Mental Strength is the new Zeitgeist – do you have the practical tools to mentally thrive? 

Success is rarely instant - from Simone Biles to leading edge scientists, from Tom Daley to tech founders we are increasingly aware that mental strength is the real secret sauce of success

In fact, in all walks of life - from start-up founders to chefs to musicians - when we look at successful people, we are fascinated to learn how they do what they do - what their secret for success is

Talent, skill and knowledge? We are increasingly recognising the much more important ingredient: mental strength

Being an Olympian not only requires immense physical talent but also an incredible amount of psychological control - resilience and determination help them bounce back from defeat and keep on keeping on. From Tom Daley - the British diver who competed in three prior Olympic games and only recently won his first ever Olympic gold medal in Tokyo, to Andrew Hoy - the Australian equestrian eventer who ...

Frankly, are you over it? 

The relentless uncertainty, the daily "can we, can't we, shall we, shan't we" of mask-wearing, social meet-ups and staycations, has now writhed it's way into our morning coffee-catch ups and our message feeds. The snake of uncertainty brings with it small, sneaking, daily confrontations with tricky choices, the relentless drip, drip, drip of new decisions, draining our energy and distracting our focus

With every glimmer of fun and freedom, we now peer into the shadows, calculating the risks and assessing the new behaviours to adopt. To keep safe, to keep strong. We have swapped worrying about 'if our job has enough purpose' for 'will I still have a job' and 'how do I keep myself and my family safe'. The statistics collaborate with our instinctive refocus on the basics of survival - whether looking at the economy, the local area R number, or the 30% of Corona survivors who are now likely to suffer PTSD

Yup, for pretty much all of us, our current reality is...

Do you often appear anxious or stressed? 

You aren’t alone - we are all aware of the increase in the number of people feeling anxious or stressed in today’s world

In the UK, the office of National statistics – reports that over 19 million people record high levels of anxiety (Ref1). A recent Gallup poll (Ref2) showed that the majority of American adults, 60%, now experience stress and worry on any given day. This is an increase of 14 percentage points between 2019 and 2020. In fact, the levels of people feeling anxious or stressed has now reached such high levels, that it is often called a ‘plague of stress’ – threatening to impact the majority of our lives

No great surprise that the main causes of this increase in stress and worry are our concerns about our physical and financial health, the pressures of required social isolation during the pandemic and the chaos for parents balancing work and childcare from our homes

The thing is, when we feel anxious and stressed, knowing the re...

Living our best life and being our most successful selves is phenomenally noble and wonderfully woke

and yet if we are honest, how many of us have thought about what that actually means

Like generations before us, we all strive for a life well-lived

Today this seems to mean a combination of being woke – the definition of woke, as stated by Merriam-Webster being, ‘Aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially issues of racial and social injustice’ - and living our best lives, which according to social media roughly translates as being present, travelling the world, landing a dream job and being physically and mentally fit and strong - sounds good to me!

So today we are striving to live our best, woke lives

Which makes sense – sort of. Most of us now know, through various pieces of research shared on social media, news articles and blog posts, that success today is not just about the job, the car, the house and the holiday destination. We are rightly ang...

I know this girl

She is a 20 something law student in her final year at one of our best Universities. She is smart, sassy, and excels at everything she puts her hand to, from hockey to home-baking. Her life is stretching before her - full of hope and opportunity 

And yet. She is crippled by anxiety and shame. Anxiety and shame driven by perfectionism. Permanently on a high wire, of perfectionism. Desperately driven by an anxiety that if she falls off, there is no world to welcome her. Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, ever fearful of the shame of not hitting her high performing, perfectionist goals

How can I explain to this sparky, kind girl that striving for excellence is one thing. Striving to excel in her unique way, using her own combination of sassy brains, deep kindness and fierce determination. That will bring magic. Striving for full marks, to always be top of the class, to never make mistakes. That will bring madness. A madness driven by seeking to control the unc...

Is striving for perfection, sabotaging your potential?

Look around and we can see that more and more ‘successful people’ feel wonky

This is despite achieving killer job titles, 1000s of followers and spending our hard-earned free-time and cash on mimicking the lifestyles of so-called successful people living their best lives; fantastic careers, up-to-date wardrobes, the best "self-care routines" and gym memberships and our insta-worthy homes and holidays

We’ve made it, haven’t we, so why don’t we feel like we’ve made it?

What's more - when we look at the lives of the so-called successful people who influence and inspire us to do what we do, wear what we wear, spend what we spend - whether on social media or at work - the statistics show that, in truth, these people might also not have their lives quite as worked out as they may appear

Statistics show that CEO’s may be at twice the risk of developing depression than the rest of the population. That 49% of Start-Up entrepreneurs hav...