough to want to tell your story themselves.

The piece opens with a line that’s stayed with me since I read it:

“For two-plus years, a former corporate professional has had his body, not his mind, confined.”

It’s not really about Immigration detention. It’s about what happens when you decide the one thing they can’t take is your mind, and you build something with it anyway.

Free to read or listen, link below.

Writing From Inside The Fire

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.
Stephen

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Ray Kroc was 52 years old when everything changed.

Not 22. Not fresh out of college with the world arranged neatly in front of him. Fifty-two. With decades of average behind him, a bad back, a struggling marriage, and a boot full of milkshake machines he was driving across America trying to sell.

By any reasonable measure, his best years were behind him.

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Reasonable measures have a lot to answer for.

I watched The Founder last week. it took me three attempts to get to the finish because I was hotspotting on a Detention Centre that is essentially built on a swamp… but it was worth the effort… And I’ll be honest with you; I was team Ray from the first scene.

Not because he was perfect. He certainly wasn’t.

Not because every decision he made was right. It certainly wasn’t.

But because of something that burned in him that I recognised immediately.

The refusal.

The absolute, non-negotiable refusal to accept that this was as good as it was going to get.

Carl Jung spent a significant portion of his life’s work thinking about time. Specifically, about the second half of it.

His argument was not what most people expect. He didn’t suggest that midlife was a decline to be managed gracefully. He argued the opposite. That the first half of life is largely spent constructing a persona, building the external scaffolding of identity, career, status and survival. And that the second half, if a person is willing to do the harder work of turning inward, is where genuine purpose is found.

Jung called it individuation.

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The process of becoming, fully and authentically, who you actually are.

By that measure, Ray Kroc at 52 wasn’t running out of time.

He was right on schedule.

There’s a story the world tells us about time.

It goes like this.

There is a window.

It opens when you’re young and closes somewhere around the point where you should know better. If you haven’t built your thing, found your thing, become your thing by the time that window shuts, well... you had your chance.

I have been told versions of this story my entire life.

And I am telling you, from inside a detention centre, at a point in my life that most people would look at and see only the wreckage:

The window is still open.

My brother-in-law, Anthony told me this week “Time is running out… you need to get out of there”. I see his point but I’m only getting warmed up in thing we call life.

The window was never closing in the first place.

Seneca knew this.

Writing to his friend Lucilius from Rome two thousand years ago, he said something that has never stopped being true.

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a great deal of it.”

I can agree with that. Being imprisoned for almost 5 across 6 years would lead you to conclude that you have wasted a lot of your life’s time. I would argue that that is purely contextual and differs from person to person. I have had the good fortune of meeting ladies and gentlemen recently who have completed degrees in prison. Some are now going for their PhD’s. I don’t believe these men and women “wasted their time”. I certainly wouldn’t agree that I’ve wasted my time in here, either.

Seneca wasn’t talking about productivity.

He was talking about presence.

About the habit, deeply human and deeply costly, of treating our days as something to be endured rather than inhabited.

I’ve watched that play out up close.

Inside, people do everything in their power to make the days disappear.

You see it everywhere. The routines designed not to fill time but to kill it. The sleep that stretches into the afternoon. The endless television. The card games. The replaying of old conversations.

All of it serving the same goal.

Make today be over.

Make tomorrow come faster.

Make this stretch of life collapse into itself so the other side arrives sooner.

I understand the impulse.

I’ve felt it myself. I certainly participated, too.

But I stopped doing it when I realised what it was costing me.

Every day I wished away was a day my daughter got older. A day I could have learned something, built something, written something.

A day that would never come back.

Not taken by circumstance.

Surrendered voluntarily.

Marcus Aurelius wrote:

“Confine yourself to the present.”

Not as resignation.

As strategy.

The present is the only place the work actually gets done.

I am 44 years old.

And I have never felt the value of a single day more clearly than I do right now.

Not because my situation is comfortable. It isn’t.

But because I have watched what happens to people who treat time as the enemy, who spend years in a kind of internal fast-forward and arrive at the other side having served their sentence twice.

Once in the body.

Once in the mind.

I refuse to do that.

Viktor Frankl developed many of the ideas that would later become logotherapy while enduring circumstances that should have made thinking beyond survival impossible.

The conditions were the laboratory.

He didn’t build his life’s work despite what happened to him.

He built it inside it.

That idea has stayed with me.

Every article. Every conversation. Every connection made through a screen on a hotspot from inside here.

None of it is wasted time.

All of it is the work.

Ray Kroc didn’t invent McDonald’s.

That’s the part people forget.

Dick and Mac McDonald had the system. The golden arches. The Speedee Service Method. The thing that worked.

Ray walked into that San Bernardino restaurant, saw something nobody else had properly seen yet, and understood, with a clarity that must have felt almost physical, that this was it.

This was the thing.

And then he would not stop until it existed at scale.

That obsession is uncomfortable to watch sometimes. The film doesn’t sanitise it. Ray makes choices that hurt people. He is relentless in ways that cost him. The hunger that drives him is the same hunger that isolates him.

But here’s what I kept coming back to.

He saw it when nobody else did.

And he refused to unsee it.

Carol Dweck spent decades researching why some people grow through adversity while others are flattened by it.

Her conclusion, the foundation of what she called the growth mindset, was disarmingly simple.

The people who keep going are not the ones with the most talent or the best circumstances.

They are the ones who believe capacity is not fixed.

That the next attempt might produce what the last one didn’t.

That effort compounds over time in ways that can’t always be seen from the inside.

Ray Kroc had a growth mindset before anyone had a name for it.

He just called it not being finished yet.

Here’s the part of his story that doesn’t get talked about enough.

He was not an overnight success who got lucky at 52.

He was a man who had been preparing for 52 his entire life without knowing it.

Every failed venture.

Every mediocre year.

Every door that didn’t open.

All of it was building something. Resilience. Pattern recognition. The ability to spot an opportunity and move on it without waiting for permission.

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Jung would have recognised this immediately.

The first half of life doing its work.

Building the vessel.

So that when the moment arrived, there was something ready to meet it.

The years that looked like nothing were doing something.

They always are.

I know that feeling.

Not the McDonald’s part.

But the seeing.

The moment I understood what The Unshackled Project could be, not just a personal story, not just a recovery framework, but a genuine structural solution to a gap the mental health system hasn’t closed, something locked in.

And it hasn’t unlocked since.

I have built this from a cell.

From a detention centre.

On a hotspot.

Without funding.

Without an office.

Without the infrastructure people assume you need before you’re allowed to start.

Ray Kroc was driving a car full of milkshake machines.

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The equipment you have right now is enough to begin.

So here’s what I want to leave you with.

It is not too late.

Whatever you’ve been waiting for permission to start, whatever you’ve been telling yourself you missed the window on, you haven’t.

Jung spent his career arguing that the second half of life is where people find their real purpose.

Seneca spent his arguing that the time we think we’ve lost was never really lost, only unexamined.

Marcus Aurelius built his most enduring work in the hardest conditions he ever faced.

The window is open.

It always was.

Ray Kroc was 52 with a boot full of milkshake machines.

Most people would have looked at his life and assumed the important chapters had already been written.

They hadn’t.

Maybe that’s the lesson.

The years that look like nothing are often preparing you for something.

Preparing you for the opportunity you can’t see yet.

Preparing you for the version of yourself you haven’t met yet.

I’m 44, inside a detention centre, building something that didn’t exist before I started.

Not wishing away a single day.

Because the Stoics were right about this one.

We don’t get more time by spending it faster.

We get more life by showing up fully inside the time we already have.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

Nobody handcuffed …

No judge read out her sentence. No prison van collected her. No gate closed behind her with that specific sound, the one you feel in your chest more than you hear it.

But she’s been doing time.

For years.

Bridget Young writes a Substack called Black Sheep Mom. She’s been documenting her journey as the mother of an incarcerated son with the kind of honesty most people reserve for their private journals, if they’re brave enough to keep one at all. I’ve been following her writing for a while now. We’ve exchanged messages. She’s one of those people who reminds you that the story inside the walls is never the whole story.

Last week, her son came home.

She wrote about it. I’d encourage you to read it. Not because I can summarise it better than she lived it, but because of one image that hasn’t left me since I read it.

Bridget standing in a prison car park in the rain. In black. Holding a melting iced coffee. Waiting for one more thirty minutes after years of waiting.

And then the door opening.

Her son hesitating in the frame, so used to being told when to move.

And Bridget breaking into a run.

That image is the whole article I’m about to write.

We talk a lot about what prison does to the person inside.

We talk less about what it does to everyone else.

And it does something.

To all of them.

Every single one.

The partner who becomes two people at once. The one living their life and the one holding space for the life that’s on pause. Who laughs on cue at family gatherings and answers “he’s doing okay” so many times it stops meaning anything. Who carries the invisible weight of a relationship that exists in phone calls, visiting rooms and careful words that won’t upset anyone.

The mother who starts every morning thinking about her child in a cell. Who checks the phone before she checks anything else. Who holds herself together in public and comes apart quietly in rooms nobody sees.

The daughter growing up faster than she should have had to. Holding two versions of her father, the one from memory and the voice on the phone. Scoring tries with nobody on the sideline who should be there. Driving for the first time without the person who was supposed to teach her.

The siblings who go quiet at Christmas. The cousins who don’t know what to say, so they say nothing. The nieces and nephews who grow inches and cut teeth and take first steps. All of it unreported, uncelebrated, happening in a world that keeps moving while someone they love is standing still.

The children born after. Who will grow up and ask where he was. And get an answer nobody rehearsed properly because there’s no good version of it.

This is the domino effect of incarceration.

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One person goes in.

An entire network of people restructures their lives around the absence.

I know this from the inside looking out.

My partner. My daughter. My mam. My family.

Every time I hear “any news?” on a call, it lands like a quiet punch. Because I can hear the hope underneath it. The please, this time, let it be something.

And I have to say the same thing I said last week and the week before.

Nothing yet.

How do you keep saying that without it breaking something between you?

How do you keep promising “soon” when you have no control over when?

My daughter is driving now. I missed that. I’ll never un-miss it. She holds my absence in one hand and tries to live fully with the other, and she does it with a grace that makes me proud and guilty in equal measure.

My partner is the bridge between my reality and the life we’re still building. Every visit, no hand-holding. No sitting beside each other. Bureaucratic hangover rules from Covid nobody bothered to change. A little warmth at the visit commencemnt, then it’s taken back before it can feel real.

She shows up anyway.

Every time.

My mam lost her true love and soul mate, Billy in December. The man she loved. The man who believed in me unconditionally for thirty-seven years and never once made me feel like anything less than his son.

She carries that now.

And she carries this too.

The waiting. The not knowing. The distance.

One grief stacked quietly on top of another.

She never got her complete picture.

We video call regularly. Her face on a screen from Ireland, mine from inside here.

And still, every single time, she shows up with the same hope in her voice.

Still asking “any news?” like she hasn’t asked it a hundred times before.

That’s what love looks like when it has nowhere else to go.

Here’s what I want to say to anyone on the outside carrying this weight right now.

What you’re experiencing has a name. It just doesn’t get one often enough.

Psychologists call it ambiguous loss.

It’s the grief that comes from losing someone who isn’t gone. Not fully. Not permanently. But who is absent in a way the world doesn’t quite know how to acknowledge.

There’s no funeral.

No casserole dropped at the door.

No socially sanctioned space to fall apart.

Just the daily management of an absence that everyone around you has quietly decided not to mention.

That is its own kind of imprisonment.

And just like the person inside, the person outside needs support that actually reaches them.

Not platitudes.

Not “stay strong.”

Not the assumption that because you’re free, you’re fine.

You’re not always fine.

You’re allowed to say that.

Bridget said something in her writing that I’ve turned over in my mind since I read it.

She talked about walking across that car park for the last time and feeling the familiar ache rise up. Not for her son, who was about to be free, but for every other mother who wasn’t there that day. Who was still waiting. Who had no melting iced coffee in the cup holder and no door about to open.

That is the size of a person’s heart.

To carry your own relief and still feel the weight of everyone else’s wait.

I’ve met a lot of people like that since I started this work. People on the outside of the system who show up anyway. Who write about it, advocate for it, lose sleep over it. Who refuse to let their person become invisible just because a gate closed.

They were never sentenced.

Yet they carry part of the punishment.

And they deserve to be seen as clearly as the person inside.

If you are one of these people, a partner, a parent, a sibling, a child, a friend doing this quietly without a name for what it is, I want to say something directly to you.

You are not dramatic for finding this hard.

You are not weak for struggling with an absence that has no clear end date.

You are not selfish for grieving the life you expected to be living by now.

And you are not alone.

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There are more of you than you know.

Scattered across every suburb, every city, every country.

Carrying the same invisible weight.

Giving the same careful answers.

Managing the same quiet loss.

Your person may be behind a door right now.

But you are not forgotten.

And neither are they.

Bridget broke into a run across that car park.

After years of waiting rooms and visiting chairs and careful words and sleepless nights and birthdays counted and missed.

She ran.

Because he was finally, finally coming home.

I think about that image a lot.

Because somewhere out there, in Ireland, in Brisbane, across every city and country where the people who love someone inside are quietly doing their own time, they are waiting for their version of that moment.

The call.

The door.

The running.

They deserve better than what the system gives them.

So do you.

Read Bridget’s piece here and bring your tissues:

Mama, I'm Coming Home

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

In prison, you don’t get to choose your people.

You work with what’s in front of you. A yard. A block. A limited pool of human beings thrown together by circumstance, not compatibility.

You find the ones you can trust. Or at least the ones who won’t make things harder.

It isn’t necessarily your tribe.

Not really.

It’s survival arithmetic

And for a long time, I thought that was just how it worked. That the idea of finding your people… genuinely your people, the ones who see the world the way you do, who are building toward something, who light up when you talk about ideas instead of just nodding politely… was a luxury for people in different circumstances.

Not in here.

I was wrong.

I have found many tribe members in here and out there. I found my partner who I adore in here while she was out there. The world really works in mysterious ways but I’m certainly not questioning this one. It was meant to be. She’s the Queen of my Tribe.

This week I had a meeting this week with Leilani Whitney.

She runs Dial A Mate Mental Health Australia… a mental health initiative in Australia built around one of the simplest and most overlooked ideas in the space. That sometimes what a person needs isn’t a clinical intervention. It’s a conversation. A real one. With a real human being who gives a damn.

Leilani had posted a video of herself doing a full, unself-conscious, don’t-care-who’s-watching dance. No explanation. No apology. Just joy, broadcast publicly. It made me laugh as I’m sure it did to many others. She posted it on LinkedIn, which is not normally the medium that you’d see something like that. So, I applauded her for her individuality and for bringing joy to anybody who watched.

Next minute Katie Shields is replicating it and challenging me to do the same.

Next minute I’m dancing around the gym of a detention centre like an absolute idiot.

Not a care in the world.

And it was brilliant.

People laughed. People joined in. People seemed to genuinely enjoy it.

More importantly, so did I.

These people are my tribe.

For your viewing pleasure, I have left all three “dance offs” below:

Leilani actually dancing

Katie actually dancing

Stephen looking like an idiot

Here’s what I’ve discovered in recent times that has genuinely changed something in me.

There is an entire world of people out there doing extraordinary things quietly. People in the lived experience space… mental health, addiction recovery, criminal justice, disability, domestic violence, grief, trauma… who have been through the fire themselves and come out the other side with something to offer.

Not because it’s a career move.

Not because it’s fashionable.

Because they simply cannot imagine doing anything else.

People who understand, without needing it explained, that the system doesn’t get it right and want to do something about it. People who speak the same language. Who have the same arguments with the same walls. Who celebrate the small wins with the same disproportionate enthusiasm because they know what it cost to get there.

I had no idea how many of these people existed until I had a look around… and I’m still mind blown by it all.

The moment I did… the moment I started putting this work out publicly and specifically and honestly… they started appearing. From across the sector. Across the country. Across the world.

Not in the room I was physically in. Or a detention centre for that matter.

But real. Present. Consistent.

Some people I care about very deeply don’t have much interest in the things I’m building.

They love me. They support me. But they don’t light up when I talk about lived experience, systems reform, mental health or prison advocacy.

Sometimes I find myself wishing they did.

But we’re all wired differently.

That’s why finding your tribe matters.

Not because the people you love aren’t enough.

Because no single person can be everything.

My tribe. I feel in recent weeks. a lot have come to the surface… and for a man who has been in custody 5 out of the last 6 years… that’s incredibly endearing.

Now I want to name something that lives quietly in a lot of men. I done a webinar at 3 in the morning to the LEAD Community Foundation in Nigeria on Monday and the topic was Men’s mental health, so I feel this is relevant. For anybody who wants to watch/ listen to the webinar, you can find it below:

LEAD COMMUNITY PRESENTATION

There is a false belief so embedded in us that most have never said it out loud.

Nobody listens to men.

Nobody supports men.

If I speak up nothing will change. If I show vulnerability, it will be used against me. If I ask for help, I’ll be met with indifference at best and contempt at worst.

I heard this recently from a man processing something serious. Real harm. Real silence. Real institutional failure. And his conclusion… not said in anger, said in resignation… was that men simply don’t get the support. That the world has decided certain voices don’t count.

I understand where that comes from.

I’ve lived in systems that reinforced this rhetoric daily.

But I want to take it apart. Not with a speech. With what actually happened.

When I started sharing this work… from inside custody, on a hotspot, with no budget and no institutional backing… people showed up. People cared. People were encouraged.

Not just people who’d been through the system. Not just men. Not just Australians. People from across the lived experience spectrum… women, practitioners, advocates, survivors of things I’ll never face… getting behind the work because the work was right.

Sharing it. Amplifying it. Turning up to sessions. Sending messages at odd hours that said simply… this matters, keep going.

I am a man. Speaking about things men are told to stay quiet about. And the response has been one of the most humbling experiences of my life.

The belief that nobody is coming for men is understandable.

But it is not accurate.

What is accurate is that the tribe doesn’t always look the way you expect. It doesn’t always come from where you thought it would. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t wait at the obvious door.

It finds you when you make yourself findable.

Tribe is not about proximity.

That’s the thing nobody tells you when you’re surrounded by the wrong people and starting to conclude that the right ones don’t exist.

Proximity is circumstance. Tribe is alignment. Values. Direction. The shared belief that things can be better and the shared willingness to actually do something about it.

You don’t find your tribe by waiting for the room to change.

You find them by showing up. By doing the work publicly enough that the right people can see it. By being honest about where you’ve been and specific about where you’re going. By making yourself visible on the frequency that matters.

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The lived experience world is full of people who will not flinch at your story. Who will not require you to minimise or perform or pretend you’re further along than you are. Who will simply say… I see you. I’ve been somewhere like that. Keep going.

That is what is out there.

That is what is available to every single person reading this.

So wherever you are right now.

Whatever walls you’re navigating… literal or otherwise.

If you have started to believe that your people don’t exist, that nobody is listening, that speaking up changes nothing…

I need you to picture something.

A man in a detention centre.

Dancing around a gym like nobody’s watching.

Because for the first time in a long time, he forgot to be guarded. He forgot to be strategic. He forgot the walls entirely. He remembered who he was and that he simply doesn’t care what naysayers think.

Because his tribe found him.

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And reminded him… loudly, joyfully, completely without warning… that life is still happening. That connection is still possible. That hope is not something you manufacture alone in the dark.

It shows up in a dance challenge from someone who gives a damn.

It shows up in a meeting with a person building something beautiful from scratch.

It shows up in a message at an odd hour that says simply, keep going.

Your tribe may not be in the room you’re currently in.

But it exists.

Right now.

Doing the work.

Waiting for one more frequency to tune in.

Start broadcasting.

They’ll find you.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

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There’s a temptation to dress boredom up as something trivial. A minor inconvenience. A flicker between more important moments.

But both ancient philosophy and modern psychiatry would push back on that pretty quickly.

Brené Brown frames boredom as a signal, not a flaw. “Boredom is your imagination calling to you.” That’s not poetic fluff, it’s behavioural data. It suggests boredom isn’t the absence of something, it’s the presence of a gap. A gap between stimulation and meaning.

The Stoics were circling that same idea long before we had language like “cognitive engagement” or “dopaminergic pathways.”

Seneca wrote, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it.”

He wasn’t talking about busyness. He was talking about misdirected attention.

Time feels heavy, even suffocating, when it’s unclaimed. That dragging sense of hours stretching out in detention, that’s exactly what he meant. Not a lack of time, but a lack of purposeful engagement with it.

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Then you’ve got Marcus Aurelius, who stripped it back even further:

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: I have to go to work as a human being.”

There’s something refreshingly blunt about that. No drama. No excuses. Just a reminder that your role isn’t to be entertained, it’s to act. Even in constraint. Especially in constraint.

That’s where my experience lined up almost uncomfortably well with Stoic practice.

Because what the Stoics trained for voluntarily, I was dropped into involuntarily.

Limited control. Repetition. Isolation. The removal of external stimulation.

And in that space, the only real lever left is internal.

Attention. Choice. Action.

Modern psychiatry doesn’t contradict that. It actually backs it.

Research into boredom, particularly work by psychologist John D. Eastwood, defines boredom as “the aversive experience of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity.”

That word aversive matters.

Boredom isn’t neutral. It’s uncomfortable by design. It pushes you to seek engagement. In evolutionary terms, it’s a feature, not a bug.

Neuroscience takes it even further.

When we’re bored, the brain’s default mode network becomes more active. That’s the system linked to imagination, self-reflection, and future planning.

In other words, the very state most people try to escape is often the same state that allows new ideas, identity shifts, and long-term thinking to emerge.

Turns out the human brain really hates staring at the same four walls without a mission.

Looking back on the last 2 years, it reframes things slightly.

I have been anything but bored. Just ask my girlfriend. My mind jumps from one concept to the next in a way that’s probably dizzying to watch.

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People tell me every day that they’re bored, and my response can sound a bit blunt sometimes: it’s because you’re not doing anything.

I’m incredibly fortunate that my mind drifted towards workshops, writing books, developing apps, public speaking, and building tools that might actually help people.

In here, we have been given forced exposure to a mental state most people avoid at all costs.

And instead of numbing it out, I leaned into it.

Writing. Building. Studying.

Not as some grand act of discipline every single day, but as a repeated response to that same internal friction.

What now?

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That question sits right at the intersection between Stoicism and psychiatry.

The Stoics would call it agency. The ability to choose your response regardless of circumstance.

Psychiatry would call it adaptive coping. Redirecting discomfort into constructive behaviour.

Different language. Same principle.

And it matters because the alternative is just as real.

Unanswered boredom doesn’t sit quietly.

It drifts.

It looks for the easiest available relief.

That’s where you get mindless scrolling, impulsive decisions, self-sabotage. Not because people are weak, but because the brain is wired to escape discomfort quickly.

I didn’t eliminate the discomfort.

I repurposed it.

There’s a line from Epictetus that fits here better than most:

“Do not seek for things to happen as you wish but wish for things to happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”

That’s not passive acceptance. It’s alignment.

It’s saying: this is the situation, now what can I build inside it?

And that’s exactly what boredom gave me.

Not peace. Not comfort.

But a constant prompt.

Most people will never face boredom in that intensity. But they’ll face it in quieter ways. Waiting for something to happen. Feeling stuck. Saying “I’m bored” like it’s the end of the road.

It’s not.

It’s your mind demanding engagement with something meaningful.

It’s the beginning of a question you haven’t answered yet.

Boredom isn’t the problem.

It’s the prompt.

And pressure, when it’s met with even a small amount of agency, has a habit of turning into something else entirely.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends

Stephen

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On performing when it matters. And who you’re really doing it for.

I was nervous on Tuesday morning.

Properly nervous.

Not the kind you shake off with a deep breath. The kind that sits in your chest and won’t move. The kind that makes you question everything five minutes before you open your mouth.

I was about to present to the IMPACT Network… Queensland’s cross-sector lived experience workforce… from inside Brisbane Immigration Detention Centre. On a hotspot. Off camera for most of it to protect the internet connection. Almost 2 years into a detention that was never supposed to last this long.

And I kept thinking… who am I to be doing this?

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Not false modesty. A genuine question. Because imposter syndrome doesn’t care about your credentials. It doesn’t care what you’ve built or what you’ve survived. It shows up anyway. Right on cue. Five minutes before you need it least.

I took a breath.

And I thought about Billy.

Billy Hughes was my stepdad. A word I’ve never been fully comfortable with, because for thirty-seven years he was simply my dad. He arrived in 1989 and never left… not really, not even now.

He was the King of Dublin cabaret. A man who could walk into any room in any country and own it within minutes. Not through volume or performance tricks. Through presence. Through the kind of warmth that makes people feel genuinely seen.

I’d watch him from the side of the stage as a kid and think… I could never do that.

And to be fair to myself, I was right about part of it.

The singing. Absolutely not. I am fortunate to have some gifts. A voice is not one of them. Billy could fill a room with one note. I could empty one just as fast. We were very different in that department and I made peace with it early.

But that’s not what I meant.

What I couldn’t do… what I genuinely didn’t believe I’d ever be able to do… was that thing he had where the whole room leaned in. That effortless connection. That warmth that made people feel genuinely seen before he’d said anything worth remembering.

That was Billy.

He’d just smile and tell me he saw something in me that I didn’t.

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For the last nine months of his life, he read every article I wrote. Every one. We’d talk about them… him and Mam… after they’d listened. Philosophy. Ideas. Life. He’d ask questions about Viktor Frankl. I bought him the book. He’d tell anyone who’d listen that I was something special.

He passed away at Christmas.

And on Tuesday morning, sitting inside a detention centre with a hotspot and a racing heart, I was about to do a presentation that really mattered.

Without him.

The room came alive.

I could feel it even off camera. Even through a screen. Even from in here.

Practitioners. Lived experience workers. People who had never touched the justice system and people who had never fully left one. Strangers, most of them. People with no particular reason to give me their attention except that something was reaching them.

Emily Cooper delivered her part of the session and owned every second of it. The energy she brought, the truth she told, the space she held… the room felt all of it.

And then the Q&A opened.

Strangers started speaking. Rose. Said. Skye. People I’d never met, who had no connection to me beyond this one morning, weighing in with the kind of honesty and warmth that you don’t manufacture. You can’t perform that. It either happens or it doesn’t.

It happened.

At one point Emily said… how am I supposed to follow that?

I won’t pretend that didn’t get to me.

Because Billy used to do that. Stop a room. Make people feel something they weren’t expecting to feel. And then grin like he knew it was coming all along.

The boy he nicknamed “The Professor” to all his mates did it on Tuesday. From a detention centre. On a hotspot.

He would have found that absolutely hilarious. And then told everyone he knew.

And then Marcus.

One of my programme graduates. Detained alongside me. Same walls. Different story. He sat in that web room and something rekindled in him… I watched it happen in real time. A man navigating the same uncertainty I am, feeling hope move through him because of something we built together in here. Right here … in custody.

That is not a case study.

That is a human being remembering that the dark isn’t permanent.

And then my girlfriend appeared.

I wasn’t ready for that. I thought I had my composure. I thought I was fine.

I wasn’t fine.

She brought a tear to my eye mid-meeting… the kind of support that doesn’t waver, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t ask you to be anything other than exactly what you are. In a moment that was already full, she made it fuller. In a room that was already emotional, she found the part of me that was still holding back and quietly undid it.

I sat there inside a detention centre and dropped a couple of emotional tears.

Big Boys Do Cry…

The kind of moment that means something is working.

One of the first things I thought afterwards… quietly, to myself, shortly after I texted my partner… was this:

I bet Billy was smiling down after that.

And I meant it.

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Not metaphorically. Not as a turn of phrase.

I meant it the way you mean something when grief is still raw and the person you’ve lost is still so present you half expect them to call.

Billy would have loved Tuesday morning. The room. The energy. The idea of the little “professor” from Poppintree, from a cell, from the longest road imaginable… standing in front of professionals and people and making them feel something.

We’d have talked about it that night.

He’d have said something that made me laugh and then quietly, in that way he had, told me he was proud.

I still want him to be proud of me.

Not past tense.

Still. Now. Always.

There’s something about losing someone who believed in you unconditionally that changes the nature of what you’re doing. The work doesn’t just become about the work anymore. It becomes an act of gratitude. A dedication. A way of honouring someone who saw you clearly when you couldn’t see yourself at all.

Billy always said… you never know who might show up. So be ready. Always be ready.

Tuesday morning, I was ready.

For the room. For the moment. For the work.

And for him.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends,

Stephen

Voluntary Donation

On Tuesday morning, I presented at the IMPACT Network, Queensland’s cross-sector lived experience workforce network, from inside Brisbane Immigration Detention Centre. On a hotspot. Off camera. Twenty-three months into a detention that was never supposed to last this long.

And it was one of the best mornings I can remember. Seriously.

The facilitator Michael Houston got there and held the room with warmth, professionalism, and humanity that I won’t forget. Under circumstances I won’t go into, he pulled off something remarkable just to be there. That kind of commitment to the work doesn’t go unnoticed. Thank you Michael.

But it was what happened in the room that made it so incredibly special.

The room was alive. Lived experience workers. Practitioners. People who have never been inside a system and people who have never left one. All of them present. All of them feeling it.

My girlfriend brought a tear to my eye with her support, the kind that doesn’t waver, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t ask you to be anything other than exactly what you are. And Marcus, one of my programme graduates, currently detained alongside me, sat in that room and felt something rekindle. Invigorated by the possibility that something being built around him might actually change the world he’s living in.

Emily Cooper smashed her part of the session. The energy she brought, the truth she told, the space she held, the room felt it.

And by the end of it we were all aligned on something that felt bigger than a meeting.

This cannot be a place where hope goes to die.

Below is a brief summary of what I discussed. That is the mission. And on Tuesday morning… it felt possible.

THE GAP

I have been inside four areas of the system.

Bail — August 2015 to October 2020. Five years of reporting, conditions, and a court date that kept moving. A friend looked around at one of my going-away parties and said, well, that felt like one very long f***ing funeral. We were trying to find humour in tragedy.

Prison — October 2020 to April 2023. Two and a half years. The day before I was sentenced I watched my daughter drive away. She was twelve. As the car reversed I saw her crying in the front seat. That moment is tattooed in my mind. It serves as a reminder of the impact of my wrongdoing and the strongest motivation possible to create positive change for the future.

Parole — April 2023 to June 2024. Won my visa back from inside prison. Two weeks later I ran into my daughter’s arms. She was fourteen. Best day since the day she was born. Then the leash. Check-ins. Conditions. The system watching to make sure you didn’t breach while you tried to rebuild a life.

Detention — June 13 2024 to now. An unrelated event. The Department of Home Affairs reversed my visa. Back inside. Twenty-three months and counting.

Four types of systems. Psychological support existed in all of them. Good people doing their best inside structures not designed for care.

But at every single touchpoint, not one person whose role was to offer support from lived experience. Not one person who had been where I was.

The support existed. I could see it. I just couldn’t reach it in the moment I needed it.

That is what oxygen behind glass feels like.

You are not suffocating because nobody cares. You are suffocating because the thing that could save you is right there, visible, present, real, and structurally out of reach. Not because of a lack of funding or a lack of goodwill. Because the person who could actually reach you, someone who had been there, was never in the room.

That is not a gap in the system.

That is a design failure.

THE EVIDENCE

I didn’t just feel this. I researched it.

I grabbed a pen and paper and walked around this detention centre and asked fifty men, if you could choose between a lived experience support person or a typical counsellor, which would you choose?

All fifty said lived experience. Every single one. No hesitation.

And during one of my psychology sessions, which I have taken to using as brainstorming sessions, I asked my psychologist: how many counsellors or psychologists do you know who went to prison?

His answer was: One. You.

Ironically, I became a counsellor inside custody.

That is not a survey from a university. That is fifty men, right now, inside a detention centre, telling you exactly what they need and exactly what they are not getting.

The research backs it up. Over 40% of people in Australian custody have a diagnosed mental illness. 65% have substance dependence. 87% have a history of complex trauma. And the evidence on lived experience peer support is unambiguous. It reduces recidivism, psychiatric readmission, suicidal ideation, and time to treatment. It improves self-efficacy, hope, and recovery outcomes.

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It works. Consistently. Across multiple independent bodies of research.

The reason it doesn’t exist at scale is not a lack of evidence. It is a structural contradiction built into the design of the system itself. Vetting processes bar people with criminal records from working in the very institutions where they are most needed.

The workforce we need is sitting inside the rooms we will not let them work in.

THE LAWYER LINK

This is the light bulb moment of the whole project.

A lawyer is almost always the first person someone tells the full truth to. Not their family. Not their doctor. Not their employer. Their lawyer. That single moment of disclosure is a stabilisation opportunity the system currently walks straight past.

And unlike the closed systems, prison and detention, where the oxygen is behind glass and we have limited control over the support people receive for now, and I say for now deliberately, the open system is different. We can build strong relationships with law firms right now. We can educate lawyers on the best places to send distressed and volatile clients. A regulated client is in their interests too. A calmer, more stable client makes better decisions, communicates more clearly, and is easier to represent. The lawyer wins. The client wins. The system gets a better outcome. Everyone benefits.

So I built something practical to sit inside that moment.

While I have been incarcerated I developed a free regulation pack that any lawyer can hand directly to a client, written by a former prisoner, while he was incarcerated, for exactly the people sitting across that desk. There is no cost. There is no catch. I am looking for no compensation. I will supply this to any legal professional who asks, whether they ever formally align with me or not. I genuinely don’t care about that. I care about the people they represent. This invitation goes out to any country. The materials are just as effective in the US as they are in Australia, in the UK as they are in Nigeria.

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The pack includes:

A six step handbook for navigating the system, practical, jargon-free, designed for the moment of crisis not the weeks after it.

The 4A Course, a free structured course built around the 4A Method. Less than an hour. Available now.

The Crisis Response Course, for the families, the partners, the parents trying to hold everything together while their loved one is falling apart. Available now.

The Unshackled Journal App, free on the Apple App Store. Daily structure, morning intentions, evening reflection. Built from inside detention to give someone in crisis a framework for the day.

The Unshackled Journal, over a hundred weekly articles written every single Sunday for more than a year. On bail, prison, parole, detention, family, accountability, rebuilding. Free. No paywall.

Five tools. Written and built from inside. Free to anyone who needs them.

If you work alongside lawyers or are a lawyer yourself, reach out. I’ll get the pack to you directly. You can give your clients real tools for stabilisation and show them that you care about them as much as the revenue they provide.

Everything is also available in one place at unshackledproject.com/kit

THE POSITION PAPER

While I have been in here I also wrote a draft referenced position paper, The Missing Infrastructure: Why Lived Experience Mental Health Support Is Absent From Criminal Justice and Why That Must Change.

Twelve sources. Fully referenced. Free to read and share.

If you want a copy, reach out directly at stephen@unshackledproject.com

THE CO-AUTHOR CALL

The position paper is the beginning. But I want to be honest about something.

I am one voice. And one voice, particularly one from incarceration, has limits.

I am looking for three people to build the next version of this work with me.

A senior counsel, someone who knows the legal architecture of these systems from the inside.

A senior psychiatrist, someone who can put clinical weight behind the evidence.

A senior Corrective Services leader (past or present), someone with the sector relationships and credibility to open doors I cannot open from here.

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I am not looking for co-authors in the traditional sense. I am looking for authentication. People with the standing in their field to write a foreword, provide a professional sign-off, or be cited in the role they hold. That kind of endorsement is what takes this from a strong piece of lived experience writing to a document the sector cannot ignore.

If that is you, or if you know who that is, I want to talk.

THE PARTNERSHIPS AND RELATIONSHIPS THAT ARE FORMING

None of this is theoretical. Here is what is already moving.

Beck Law have formally aligned with The Unshackled Project. While I am still incarcerated, a law firm chose to put their name next to mine. That takes a particular kind of belief and integrity.

Fathers.org.au, a free non-profit community of dads supporting dads, are aligned with the project. Two organisations in two different sectors carrying the same mission.

Peer Qnect, a Queensland peer-led lived experience initiative, are aligned with The Unshackled Project. I am proud to stand alongside the work Emily Cooper and her colleagues do every single day.

QLEWN, the Queensland Lived Experience Workforce Network, hosted Tuesday’s presentation and brought the room that made this conversation possible. I am grateful for the platform and look forward to continuing that relationship.

The IMPACT Network, Queensland’s statewide home for the Lived–Living Experience workforce. I am proud to be aligned with Katie Shields and all of the crew whose work makes a difference every single day.

Dr Baz Dreisinger, founder of the Incarceration Nations Network, has referred to The Unshackled Project as an ally in her recent newsletter. INN are doing extraordinary work bringing higher education into prisons globally and I believe the 4A Method can sit alongside that as the mental health foundation their students need.

Global Freedom Scholars, the world’s first transnational network of justice-involved university students, are aligned with the project.

WHAT COMES NEXT

I have a tagline on my website. It’s a little bit corny.

Custody was the trailer. The movie starts now.

But I mean it more today than I ever have. Because on Tuesday morning, in a room full of people who gave their attention to work built inside the very system it is designed to fix, something shifted.

The infrastructure exists. The evidence exists. The partnerships are forming. The workforce model is designed. The licensing pathway is ready.

Marcus sat in that room, detained alongside me, and felt something rekindle. That is the proof of concept. Not a statistic. Not a case study. A human being in the same conditions I am in, feeling hope move through him because of something we built together in here.

This cannot be a place where hope goes to die.

The oxygen is no longer behind glass.

It is being piped in. One conversation, one partnership, one presentation at a time.

And the movie is just getting started.

To everyone who showed up at IMPACT on Tuesday, thank you. To Michael Houston for pulling off a miracle to facilitate. To his lovely wife Janelle, I appreciate your support this week. To Emily for bringing everything she brought and for the connection that followed. To Katie Shields for building a room that makes conversations like this one possible. To my girlfriend, whose support brought a tear to my eye mid-meeting on Tuesday. And to Marcus, keep going. This is being built for you. To the new friends I met on the webinar, Rose, Said, Skye, and many more, thank you for giving me your attention.

Attention is not a small thing. I do not take it for granted.

Custody was the trailer. The movie starts very soon.

Stay Unshackled, My Friends.

Stephen

stephen@unshackledproject.com | unshackledproject.com |

You don’t always get to choose who you’re surrounded by.

That’s not a mindset problem. That’s reality.

In some places, it’s obvious. In prison, you don’t pick who’s beside you, who’s carrying their own weight, or who’s about to drop it on you. Outside, it looks different, sounds nicer, but it’s the same thing underneath. Work, family, friendships that don’t quite fit anymore.

Different setting. Same truth.

You don’t always choose the room.

But you always choose how you show up in it.

And that choice comes down to four things most people talk about, but very few actually live.

Awareness. Accountability. Agency. Action.

It starts with awareness.

Not the easy kind where you can read a room and quietly judge everyone in it. Most people are brilliant at that.

Real awareness is uncomfortable. It turns the lens back on you.

Where do I sit in this?

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Because it’s easy to label people. The one who drains you. The one who makes everything about themselves. The one who brings tension into every room they enter.

But we’ve all been that person at some point.

We’ve all walked into a room carrying something that spilled onto others.

We’ve all taken more than we’ve given.

Awareness is admitting that without dressing it up.

Then comes accountability.

This is where most people flinch.

Because accountability means dropping the excuses.

Not “I’m like this because of them.”

Not “that’s just how I am.”

Just a clean, honest look at yourself.

I can be hard work when I’m stressed.

I avoid difficult conversations.

I give too much access to people who drain me and then wonder why I feel empty.

Accountability doesn’t shame you. It grounds you.

Because once you own it, something shifts.

You stop waiting.

And that’s where agency comes in.

Agency is the part people forget they have.

It’s the quiet understanding that even if you didn’t choose the environment, you still have a say in how you exist within it.

You can’t always change the people around you.

But you can change what you tolerate.

You can change how much access people get to your energy.

You can decide whether you keep showing up the same way, expecting a different outcome.

That’s your leverage.

And then, finally, action.

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Because none of this means anything without it.

Action isn’t always dramatic. It’s rarely a big speech or a clean cut.

Most of the time, it’s subtle.

It’s setting boundaries without announcing them.

It’s giving less energy to the conversations that drain you.

It’s showing up consistently for the people who actually add to your life.

It’s having the conversation you’ve been avoiding, not to tear someone down, but to give them a chance to see what they can’t see themselves.

Some people will hear you.

Some won’t.

That’s not your responsibility.

Your responsibility is that you don’t stay stuck once you’ve seen it.

Because awareness without accountability keeps you comfortable.

Accountability without agency keeps you stuck.

Agency without action keeps you talking.

But when all four line up, something changes.

You stop reacting to your environment and start shaping your experience within it.

You notice who lifts a room without needing credit.

You recognise who drains it without realising.

And more importantly, you become someone people don’t have to recover from after spending time with.

That’s the shift.

You might not always get to choose who’s around you.

But you always get to choose whether you add weight to the room…

or help carry it.

Stay Unshackled My Friends

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I built the Unshackled’s 4 A’s in one of the most high-pressure environments a human being can find themselves in. Inside custody.

That was intentional. I didn’t want a framework that worked in a therapy room or a corporate workshop. I wanted something that worked when your back was against the wall. When the options were limited. When the noise was loud and the stakes were real.

I believed I’d stress-tested it properly.

Then life showed me what stress-testing actually looks like.

In the space of a few months, I lost three men who were pivotal to who I am. One after another. From the other side of the world. Behind a fence. With no ability to be there, to hold anyone, to sit in a room full of the people who loved them too.

I didn’t set out to use the 4 A’s. I wasn’t thinking in frameworks. I was just trying to stay upright.

But when I went back and read what I’d written during those months… three pieces, three men, three losses…. I sure found it there. Not labelled. Not deliberate. Just present.

The framework had held. Not because I’d applied it. Because it had become part of how I move through the world.

Bimbo passed first…

One of those rare people it’s impossible not to like. His laughter filled spaces. His warmth pulled people in. He lived wholehearted and unapologetically himself… the kind of man who runs around a pub in Australia (and everywhere else) with his shirt off and somehow makes the whole room feel like they’ve known him their whole lives.

When the news came, I didn’t collapse into it. I went looking.

I found a podcast. A neuroscientist talking about grief, energy, the science of why we might never truly lose the people we love. I sat with the idea that his energy hadn’t gone anywhere… it had simply changed shape. Into stories. Into smiles. Into the pull we feel to keep remembering him.

That was Awareness. Naming what had happened. Feeling the disruption of it rather than running from it.

That was Agency. Choosing where to put my attention in the middle of pain.

That was Action. Writing. Processing it out loud. Turning grief into something that might reach someone else who needed it.

I didn’t know I was doing any of it. I was just trying to make sense of losing him.

Then my Da.

That one was more complicated. It always is, with fathers.

We weren’t close in the way some sons and fathers are. There were years stretched thin, visits measured in hours. A love that was always there but not always reached for.

I wrote about him simply. An ode. A poem almost. No bitterness. No pretending the gaps weren’t there.

“Love was always there for the taking. Sadly, you just didn’t take enough of it when it was on offer.”

That line took something. To write it and mean it without cruelty. To see it clearly and still choose, at the end, to remember the laughter. The bus rides. The silly debates about Oasis and the Beatles.

“I choose to remember the laughter.”

That word… choose… is the whole framework in one word. That’s Agency in its rawest form. Not pretending the pain isn’t real. Not rewriting history. Just deciding what you carry forward.

And the Accountability was quiet, but it was there too. Seeing the relationship as it actually was. Not performing grief that I didn’t feel. Not withholding grief that I did. Just honest.

Voluntary Donation

Then Billy.

The greatest man I ever knew.

Thirty-seven years. The man who turned up in 1989 with a World Cup magazine and the quiet wisdom to give am eight-year-old boy something to bond over. The man who dressed in a shirt and tie to watch horse racing on the couch because you never know who might show up. The man who came to Vegas for my thirtieth birthday as if there was nowhere else on Earth, he’d rather be.

No matter what I did… success, failure, the fall, prison, rebuilding… his belief never wavered. He told anyone who’d listen. He was there for every word of Unshackled. Every idea. Every step.

And then he was gone too.

I wrote about him with everything I had. I promised to come and read it by his graveside.

That promise… that Action… was the thing that kept me intact. Not the grief. The intention inside it. The decision to carry him forward deliberately, publicly, with the same love he always gave me.

That’s Awareness… knowing what you’ve lost, fully, without minimising it.

That’s Accountability… looking at who you were to each other honestly, including the parts where you fell short.

That’s Agency… choosing how to honour someone when honouring them is the only thing left you can do.

That’s Action…. doing it. Writing the words. Making the promise. Showing up even from the other side of the world, even behind a fence.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know when I built this.

The 4 A’s don’t fix grief. They were never meant to.

What they do is keep you intact while grief does its work. They give you a structure to move inside when everything else has collapsed. Not a script. Not a solution. A spine.

I built the framework in a high-pressure environment. I thought that was the test.

It wasn’t.

The test was three men. Three losses. One after another. From 17,000 kilometres away.

And the framework held.

Not because I’m exceptional. Because the structure works — even when you’re not thinking about it. Especially when you’re not thinking about it.

That’s how you know something is real.

If you’ve lost someone, or you’re sitting with a loss you haven’t fully named yet… the 4 A’s aren’t a cure. But they might just be the thing that keeps you upright while you find your way through.

The three pieces below were written in the middle of the storm, not after it. Long before I realised the 4 A’s were already carrying me through.

If you want to understand these pieces more deeply, start there.

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Why I'll Never Say Goodbye To Bimbo

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Ode To My Da

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King Billy

Stay Unshackled, My Friends

Stephen

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