Hi Reader, How are you doing on your new year's intentions? We're three weeks into the year and I am looking at my 10 commandments - my operating system for the year - and can't help noticing a pattern that keeps showing up at the intersection of three of them: I choose ease. I am obsessed with clarity. I put my shoes on (I don't wait for permission). I keep catching myself mid-sentence, correcting from "Shall we [...]?" to "Let's [...]." At first I was too slow. I'd hit send on "Shall we?"...
10 days ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, What makes it difficult to call a mistake what it is? This week, I posted a list of some of my biggest business and podcast mistakes on LinkedIn and it went mini-viral with 300+ reactions. The post ended with: 'Some mistakes led to surprising outcomes. All led to a waste of time and money.' The comments were thoughtful - and revealed something. What caught my curiosity was the pushback on 'waste.' Many offered gentler words: investment, learning, growth. I chose 'waste'...
17 days ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, Do you have a new year's ritual? A word or a commitment for the months to come? Since 2016, I write my 10 commandments and choose a word every January. A few years ago I shared my commandments in this newsletter. One reader (and good friend in the meantime) started writing hers too. Now she sends them to me every year. It reminded me that sharing our commandments turns them into commitments. It makes it real. What makes it even more real is looking back at the changes and...
24 days ago • 3 min read
Happy New Year, Reader! I wish you a healthy body and a content soul. I wish you inspiration, and the courage to act on it. And I wish you meaningful connections, conversations, and collaboration for 2026. As the year is about to begin, I find myself asking a familiar question: what do I want to start, stop, or continue? We tend to focus on beginnings. New habits, new goals, new energy. It's exciting. Yet, we've all learned that what we forget to stop often comes at the highest cost because...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, What tells you that you’ve done a good job? Pause for a second before you answer. Is it a number, a feeling, a comment from someone else, or the simple relief of being done? Most of us have a metric, even if we’ve never named it. And once it’s there, it starts steering far more than we realise. I noticed this recently, in the most unlikely of places: on my meditation cushion. Before my last Vipassana retreat, a “good” meditation was easy to define. It was a sit where my mind...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Dear Reader, I came back from ten days of silence on Sunday. No phone. No writing. No reading. No podcasts. Just long hours of sitting, scanning sensations, and noticing how quickly the mind wants things to be different. Less pain. More comfort. A way out. Vipassana calls the practice equanimity. The capacity to stay with sensation as it is, without craving when it’s pleasant and without aversion when it’s unpleasant. Not suppressing. Not indulging. Simply noticing. When we stop feeding our...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, By the time you read this, I’ll be sitting in silence. Today will be day six out of ten. Ten hours of meditation a day. No phone, no notebook, no book, no calendar. Just me, my breath, and whatever Goenka has to say about observing sensations without reacting to them. It’s my sixth Vipassana (listen to my insights after the last), which means I should know by now that the first two days feel excruciating. My mind throws a tantrum like a toddler whose iPad has been taken away....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, I said yes. Too quickly. Again. And here I am, looking at the pile of broken glass, wondering what I could have done differently. Isn't it ironic that I'm a facilitator who literally teaches people how to work together. And still, I fell into the oldest trap in the book. Someone invited me to collaborate on something exciting. I felt flattered. My gut told me to slow down, to have a real conversation about how we'd work together. But I didn't want to be the difficult one....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Dear Reader, How do you know whether the group you're speaking to is engaged or not? Last week I was facilitating a workshop on the basics of facilitation for a new community. I asked a question. Silence. Everyone stayed on mute. I tried another prompt. More silence. But people had their cameras on and smiled—they were clearly engaged, just not speaking. I've written about the sound of silence in facilitation, and this week Yuko shares the Japanese perspective on it in the podcast. But last...
2 months ago • 2 min read