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 24 hours 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...
about 2 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...
2 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...
3 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. I’ll be honest. The rollout hasn’t been clean. The details...
3 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...
4 months ago • 12 min read
Prefer to listen? Click here to listen to the podcast version. When distraction isn’t harmless: a reflection on driving, thinking, and attention Once in a while, someone arrives for coaching… in their car. They suggest we go ahead anyway. They’re driving, but it’s 'hands-free', so ‘it should be fine’, they say. It’s an immediate no from me. Not just because of safety, but because of what coaching asks of us. Coaching requires presence, reflection, and the ability to think beneath the surface....
4 months ago • 3 min read
I was stuck. Not the dramatic, life-questioning kind of stuck. The quieter, more familiar version. A blank page. Trying to describe what I do as a coach in a way that actually lands—not “this is coaching,” but “this is what changes for you.” And nothing felt quite right. So I tried something different. Story Cubes. Nine dice. Six faces each. Random images. No agenda, no structure, no promise of making sense. Exactly what I needed. Rolling into the unknown I threw three dice at a time. First...
4 months ago • 3 min read
I’ve spent the last few (many!) weeks doing something that doesn’t feature much in the romantic version of being a researcher: cleaning data. Not the exciting kind of work. Or so I thought. I’m in the middle of my doctoral level research exploring the impact of coaching on resilience and wellbeing. That means surveys, lots of them — 173 participants across 8 time points, all needing to be pulled together into one clean dataset (or person-wide to get technical). I taught myself Power Query in...
5 months ago • 2 min read