Last week I wrote about a big reset after a heavy period of my life. This is a small one. After my mum passed away 6 years ago, I made a decision that felt almost radical at the time. Saturdays are mine. Completely.

Long sleep in. Lazy breakfast at my favourite café, newspaper from front to back, sudoku included. Easy meal in the evening, pizza usually. A film. Music. Sofa. Nothing that needs doing.

It took real effort to keep that boundary. The inner voices were loud. “You should be doing something useful.” “You’re wasting time.” That pressure to always be on is so embedded in how we live and work that switching off genuinely feels like a transgression.

I kept it anyway. Even during the periods when the work was too much. Even when other boundaries had dissolved. I kept it and cherished it.

And what I noticed, over time, was that my best days are early in the week. Not because I work harder then. Because I arrive differently. The Saturday distance gives me something I cannot get in any other way: the ability to see my work clearly again, rather than just being emerged in it.

Presence at work, the kind that actually changes the quality of your thinking and your communication, does not start on Monday morning. It starts with what you protect the day(s) before.

What is the one thing you have stopped doing that your best work probably depends on?

Of course I use AI in my preparation. Specifically and deliberately. Before a session I feed in summaries from my client calls, the context, the challenges, the dynamics they have described. Then I ask for scenarios and roleplay prompts built around what is actually happening in their world.

Not generic. Not “imagine a difficult colleague.” Their world.

And you can feel it in the room. The moment someone reads a scenario and the nodding starts, because it is familiar. Sometimes they glance at each other, just briefly, when it is one team. That is when the work begins.

Recognition is not a nice-to-have in communication training. It is the condition for learning. If someone has to translate a scenario into their own context, you have already lost some of the room.

AI does not replace the preparation. It sharpens it. The insight still comes from the client conversation. The craft still comes from knowing what to do with it. But the specificity, the part that makes someone think “this is exactly what happens in my team,” that is where AI earns its place.

🤔 What makes a scenario feel real rather than generic?

Nine years ago, an email changed my life forever. As a result, I went through a long period that was heavy. I was looking after a parent whose health was declining. And when she passed away nearly four years later, I did what a lot of people do. I threw myself into work. With the best intentions, mine and everyone else’s. But grief does not wait. And the work kept growing.

And every time I came back from a holiday during that period, the first few days felt slow. I always said “I’m just a bit rusty after the holidays.” And it felt like that too.

When I finally stepped back properly, it took months before I felt my feet on the ground again. I travelled to Colombia. I rested. I cleared the cobwebs, internally and externally. And slowly, something settled.

Then, nearly four months later, I delivered my first session back.

Nothing. No rustiness at all. Just joy!

And that is when I understood. The rustiness was never about the skills. It was exhaustion. Every single time. The skills were always there. I was just finally rested enough to feel and enjoy them.

That is when the last bit of insecurity about my skills evaporated. I was just tired. I can actually do this. Any time. Anywhere.

What would you discover about yourself if you finally gave yourself enough rest?

Early in my communication coaching journey, a mentor said something to me that has stayed ever since.

“The ocean is big enough for us all to swim in.”

It landed personally at the time. I did not realise how much it would shape how I work, and what I would start noticing in teams.

Because some teams have that. Not as a value on a wall. As something you can actually feel. In how people talk about each other’s work. In how someone responds when a colleague gets recognised. In whether people share what they know or hold slightly back. In whether success feels shared or rationed.

I was reminded of it recently. I was coaching a group, not a team exactly, more a team of peers. Afterwards I shared a photo with the person who had organised it. His response made me smile: “it looks like everyone actually liked each other.” As if that were surprising. As if it shouldn’t be the baseline.

But he was right to notice it. Because it isn’t always there. And when it isn’t, teams feel it even if no one names it. Decisions get complicated by things that have nothing to do with the decision. Collaboration requires more effort than it should. People protect territory that was never actually under threat.

That unspoken sense that there is not quite enough to go around is one of the things that stops teams from really moving.

Keeping Things Moving, the final phase of my work with teams, is not about tighter processes or louder accountability. It becomes possible when people have stopped competing for an ocean that was always big enough to swim in.

What was said to you early in your career that still shapes how you work?

The behaviours teams find hardest to address are not the difficult ones. They are the well-meaning ones.

I have seen this pattern more times than I can count. Someone on the team who dives in. Solves problems. Fills gaps before anyone has even noticed they exist. On the surface, enormously helpful. In practice, quietly suffocating.

Not because the intention is wrong. Simply because no one ever said anything.

And here is the part that rarely gets said: teams often let it happen. Because it is convenient. The work gets done. The gaps get filled. The discomfort of a conversation gets avoided. Consciously or not, the behaviour gets used.

Over time, “that is just how they are” becomes the explanation. Not because it is true, but because it is easier than the conversation that never happened.

And the person doing it? Often they feel it. The sense that what they contribute is taken for granted rather than genuinely valued. That eats away at people, slowly and without drama.

The cost is paid on all sides. The person never gets the chance to adjust, and never feels properly seen. The team never develops its own capability because someone always steps in. And the dynamic becomes a permanent feature of how that team works, invisible to everyone inside it.

Most of these patterns are workable when named early. Gently, specifically, before they have become part of the furniture.

Left until they are embedded, they are a different conversation entirely.

What in your team has quietly become “just how it is”?

The habits we build around how we communicate become automatic over time. And automatic means unexamined. We stop questioning whether they are working because they feel normal. They are just how we do it.

I was reminded of this recently, in a fairly personal way.

I received feedback from a participant after a session. I read it. I always read feedback, not out of habit but because I am genuinely curious what people notice. One observation stopped me: she had noticed that I close my eyes too often when I am speaking.

My first instinct was not to agree or disagree. It was to go and look.

I watched a recording of myself facilitating. And there it was. Exactly as she had described. A habit I had no idea I had developed, clearly visible once someone had pointed it out.

The odd thing was not the feedback itself. It was realising it had been there for a while, and I had not seen it. Not because I was not paying attention. But because it had become habitual, and habits stop asking for our attention.

That is how blind spots work. They are not hidden because we are careless. They are hidden because they are familiar.

I see the same thing in teams. Communication habits that developed gradually, in how meetings run, how decisions get shared, how people give and receive feedback, become invisible to the people inside them. Not because no one cares. Because no one has looked from the outside recently.

Awareness rarely comes from intention alone. It usually needs a second pair of eyes.

What brought a communication blind spot into view for you, and did it come from inside or outside?

There is a museum in Rome that is easy to walk past.

From the outside, the Crypta Balbi sits quietly on a street corner, its signage understated, nothing to prepare you for what is inside. I was wandering around the city a few years ago and almost did not stop.

I am glad I did.

Once you go in, you take stairs downward. And then you see it: the layers. Roman foundations at the bottom, then medieval, then Renaissance, then modern Rome sitting on top of all of it. Each era built on what came before, adapted it, sometimes without even knowing what was underneath. The people who laid those first foundations had no idea that one day, somewhere above them, someone would build the Colosseum.

I studied history, and later did my MA in Leiden. I have always been drawn to how things accumulate: how each layer makes the next one possible, not by design, but by being solid enough to build on.

I recognise that in the work I do. The clarity that gets built conversation by conversation, the small shifts that compound over time, the conditions that make the next thing possible. In work, in collaboration, in how we show up for each other. None of it looks dramatic from the outside. Often it looks like an ordinary building on a quiet street corner.

But underneath, the layers are there.What has quietly accumulated in your own work that you only notice when you stop and look?