Every time I sit down to write this update, I hope to be telling you I've submitted the paper. Yet here I am again, saying "nearly there". The progress: the full draft is written. That IS progress since my last update. The number of revisions? I don't even know, and it's probably best not to count. Maybe I'll run a competition at the end. What's getting in the way? Honestly, the pace my brain can work at. You can sit and write all day, but with a project like this, when your brain is done,...
about 10 hours ago • 2 min read
First publication! Chapter in The Coaching Supervision Casebook Notice the windscreen. Then check the mirrors. I was talking to Jeremy Lewis this week, for his podcast series on the Coaching Supervision Casebook. My case study sits inside it, one of eighteen. If you know me, you’ll know that I have a central theme to my work, or lets say metaphor, that sits at the intersection of coaching, coach supervision and being well. When I use it with supervisees, we talk about noticing, I remind them,...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
What do you do, when you don't know what to do? Look Up! This article was first written in August 2021. I dusted it off ahead of the upcoming Street Wisdom on 18th September 2026 at 2pm in Poole, and believe it is all still fully relevant. What do you do when you are stuck? An old manager once described resilient people as those who “know what to do when they don’t know what to do”. It took me years to make sense of that. It is not about having a secret answer tucked away somewhere. It is...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
There is a stage in research where progress becomes difficult to see from the outside. There are no participants to recruit, no fresh data arriving and fewer obvious milestones to celebrate. Instead, there are paragraphs being moved around, analysis decisions being checked, slide titles being simplified and the same question appearing again and again: why does this matter? That is where I have been recently. In this update, I share my reflections, and, towards the end, short snippets of what...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Look Busy, The Boss Is Coming! An audio version of this article is available to listen here. According to Zen: ‘If one does not have one minute to meditate, then one should meditate for an hour’ You’re already ridiculously busy. You need a break. You got started super early, well before you were due. You’ve been working flat out all morning. Like, really hard. AND managed all the interruptions that could have thwarted you. It’s your first pause for breath of the day. You didn’t even get time...
4 months ago • 5 min read
I've been sitting with a question lately that I suspect every researcher knows well: where do you actually start? Even when a study is grounded in solid theory, the analytical choices are anything but automatic. Statistics is a language, and like any language, there are many ways to say the same thing — and the one you choose matters. This update is about data preparation: the essential work that happens before any meaningful analysis can begin. I had planned to move quickly through this...
4 months ago • 3 min read
Trained Coach. Got Experience. Now you want the credential? More coaches are asking this question than ever before. The answer is YES. Whether you trained one or 20 years ago. Maybe you completed an ILM Level 5 or Level 7. A university-based coaching programme. A CIPD or CMI qualification with a significant coaching component. An EMCC-accredited programme. Something rigorous, something well-evidenced — just not an ICF-approved course. You've been coaching for years. You're good at it. And now...
4 months ago • 6 min read
Prefer to listen? Click here to hear the podcast version [10 min listen]. In April 2026 there were four major announcements in a single week from the ICF (The International Coach Federation is one of the global professional bodies for coaching). If you are working towards your credential — or thinking about it — this post is a plain-English version of what’s changing, what it means for you, and what you actually need to do next. The rollout hasn’t been clean (in my opinion!). The details...
5 months ago • 7 min read
How does two weekends a week sound? ...this is what Happened When I Stopped Working on Thursdays. Prefer to listen? find it here [ 20 minutes]. How do I actually switch off? I’ve always been fairly disciplined about finishing on time. My challenge was more subtle than that. My creative brain doesn’t get the memo. Ideas arrive mid-swim, mid-walk, mid-dinner. The work doesn’t follow me; my thinking about it does. And whilst I’d never want to lose that quality entirely, I was curious whether...
5 months ago • 12 min read