In 2022 I ran 136 virtual sessions.

I did not plan to learn what I did from that year. I thought I was delivering training. What I was actually doing, without quite naming it at the time, was watching the same patterns surface again and again across completely different teams, organisations, and topics.

The pattern that appeared most consistently was not about communication skills. It was about assumptions: the assumptions people carry about what good communication looks like, and the quiet pressure they put on themselves because of the gap between that image and what they actually do.

The clients often wanted the meatier topics. Challenging conversations, difficult feedback, high-stakes communication. And those matter. But what I kept observing was that the real difference was rarely made by the content of the session. It was made by smaller things.

One of those things was presence. Not mine as the facilitator, though that matters too. Everyone’s.

And by presence I do not mean high energy, or being visibly engaged, or performing enthusiasm. Some of the most present people in a room are the calm ones. The ones who observe carefully before they speak. The ones who ask the question no one else thought to ask. You need both in a team: the person who moves fast and the person who notices what the fast mover missed.

What I started asking, and still ask now, is: what is the energy you bring? Not as a judgement, but as genuine curiosity. Because when people understand their own energy and how to use it well, without burning themselves out trying to be something they are not, something shifts in how a group thinks and works together.

That understanding sits at the foundation of how I design my work now. Not the 136 sessions as a number, but what that volume of repetition made visible: the small things that consistently made a difference, and the structural patterns underneath all the variation.If I could say one thing to the version of myself running session one, it would be this: be present. It is over before you know it. And presence is not a nice-to-have. It is the work.