I've heard it dozens of times in coaching sessions. And if I'm honest, I've caught myself thinking it too. "I'm just not wired for focus." It's a comforting story. It lets you off the hook. And in my opinion, (as a result of experience and experiments)that story is wrong. Focus isn't a personality type. It's not something you're born with, like blue eyes or a talent for mental arithmetic. It is a trained skill, supported by environment, boundaries, and recovery. The people

There are moments when you meet someone whose work has shaped your thinking and for a few seconds you forget how to speak normally. That happened to me recently in Rome. One of the speakers at the conference was Hae Sun Moon, author of The A to Z of Coaching, a book I have long admired. On a scale of 3-18 this was a 19 3/4 moment Her work explores the weight and influence of language in coaching, and the subtle ways emphasis changes meaning. It is thoughtful, practical, and d

I recently attended a half-day professional development program , designed for educators who bring coaching into their educational practice. One of the sessions I attended was called The Courage to Pause: How Silence Strengthens Presence and Connection. What fascinated me was how simple the structure was. Fifteen of us sat together in a circle. Whoever wanted to speak held the talking stone. Everyone else listened. No interruptions. No questions. No talking over one another.

What 36 Conversations Taught Me About Success, Support, and Why Nobody Gets There Alone There is a story we tell ourselves about success. It appears in leadership biographies, startup folklore, sales cultures, and career advice. It is the story of the lone wolf. The individual who sees something others do not. The person who works harder, pushes further, and succeeds through determination and grit. Jobs, Buffet, Gates, Bezos and Musk It is an appealing story and in many cases

Most people think a good coach is defined by hours logged, certifications earned, and models learned. Yes those those things matter, continuing to learn is important. Those things are also visible and easy to point to. But do they alone make you a better coach? What I have found is that coaching excellence is not built on experience alone. It is built on what you do with that experience once the session ends. Two coaches can have the same number of hours. One improves every y

I caught myself doing it at the airport last week. Waiting at the gate, I opened LinkedIn. Closed it. Opened it again thirty seconds later. Not because anything had changed or I was looking for something specific, just because my thumb knew where to go. That's not a habit. That's a loop. Social feeds are engineered around variable reward schedules, the same mechanism studied in gambling behaviour. You don't know if the next scroll will bring something interesting or nothing a

If your work is anything like mine, what worked last year doesn’t quite work this year. The technology you learned three years ago is already outdated, and the needs your clients have have shifted multiple times within a single engagement / opportunity cycle. There’s a kind of background volatility to it all. Constant enough that it seems like you are asked / expected / demanded* to adapt, recalibrate, keep moving (and smile). Often, without much acknowledgement. With every

We've all gotten faster at using AI. We upload documents, ask questions, get analyses and summaries, move on. It feels efficient (it often is). But as I use AI in my professional and personal life (and based on some of the articles that appear in my feeds) I've started wondering what we might be losing in the process. Look at the words cited as similar to discernment. Would you want to lose the ability for any of them? We might be giving away our discernment. Discernment isn

The first draft is where far too many ideas fizzle out and disappear. Not because they were bad ideas, but because the first draft was never started. An idea can begin to feel too big, too complicated, or too difficult. The project grows in our imagination until it feels more unwieldy than it really is. Or maybe we tell ourselves we’ll come back to it later, when we have more time, more clarity, or a "just" a better opening sentence. But the moment the first draft actually be

Someone messaged me last week. We hadn't spoken in several years. No "how are you." No "hope you're well." Just straight into the ask, could I introduce them to someone / help them get onto a platform / open a door*. And honestly? It's not that I don't want to help. It's that there's nothing there to help from. No warmth. No history. No recent thread to pull on. Just a name I vaguely recognise and a request I wasn't expecting. So rather than just bitching about it, here's wha

When I started at Ezra a few years back, I nearly lost my mind in the first week. Not because the work was hard but because everything was interrupting it. Slack notifications constantly pinging. Emails popping up. My work phone face-up on the desk like a needy companion. And (my personal favourite) calendar reminders for meetings about meetings. By the end of that first week I was exhausted, and I had genuinely no idea what I'd actually done. So I did something drastic. I tu

This is a tough year for people with friggatriskaidekaphobia*, which is, yes, a fear of Friday the 13th. 2026 will have three February March November So two down and one to go! *Apologies if you have hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, or a fear of long words.

“It’s no longer just about taking a course for my career development,” he said in our first session. He’s a highly qualified engineer, has moved across roles and sites, built a strong track record, and by most measures doesn’t need more training, but he knew something still felt unfinished. Not a gap in knowledge, not a lack of experience, just a sense that more courses weren’t going to move things forward in the way they once did. As we talked, it became clearer that he wasn

I try to close meetings on time. A meeting that runs long sends a message about how we value other people’s time. When the clock slips past the end without acknowledgement, the room begins to thin out mentally even if everyone is still seated. People start thinking about the next call, the next task, the next commitment they are now late for. And finishing on time respects the invisible chain of meetings that follows yours. Finishing on time also forces clarity. When a meeti

People spend hours preparing slides for the meeting (or minutes in Gamma or Genspark or Co-pilot now), but very few spend time preparing the people in the meeting. The best sellers and leaders I’ve worked with don’t rely on the meeting to get the approval. Before the meeting they’ve already done the bulk of the work; in side conversations; by understanding where the resistance sits; by shaping the message for the people who matter; by testing and evolving the idea. They’ve

MBWA, the idea popularized by Tom Peters that leaders should get out from behind their desks and stay close to what is really happening . It’s usually described as being visible, accessible, and connected. That matters more than ever with the seeming acceleration of everything, but it feels incomplete. Because what I notice in my own day does not feel like managing. It feels like a series of small coaching moments happening in motion. Many are easy to miss. A quick question a

Or the Monday Hangover You Didn’t Drink For With the clocks changing around me (in Singapore we don't change clocks twice a year) I learned about a new thing and I wanted to share it. It’s called social jet lag, and the thing that struck me is that most of us are living with it without ever naming it. Jet lag is seen as something that happens when we cross time zones, stepping off a plane and feeling out of sync with the day around us. Social jet lag is more subtle than tha

We live inside our own normal and with the busyness, repetition and hustle, and at a point it stops feeling special. About 30 years ago, I worked on a project when I lived in Chicago, and it required travel to New York on a regular basis. Twice monthly flight, airport lounges, taking the Queensboro bridge into the city at 8 O'clock in the morning, same car service waiting on arrival taking me back into the office. And at the time, that life seemed like it was all logistics,

There’s a moment in many meetings where we speak not to add value, but to fill space, covering nerves, masking gaps, or getting ahead of objections, and the more we say, the less we mean. So how about saying nothing and listening instead? In Asia, silence isn’t emptiness, often it is respect. And many times that silence is masking deep thinking. And from personal experience silence can also be restraint. So the question morphs from “Should I speak?” to “Will this add some

The open road, with music to match! The open road, with music to match!