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Why your best ideas die before breakfast Recently I had one of those a-ha moments — a genuinely brilliant, almost a breakthrough, idea, pushing its way into my thoughts just before I was fully awake. You’ve probably had that happen too. Of course, I regret not having the habit of keeping a notebook on the bedside table. A few hours later the idea was gone. Not fuzzy or vague. Gone. I couldn’t even reconstruct the concept I had been so excited about. (It did eventually come ba

There's a particular kind of tired that has nothing to do with hours worked. It's the tired of a leader who's been "in it" so long they can't remember what "it" was for. You know the state. Diary full. Fires everywhere. Every decision feels urgent because in the moment, it is. You're not lazy, you're not disengaged — you're handling things. Constantly. And therein lies the problem. Your brain isn't built to think creatively or even objectively, in the middle of the unrelentin

A few weeks ago, I spent an afternoon doing the hardest and probably most hated gardening - weeding. Not the easy kind — pulling a few stray blades of grass from a flower bed — but the real fight. Dandelions in the lawn. Clover threading through the landscape rocks, invisible until you look closely, and by then it's everywhere. If you've ever tried to remove a mature dandelion, you know the problem isn't what you see above the soil. It's what's below it. The taproot can run

There's a version of leadership we've all been trained to perform. It looks like composure. It looks like having an answer for every question, a plan for every contingency, a steady hand on every lever. We call it strength. Often, it's actually control — and control, dressed up in the language of decisiveness, is one of the most spiritually dangerous postures a leader can adopt. I want to dig into the difference between two leadership postures that can look almost identical f

I live in two time zones. Sometimes three, depending on the season and which continent I've landed on. My calendar looks like a small air traffic control tower — Apple Clock has a permanent row of cities pinned to it, Google Calendar booking schedules save my brain from all the calculations, and make it easier for clients. But this week, reading through the books of Samuel, I ran into a different kind of time zone problem. Not geography this time — history. In 1 Samuel 12:20–

David wrote Psalm 27 with armies camped against him. Not a metaphor. Not a bad quarter. The Philistines and the Ammonites had pitched their tents around Israel, and David — king, warrior, the man who'd already killed a giant — sat down and wrote this: "The Lord is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid? When the wicked advance against me to devour me, it is my enemies and my foes who will stumble and fa

What Samuel teaches us about consistency in our relationship with the Lord There is an unassuming verse near the end of 1 Samuel 7 that most of us would read straight past. After cataloguing Samuel's circuit as judge across Israel — Bethel, Gilgal, Mizpah — the text adds - almost as an afterthought - : "But he always went back to Ramah, where his home was, and there he also held court for Israel. And he built an altar there to the Lord." (1 Samuel 7:17) That word always carri

Imagine God appeared to you tonight in a dream and said, "Ask for whatever you want, and I will give it to you." What would you ask for? That's exactly what happened to a young king named Solomon. And before we admire his answer — the answer that made him famous as the wisest leader in the Bible — we need to be honest about who was actually asking. The King Before the Wisdom We tend to picture Solomon the way Sunday school flannel boards do: serene, golden, already wise. But

— and Our Modern Versions of It There’s a pattern as old as humanity itself, and most of us don’t recognize it in ourselves until the damage is done. We face a crisis — in our business, our leadership, our family — and we go looking for a fix. We exhaust every strategy, consult every expert, deploy every resource at our disposal. And somewhere in the middle of all that scrambling, we remember God. We “plug Him in.” Not as the foundation of our response, but as a last-resort a

Knowing yourself, showing up well, and choosing to grow. I didn't plan for a week alone in the African bush; it happened incidentally, but when I faced a week of solitude at Ngwenya Lodge — on the edge of the Kruger National Park in South Africa — I decided to lean into it rather than feel disappointed. The first day, I detoxed from the voices of others. The expectations (explicit or imagined), the input, and the noise of the past year of disruption and change. The second day

How returning to what you know can interrupt anxiety and restore your footing There's something I've noticed in people who navigate pressure well. It's not that they have better answers. It's not that they feel less afraid. It's that when things get uncertain, they don't improvise — they return. The concert pianist, preparing for a high-stakes performance, doesn't try something new. She plays scales. The elite athlete, heading into the most important match of the season, star

Reflections on identity, leadership, and the courage to return There is a question buried in the oldest story ever told. God walks through the garden, and calls out to a man hiding in the shadows: "Where are you?" It wasn't a question about geography. It was a question about identity. About who Adam and Eve had become — or rather, who they had forgotten they were. That question echoes across millennia. It echoes across continents. And if we are honest, it echoes somewhere ins

The echo chambers that shape how you think, decide, and become There's sometimes a moment in a meaningful conversation where something shifts. The space between us subtly changes. Because perhaps, a question lands differently, or you experience an internal reaction of defence rise up as automatically as a sneeze. And you realise — oh. I've never actually thought about it that way. I had one of those moments recently. Someone challenged an assumption I'd been carrying — not ag

There's a particular kind of silence that follows a mountaintop moment, or worse, a mountaintop season. You've just experienced something extraordinary — maybe it was a breakthrough in your business, a clear word from God, a season of momentum that felt almost impossible to contain. And then, almost without warning, the noise dies down. The crowd disperses. The results stop coming in. And you're left sitting in a boat that feels smaller than it did before — with wind you were

One of the most powerful — and, in my opinion, most dangerous — words to emerge from the Covid chapter is normalize. We spoke of the new normal. We adjusted. We adapted. We moved on. That's good. But did we move on well? Normalize used to mean bringing something into conformity with an established standard. You took the outlier and brought it back into line. What it seems to mean now is something far more unsettling: we change the standard to accommodate the outlier. We don't

In a recent coaching conversation, I said to the person, "You know you're building a case to support that assumption, right?" A pause. A slow nod, the dawning realization. We were talking about a decision they'd already made — one that quietly crossed a line they'd set for themselves. And without realising it, they had taken the twenty minutes or so giving me all the supporting “evidence” that their decision “felt” right. They weren't being dishonest with me. No, it all sound

Putting Down What Was Never Yours to Carry We’ve spent three weeks looking at what to amplify, what to reduce, and what to finally get started in our lives. This final instalment is the most personal of the four — because stopping isn’t just a practical decision. For most of us, it’s a spiritual and emotional one. And it begins with a distinction that changes everything. Not everything you’re carrying was given to you by God. Some of it you picked up yourself — out of obligat

The things that really matter, that you keep putting off There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much. It comes from doing a lot — and still feeling like something essential is missing. You know the feeling. The schedule is full, the output is tangible, the people around you would say you’re doing well and are very productive. And yet there’s a quiet, persistent sense that the most important things — the things you were actually made for — k

The Honest Conversation You've Been Avoiding There's a passage in Romans that reminds us of the human-ness of the apostle Paul. Paul – an apostle, theologian, church planter, someone who had, by any measure, figured a few things out — writes this with disarming honesty: "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do." (Romans 7:15) This honest reflection is a powerful example of vulnerability, too. The man who wrote half the New Testa

The Art of Doubling Down on What's Actually Working There's a bias built into most evaluation processes — whether we're reviewing a business quarter or reflecting on a personal season — and it's this: we are far more drawn to what went wrong than to what went right. It makes sense, neurologically. Our brains are wired to flag problems, to scan for threats, to spend disproportionate energy on the gap between where we are and where we want to be. It's a survival mechanism that