You Can't Win at Being Calm. Trust Me, I Tried. I’ve downloaded, deleted, and redownloaded the meditation app Headspace so many times, it should come with a loyalty card. I’ve also done 200-hour yoga teacher training. I am literally certified to teach people how to be more present. And I still catch myself treating mindfulness like a performance metric. I can’t help it, I turn everything into striving. Meditation, nutrition, sleep, exercise, even rest. Part of it is just how I’m wired, the...
9 days ago • 1 min read
The Burnout Diagnosis Most Industries Refuse to Make Imagine being in a ballroom, listening to Singapore’s Chief Justice deliver an opening address, and somewhere around the middle of it, having to physically restrain yourself from jumping up and down. That is basically what happened to me last July at the Legal Profession Symposium. Not because anything shocking was said. But because the quiet part was FINALLY being said. Out loud, in public. By one of the most respected voices in...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Walking Has the Worst PR in Wellness The wellness industry needs exercise to be hard. If walking counted (and it ABSOLUTELY does), the entire model falls apart. There’s no programme to sell. No app to subscribe to. No 30-day challenge to restart every January because the last one lasted 11 days. You cannot build a content empire around “go outside for 20 minutes.” There is no charismatic founder standing next to a freezing cold plunge explaining that walking is the future of human...
22 days ago • 1 min read
Spring Motivation Is Here. Please Don’t Build Your Life Around It. I grew up in the French Alps, where spring is NOT subtle. One week everything is cold and frozen, the next week the whole valley is aggressively alive. Four seasons, dramatically different, so your body learns the rhythm whether you want it to or not. Then I lived in Singapore for nearly 20 years, with tropical 30+ degrees year-round and no real seasons to speak of. And yet every single March/April, something in my body would...
29 days ago • 1 min read
Your Problem-Solving Brain Is The Problem 20 years of corporate life trained me to do one thing brilliantly: hear a problem, solve it, move on. With a blend of decent critical thinking + a loud mouth, I could fix things before the meeting was over. That skill built my career. It is also, it turns out, the single most counterproductive thing I do to myself. I found this out the hard way when I started coaching. 2 decades of being paid decent money to solve problems all day means it’s really...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
"Listen to Your Body" Is Useless Advice. Here's What It Actually Means. Something shifts in April and I fall for it every single year. Longer days, lighter clothes, race sign-ups everywhere (Hyrox season is back, I can feel it), your feed filling up with 'day 1' selfies and new training plans. That collective post-winter hibernation 'I'm starting NOW' energy hits, and before you've properly registered it, your brain has already committed to something your body hasn't been consulted about. My...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Why Trying to Fall Asleep Keeps You Awake Before we begin, this week's piece comes with something new! I built The 7-Day Sleep Reset: a proper protocol based on clinical insomnia research and behaviour design, with 15 printable tools and the worksheets I use with actual coaching clients. The guide is the full 7-day programme and it’s $17. If you want the one technique that changed everything for me, plus one experiment to try tonight, keep reading. For the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching a...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
Is it just me, or everything feels a little fucked? Is it just me or is everyone a little bit over... everything right now? It’s like a constant dread in the background. A constant what the fuck is happening that doesn’t switch off. You open your phone and there’s multiple wars, climate crisis, something unhinged someone said, and a grocery receipt that makes you want to lie down on the floor. And then, at the same time, everything is also incredibly stupid. Oracle just laid off 30,000 people...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
SMART Goals Have Zero Evidence Behind Them. Zero. The world’s most popular goal framework has zero evidence behind it. I know. That’s a big claim. But stay with me. SMART goals are everywhere. Every corporate training deck you’ve ever sat through. Every January reset article. Every wellness carousel with cute fonts and a sunset background. They feel so official, so universally agreed upon, that I assumed there must be decades of research behind them. Right? There are not. The whole thing...
2 months ago • 1 min read