Reasons To Be Hopeful

Reasons To Be Hopeful











Naked Coaching

Naked Coaching











The dance is not comfortable and beautiful because you are dancing!










Overcoming Overthinking

Overcoming Overthinking



What happens is one of two things:
















Imagine the relationships that would be deepened!


Imagine the ideas that would be given space to be actioned!


The Art of Commitment

The Art of Commitment

Do you have a project or task that you just cannot seem to get around to? It seems that the hardest job in the world sometimes, is just starting.  Just start, you may think and then, you don’t! Is it down to a lack of commitment? Perhaps! But what is the act of committing or the lack of committing down to?

Commitment looks like something that cannot be stopped or changed, altered or slowed down.  The act of ‘committing’ seems a serious business and often, commitment requires either a guarantee that something will work out the way we hope or believe, or else, being prepared for it not to.

Yes, commitment can look like a big deal!

What if commitment doesn’t have to viewed as a long term contract? What if the only thing we can really commit to is this very moment? The present moment, the moment we have right now. This is actually the only sensible option and will allow for change, growth and transformation.

Realising that commitment is not a serious business, well, it takes the seriousness out of committing. You can commit, fully knowing that at a later time, what is important has changed shape, moved up or down a place and your new world view allows for fresh thinking, a renewed or even different commitment!

This is in fact how creativity works.  Everything in life is creative, created and is part of creation.  Everything is a construct of the principle of thought taking form in the moment and can only be created and perceived from there, from our inner world.

Thought isn’t static or stuck or a certain way.  Thought changes shape, changes form and changes the way we see life, including the project we are creating, how we are creating and even whether we are creating it at all.  But it doesn’t always seem that way. Life seems solid and robust and when we have made a decision, a commitment, we have to continue with that commitment don’t we?

When we begin to understand the changeable nature of life, of thought. Commitment takes on a new meaning.  The act of committing is temporary, a promise in the moment.  Knowing this, you become responsive rather than reactive. You can alter paths, change course, respond to what is right now and solve problems that arise without having to think in advance of every possible scenario that might arise, trying to solve it beforehand. In other words, you will have less on your mind. This gives a whole new meaning to ‘managing risk’.  Managing risk is guess work.  Instead, you can respond to risk if and when it arises.

Let me give you an example:

During a call last week, my client noted how many different things that I appear to do, whereas, right now, she is doing the same thing that she began when we first started to work together.  Actually though, she is not. Her project is amazing and is really worthwhile.  It has grown and changed shape.  She has given it more substance than when she first began and she actually runs it differently, but, she has continued with the same project. She also charges more, uses more technology and leads it differently, although yes, it still heads under the same name.

When my client first committed to the project 18 months ago, it looked quite different.  Did she commit to the project remaining the same? Maybe at the time it looked to her that way.  What she actually committed to though, was creating the project and to it’s continual development and creation. Of course, like all of us, she has moments of overthinking, moments where her plan doesn’t seem to be in alignment with her original plan and she forgets how much she has grown.  During those moments, it doesn’t look like growth at all, it looks like she hasn’t set out to do what she originally set out to do.  That is true.  She has done so much more!

I know that she will continue to grow and change and alter her commitments accordingly, because she has experienced for herself that she has an innate capacity to deal with any circumstance, problem, pothole, change in scenery that arises, but, only in this moment!

In other words, she commits, makes plans, imagines what might and could happen and actually creates because she has an awareness of her innate capacity to create every single new moment.  She is connected to her inner resilience, her ability to respond from a place of wellbeing.  This gives her what some think is a ‘superpower’; the ability to innovate

It’s the same for you too. If like many, you find yourself committing and then not following through, or you realise that you are reluctant to commit and so have great ideas that you don’t start, you’re probably misunderstanding the true essence of commitment! The commitment is actually to yourself! it’s your promise to do something, to undertake a task, a project, a job that over time, is likely to look different, be different, feel different.  By not committing to allowing THAT, to allowing growth and change and transformation, you are withholding part of your self from the world and we are all missing out!

You have the ability, the capacity to innovate. It is your birthright. You have within you the power to respond rather than react and to create without worrying about risk! Furthermore, you can realise that you have dealt with risk many times in your life and regardless of how it felt at the time, or feels right now, you not only survived, you thrived. You are a born risk taker, a born innovator, commit to that!

Nicky x

I See You

I See You

I see you, in plain view, hiding on Social Media

I see you with your gorgeous smile that doesn’t even reach you

I see you, leading and being and pretending that you can’t

I see you, wearing a filter and wishing that you were that

I see you, rushing and tidying up life and missing your purpose

I see you and your million and one things, faces and places, ignoring the one place where your real face is

I see you, pretending to taste but swallowing it whole

I see you, missing your magic and jumping down the hole

I see you, wanting to rest but not daring do

I see you, because, me too

I see you, looking at the lense and waiting for the flash

I see you, with aching cheeks, tired eyes, wishing you had a pass

I see you, behaving like everything is normal

I see you, waiting for your obituary to become formal

I see you, waiting to breathe out and not seeing this is the moment

I see you, believing your life is dormant

I see you now, waking up and wondering

I see you now, reading these words and the insight that’s forming

I see you, noticing the space and realising that its yours

I see you, yearning to embrace, to cherish and adore

I see you and your true nature and the game you’ve been playing

I see you, your innocence and you’re simple not knowing

I see you, the realisation arising that now is your time

I see you, your frown lines dissolving, bullshit melting

I see you, your magnificence, your ordinary life

I see you, just being here with me now, not caring that this doesn’t rhyme

I see you, realising that maybe you are a creator

I see you, mulling over the messiness and forgetting later

I see you, accepting all that you are

I see you, taking off the mask that you think kept you safe so far

I see you, taking a chance that I might be right

I see you, turning your gaze to your light

I see you, noticing that  real life is just beginning

I see you, loving and honouring and winning!

I see you, coming undone

I see you, now go and be you and have fun!

This is for all of you who are ready to take off the mask and realise your innate power.  It’s for all of you humans who haven’t yet played full out with your potential. It’s for all of you humans who are playing at leading and are ready for more.  You are already it! There is less to do than you think


Nicky x

Qualities of a Great Leader

Qualities of a Great Leader

The qualities of a great leader, I am discovering are pretty similar worldwide.  Or rather, when I googled this question, most content listed the same or similar traits as significant.

No doubt you may have your own ideas of what a leader looks like or what they might do and the qualities they possess to make them so.  These idea’s or concepts are what you use to decide whether you yourself are a good leader.  It’s your inner Leadership Template!  If you fit the template, that is great news and it’s likely that you identify with those qualities, they are prevalent in your working life and you have little doubt as to how to lead or whether your leadership is effective.  But, if you don’t fit that template, whether you are in a position of leadership or would like to be, you’re likely to be struggling and wondering how you can mould yourself into the Leadership Template!

Either way, the fact is, any idea that humans have of a ‘Leadership Template’ made of qualities, concepts and ideas, is likely to be way off what an actual great leader would define themselves as.  Fitting ourselves into a ‘template’ is not actually the best way for us to even grow or develop into a great leader.  Certainly, the qualities that most conceive as desirable in a leader, are not the stuff that leaders are made of and are not available to them 100% of the time.  Leadership it seems, like everything else in life, is a moment to moment experience.

So, what are these qualities anyway you may be wondering.  The most common are things like: confidence, authenticity, integrity, generosity, insightfulness, decisiveness, positivity.  They all sound plausible don’t they? In fact, they really sound like the qualities that I myself would love but sometimes, these qualities seem to evade me.  When I delved further though, I found some surprising qualities on the list like: restlessness, even wonkiness.  Im not even sure what wonkiness means? Although, I can guess, because, sometimes I have wonky days too.

That got me thinking! These qualities, they sound like traits that every human I have ever met has within them.  There is nothing that I came across that I could rule out as not being available to me or you.  Obviously, there is something missing from the equation that we aren’t noticing.

It was the last session with one of my wonderful clients yesterday.  She is the CEO of a global organisation and when we started to work together she had questions that she wanted answers to.  She was unsure of whether to move on to something new.  Her organisation had gone through a huge change over the last few years and it was taking it’s toll on.  She felt anything but the amazing leader that she is! She was making decisions for everyone and rather than growing in the direction that she had hoped, the question she needed to ask herself was whether to continue and risk her health, relationships and sanity, or whether to bail out, find something new and start again.

Throughout our time together, she has recognised her decisiveness, her confidence, her integrity, her authenticity, generosity and positivity but what she also noticed was these qualities weren’t as available to her in every moment and she wanted them back!  What she was actually experiencing was her wonkiness and restlessness.  Now, according to sources, restlessness and wonkiness are desirable, but to my client, they were anything but!

The real source of good Leadership

Fast forward 6 months and she has stripped her organisation back, stripped her ‘self’ back.  She has uncovered glitches that were clogging up the system.  She had unearthed what needed to be unearthed and she has rejigged and reshaped a structure that she had been trying with all her might to contain and keep in place. She is in Service!

As we reflected last night on her journey over the last 6 months, she recognised how scary this had been.  How she had moments where it looked like everything she had worked so hard for was simply crumbling and that she had failed.  It had seemed to her that it was her job to keep it all together and during the last few years. she had worked harder, longer and faster to try to do so!  Working that way was not enabling her to be and remain in Service.  Being in Service requires your best ‘self’ to show up whenever its available but it also requires you to know that even when it doesn’t show up, it’s still there!

Being in Service is exactly how any and every Great Leader continues their mission and is able to bring forward their decisiveness, confidence, integrity, generosity and authenticity, even when these qualities seem to have deserted them!

Finally my client said the difference that really made the difference was understanding her true nature and noticing, in real time, the ebb and flow of her felt experience, of life!

Really seeing for herself that a Leader will have a range of feelings, including not feeling like a Leader and when this seems true, it has the potential to affect her ability to lead.  In fact, this is what happened over the last twelve months, until it gradually dawned on her that during each and every session, we were able to discover those qualities and let them shine.

What my client now has is a refreshed global organisation that she is excited about leading and furthermore, she knows that she is fully equipped for the job!  She works less, gets more done and has a better quality of balance in all areas of life, including her relationships and health.  All of the qualities listed above are prevalent and available to her in any given moment, but for her insecurity.  The desirable qualities in fact, are symptoms rather than causes! They’re symptoms of our moment to moment experience. When she remains in Service to her ‘self’, she naturally calibrates and readjusts and her best ideas, her genius, her fresh thinking has emerged from that place.  Being in ‘Service’ to her ‘self’ has benefitted her whole organisation, her personal relationships and her zest fro life!

When we start to understand that our moment to moment experience of life is transient, changeable and not fixed at all, we start to understand why those qualities, or any other qualities, come and go.  Life isn’t made of fixed, permanent unchangeable moods or feelings.  It is made of fleeting, changeable and variable feelings, moment to moment to moment.  Knowing this has enabled her to see just how much she was doing to try and change a feeling and whilst she was doing that, she wasn’t able to access her best ideas, her natural ability to connect and her resilience.  She was in fact fighting invisible fires.

Surprisingly for her, but actually not so for me, my client has discovered her inner and innate resilience! She is now conscious, aware and awake to life more of the time and she understands that she gets to listen to her wisdom! Her inner sat nav is her feelings in any given moment.  The knowing that the feeling is a reminder of how close or how far away she is walking from her true nature, her inner leader and it is beckoning her to return to her centre has been pivotal.

An insecure feeling is never a warning or sign that we are actually insecure, useless and need to work harder and faster.  Neither is it an indication of failure or wrong doing.  Our insecurity, whether it is in the form of fear, anxiety or a gentle for-boding, is in fact calling out to us that we are forgetting that we are enough in this moment.  The more we ignore this inner sat nav, the louder it will beep! It is trying to keep us on course.

It was so good to see my client fully aware of her centre, of her resilience, health and wellbeing and the joy shining through her smile was a reminder to me why I do this work!

When your inner leader deserts you, remember that it’s simply buried beneath the chaos of an insecure feeling and there is nothing that you need to do to beckon it to return!  What you could do instead is remember that the real signs of a good leader is your inner knowing and connectedness to your innate wisdom and resilience and the awareness that in this very moment, you are enough.  That is the difference that makes the difference.  That is why some Leaders naturally lead and some Leaders never lead at all.  It’s because those that never become Leaders, aren’t aware that it is innate and that they can!

Go on, unleash your inner Leader!