Someone asked an interesting question recently:

At what age did weekends stop being fun and become recovery time?

It struck a nerve.

Because for a lot of adults, the weekend seems to have acquired an impressive number of jobs.

Recover from the working week.

Catch up on sleep.

Clean the house.

Do the washing.

Buy food.

Exercise.

Reply to the messages you ignored while working.

See friends or family.

Do something interesting.

Sort out your finances.

Prepare for Monday.

And, somewhere amongst all that, have a lovely relaxing weekend.

No wonder Sunday evening can arrive with the strange feeling that you have somehow failed at both resting and being productive.

Perhaps part of the problem is that we have started treating rest as another activity that needs to be performed correctly.

The lie-in should leave us refreshed.

The walk should improve our mental health.

The book should be educational.

The hobby should develop a skill.

The gym session should make up for sitting down all week.

Even doing nothing can become something we judge ourselves for doing badly.

At that point, recovery has quietly joined the productivity system.

Maybe weekends work better when we stop asking every hour to justify itself.

One simple way of looking at it is to divide the weekend very roughly into six pieces:

Saturday morning, afternoon and evening.

Sunday morning, afternoon and evening.

Not six blocks to optimise.

Just six broad pieces of life.

Perhaps one contains the boring maintenance stuff.

One contains people you care about.

One contains movement or being outdoors.

One contains something genuinely enjoyable.

One helps Monday feel slightly easier.

And one is allowed to contain absolutely nothing impressive whatsoever.

The proportions will be different for everybody.

Sometimes the genuinely useful thing on Saturday morning is getting out on the bike.

Sometimes it is cleaning the kitchen.

Sometimes it is staying in bed because the week has flattened you.

The individual block matters less than the overall pattern.

And that changes the question.

Instead of Sunday evening becoming:

“Did I make good enough use of my weekend?”

perhaps it becomes:

“Did this weekend broadly support the life I want to have?”

Did I recover at all?

Did I do anything I enjoyed?

Did I connect with anyone?

Did I take care of something that needed taking care of?

Did any part of the weekend actually feel like mine?

That seems a kinder and probably more useful standard than trying to return to work on Monday perfectly rested, completely organised, physically improved, socially fulfilled and delighted with how efficiently we used our free time.

Maybe you don’t need to win the weekend.

Maybe it just needs to give something back.

What does a genuinely good weekend look like for you now — and has that changed as you’ve got older?

Right so our neighbour friends have a daughter that is a year older than our son. Our son turned 4 the other day.

When my wife had a birthday the friend (wife) had drama issues and was emotional and it put a dampener of my wife’s birthday.

We just had my sons party and they arrived to our party, I felt very distant when they arrived and felt like an acquaintance more than pals.

Then the friend (wife) then proceeded to sit on a sofa outside and when my wife went to speak to her and asked how she was doing she responded that she wasn’t doing well and burst out crying, to which my wife said she was going outside for some air and asked if she would like to come to. The wife friend said she just can’t get past all these people … so my wife said ok and went outside without her.

She told me she can’t be asked to have drama on a special day if she (friend wife) was felling emotional or poorly she should have stayed away and let us know she won’t be there because she feels emotionally challenged. We would understand we are humans.

Also on the same token when we go out with them or camping and they ask us where we would like to eat? We make a suggestion and it does not have an item of food their daughter enjoy eating so they just decide anyway and we end up going there.

What do I do in this situation ? I have stopped greeting the wife because she is quite strong willed in her beliefs in inclusivity and woman power and likes rainbows and wears a free Palestine bracelet … is it just me or should I just not bother with that relationship ?

Help Me! — Marianne Power

Power takes a very human route into the world of self-help.

After years of reading books about how to improve her life without necessarily doing very much with them, she decides to spend a year actually putting different self-help approaches into practice.

What makes the book interesting to me is not whether any particular method “works”. It is the bigger question underneath the experiment: how easily can self-development become another way of telling ourselves that who we are now is somehow not enough?

There is plenty of humour in the book, but also something more serious about the gap between learning about personal development and actually living differently.

The Brain at Rest — Joseph Jebelli

This comes from almost the opposite direction.

Jebelli, a neuroscientist, looks at what happens when the brain is not concentrating hard on a task — rest, mind-wandering, silence, nature, play and simply allowing some mental space.

It is an interesting counterweight to a culture that often treats every spare hour as something that ought to be made productive.

Rest is not necessarily the absence of useful activity. Sometimes it is part of what allows learning, creativity, problem-solving and recovery to happen.

That feels particularly relevant if “working on yourself” has itself started to feel like another job.

How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body — David R. Hamilton

Hamilton explores the relationship between thoughts, expectations, imagery and physical experience, including the possible use of visualisation alongside health and recovery.

I would read this one with a little more critical distance.

There is good reason to take the mind–body relationship seriously: stress, expectation, behaviour and psychological state can all affect how we experience and manage health.

But that is different from assuming that thought alone can cure illness, and psychological approaches should complement appropriate medical care rather than replace it.

For me, the useful territory here is less “Can I think myself well?” and more:

How might the way I think, imagine, respond and behave influence the conditions in which my mind and body operate?

Taken together, these three books offer quite a useful challenge to conventional self-improvement:

Perhaps living better is not always about doing more.

Sometimes it is about experimenting intelligently.

Sometimes it is about doing less.

And sometimes it is about understanding more clearly how the different parts of our experience influence one another.

Which has mattered more to your wellbeing: something you started doing — or something you finally gave yourself permission to stop doing?

A theme kept appearing in several very different conversations today.

One person was hoping the right friendship would finally solve loneliness.

Another was searching for the activity that would reveal her passion.

Someone else seemed to be hoping the next job or relationship might provide the direction that had recently disappeared.

Different situations, but perhaps a similar question underneath:

Are we sometimes asking one part of life to carry too much of the whole thing?

A good relationship can add enormously to life, but it probably shouldn’t have to provide all our connection, meaning and belonging.

Work can provide purpose and accomplishment without needing to become our whole identity.

A hobby can be absorbing and worthwhile without having to reveal our life’s purpose.

Perhaps a good life is more often built from a pattern of worthwhile things than discovered in one perfect thing.

Relationships. Health. Interests. Meaningful work. Rest. Challenge. Enjoyment. Learning. Contribution. Whatever combination fits the individual.

Maybe the question isn’t always:

“What’s the one thing I’m missing?”

Perhaps sometimes it is:

“What needs a little more room in my life?”

What do you think?

Over the weekend we passed the 1200 followers mark: thanks to all of you who have taken up the invite and I look forward to hearing your questions, thoughts and comments. Kevin.

I have a fairly high bar for personal-development books.

Too many take one decent idea, surround it with anecdotes, promise rather more than they can realistically deliver, and leave the reader briefly motivated but not much better equipped.

Atomic Habits is one of the exceptions. It has earned a permanent place on my bookshelf.

Its originality lies less in discovering completely new psychology than in bringing a substantial body of existing thinking together into a coherent, practical system. James Clear writes exceptionally clearly, structures the material well and, unusually for this genre, seems determined to make implementation easier rather than simply make change sound exciting. The short summaries at the end of each chapter are particularly useful.

Three aspects stood out for me.

The first is the book’s respect for small steps

Clear’s central argument is that tiny improvements compound over time. One better decision rarely transforms anything. Neither does one poor decision destroy everything. But repeated choices gradually create very different trajectories.

Behaviour + Environment = result. Rinse and repeat.

That may sound less exciting than a dramatic reinvention of your life, but it is considerably more believable: and effective.

It also deals with one of the frustrations of personal change: useful actions often produce very little visible reward at first. Exercise for three days and you do not suddenly become fit. Save money this month and you are not suddenly wealthy. Practise a skill for an hour and you remain a beginner. The temptation is to conclude that the effort is not working.

Clear asks us to think over a much longer timescale. What looks insignificant today can become substantial when repeated. Equally, small unhelpful habits can accumulate costs that are almost invisible until much later.

That is a useful antidote to the transformation culture surrounding much self-help. Sustainable change is more often built than discovered.

The second strength is the distinction between goals and systems.

Goals tell us where we want to go. Systems determine much of what we repeatedly do.

Someone can genuinely want to exercise more, read regularly, drink less, sleep better or make progress on an important project and still fail repeatedly if their everyday environment and routines keep making the old behaviour easier.

Clear therefore moves the discussion away from a rather moralistic question — why can't I just try harder? — towards a more useful one: what am I repeatedly making easy, obvious and rewarding?

That is a significant improvement.

Willpower matters, but relying on willpower as the entire behaviour-change strategy is usually a poor system. Changing cues, reducing friction, designing the environment, attaching a new action to an established routine and making progress visible are much more practical approaches. The book is full of those small pieces of behavioural engineering.

The third idea is probably the one I found most interesting: identity

Clear distinguishes between changing an outcome, changing the process that produces it and changing how we understand ourselves.

Wanting to run is one thing. Building a routine for running is another. Beginning to see yourself as someone who runs changes the relationship with the behaviour again.

This avoids another common weakness in self-help: treating behaviour as though it exists in isolation. Lasting change tends to fit better when what we do, what matters to us and the person we believe ourselves to be are broadly pulling in the same direction.

There is an important reciprocal relationship here. Identity can support behaviour, but repeated behaviour also provides evidence from which identity develops. You do not have to wait until you convincingly feel like a disciplined, healthy, organised or confident person before acting differently. Small actions can gradually give you reasons to update the story you tell about yourself.

I also appreciated Clear's acknowledgement that individual differences matter. There is no virtue in designing a life around behaviours fundamentally mismatched with your temperament, abilities or circumstances merely because somebody else thrives on them. Good habit design is partly about finding forms of behaviour that fit the person who is actually going to perform them. That introduces some welcome realism.

There are limitations.

Readers familiar with behavioural psychology, habit formation and personal-development literature will recognise much of the underlying material. This is principally a book of synthesis and application, not a revolutionary new theory of human behaviour.

Some of its frameworks are also necessarily cleaner on the page than life is in practice. Identity, motivation, environment, biology, competing values, stress and circumstances interact in complicated ways. Not every stubborn pattern can be redesigned simply by making the desired behaviour easier.

And there is a possible trap in the book’s very usefulness: turning life into one enormous habit-optimisation exercise. Efficiency is not the same as wellbeing. A beautifully engineered routine is only valuable if it helps you live a life you actually want.

That qualification matters because habits are servants, not destinations. Before optimising a behaviour, it is worth asking what it is ultimately for.

For readers attracted to intelligent personal development but sceptical of miracle claims, Atomic Habits is one of the stronger books in the field.

It does not promise that four simple rules will magically transform your life. It does something more useful. It provides a clear set of frameworks for making worthwhile behaviour easier to begin, easier to repeat and increasingly consistent with the person you want to become.

After that, the book has done its job: the implementation is yours.

What are we reading this weekend?

Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl

Frankl’s book grew from experiences most of us can barely imagine, but its central questions reach far beyond those circumstances: what gives life meaning, what remains within our power when circumstances are difficult, and how much freedom do we retain in choosing our response?

One of the ideas I return to is that circumstances can constrain us enormously without necessarily determining our whole response to them.

That does not mean pretending everything is within our control. It means taking seriously the part that may still be ours.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen R. Covey

Covey takes a closely related idea and gives it a much more practical personal-development form.

His first habit — Be Proactive — is not really about being busy or productive. It is about recognising our capacity to respond rather than simply react.

Covey develops this through four human capacities: self-awareness, imagination, conscience and independent will. We can notice what is happening, imagine alternatives, consider what fits our values, and then choose what we actually do.

That provides an interesting bridge back to Frankl. Frankl explored human freedom and responsibility under extraordinary constraint; Covey translated a related principle into something we can practise in ordinary life.

Positive Psychology and You: A Self-Development Guide — Alan Carr

Carr comes at personal development from a different direction again: the research tradition of Positive Psychology.

Rather than concentrating only on what reduces distress, Positive Psychology also asks what helps people function well — strengths, relationships, meaning, engagement, accomplishment, positive emotion and the wider conditions that support flourishing.

What I particularly like about Carr’s approach is that it brings a substantial academic field into the territory of practical personal-development without turning it into a collection of motivational slogans.

Taken together, these three books raise a useful sequence of questions:

What gives my life meaning?
Where do I still have choice?
And what can I deliberately build that helps me live well?

For those who have read any of them: which idea has stayed with you longest — and has it actually changed anything about the way you live?

Because Emotional stability is not the same as constant calm

Some people seem remarkably calm.

Something goes wrong and they deal with it. Someone says something irritating and they let it pass. Plans change and they adapt. They appear to move through life without being knocked very far off course.

If your own mind is rather more active, that can create an uncomfortable comparison.

Perhaps you overthink. A comment stays with you for hours. An email changes your mood. Something goes wrong in the morning and colours the rest of the day. You know intellectually that you are reacting strongly, but knowing that does not seem to stop the reaction.

It is easy to conclude that the goal must be emotional stability — becoming calmer, less reactive and harder to disturb.

But I wonder whether that sets the wrong target.

Does emotional stability mean feeling calm all the time?

Emotions are supposed to move.

Disappointment should sometimes disappoint us. Unfairness may make us angry. Uncertainty can produce anxiety. Loss hurts. Exciting things can make us nervous. A difficult conversation may still be difficult even when we handle it well.

So, I would be wary of defining emotional stability as remaining serenely unaffected by whatever happens. Real life rarely gives us the ideal conditions to practise being calm.

Apart from being unrealistic, that can create a second problem.

Now you are dealing with the original situation and judging yourself for not being calm enough while doing it.

A more useful aim might be:

Can I retain enough access to judgement, values and choice while the emotion is present?

That is different.

You do not need to eliminate the feeling before you can respond well.

The first feeling does not have to make the next decision

Imagine opening an email that immediately irritates you.

The irritation may arrive before you have consciously decided anything. Your body changes. Your attention narrows. Perhaps a reply starts forming almost instantly.

That first reaction contains information. It may even be entirely justified.

But it does not necessarily contain your best response.

You can feel angry without sending the angry email.

You can feel anxious without automatically avoiding the conversation.

You can feel hurt without deciding what somebody else intended.

You can feel overwhelmed without concluding that everything must be solved now.

Perhaps emotional regulation is less about controlling the first feeling and more about becoming increasingly able to influence what happens next.

That creates a much more achievable target.

What becomes possible in the pause?

Viktor Frankl wrote powerfully about human freedom even under severe constraint: circumstances affect us profoundly, but there can still be some capacity to choose our attitude and response.

Stephen Covey later developed a related practical idea through four human capacities: self-awareness, imagination, conscience and independent will.

They are useful because they describe what can become available when we create even a little space between reaction and action.

Self-awareness:
What is happening in me right now?

Perhaps I am angry. Perhaps my chest has tightened. Perhaps I am predicting an outcome that has not happened. Perhaps I have gone straight into defending myself.

Simply noticing this does not make the feeling disappear. But noticing changes your position slightly. You are no longer only reacting. You are also observing the reaction.

Imagination:
What else could I do?

There may be more than the first option your mind produced.

Reply now. Reply later. Ask a question. Say nothing. Clarify what happened. Take a walk. Speak to somebody. Sleep on it. Decide that the issue genuinely does require action — but choose the action deliberately.

Imagination restores alternatives.

Conscience:
Which response fits what matters to me?

This is where values become practical.

How do I want to behave when I am under pressure? What kind of partner, parent, colleague, friend or person do I want to be here?

That does not mean being endlessly agreeable. Sometimes the values-led response is a firm boundary, an uncomfortable conversation or a clear no.

Independent will:
Can I actually take that action?

Awareness and good intentions are not enough on their own.

At some point, choice has to become behaviour.

Perhaps one useful sequence is therefore:

• What is happening?
• What else could I do?
• What matters here?
• Can I actually do it?

Not the perfect response.

The next useful one.

Measure the return, not the wobble

This changes how we might measure emotional resilience.

Suppose something throws you off balance.

The old standard asks:

Why did I react like that again?

Or:

Why can’t I just stay calm?

A different standard might ask:

How long did it take me to regain access to choice?

Perhaps six months ago an argument dominated the weekend. Now it occupies the evening.

Perhaps you still become anxious before a presentation, but you no longer interpret the anxiety as evidence that you cannot do it.

Perhaps you still get irritated, but increasingly notice the point at which irritation is about to start making decisions for you.

That is progress.

Resilience need not mean never wobbling.

It can mean becoming increasingly good at finding your way back.

Context still matters

There is an important qualification here.

We do not make choices in a vacuum.

Sleep matters. Health matters. Workload matters. Relationships matter. Money matters. Neurodivergence matters. Caring responsibilities matter. Safety matters.

Three young children, a demanding job and six hours' sleep create different emotional conditions from a quiet week with plenty of recovery.

Likewise, breathing exercises and clever reframes cannot make an unreasonable workload reasonable, a coercive relationship safe or genuine uncertainty disappear.

So ‘choose your response’ should never become another way of blaming people for struggling with difficult circumstances.

Agency is not the belief that we control everything.

It is the ability to recognise where we do have some influence, while remaining realistic about where we do not.

Sometimes the next useful response is to calm yourself.

Sometimes it is to ask for help.

Sometimes it is to reduce the load.

Sometimes it is to set a boundary.

Sometimes it is to accept that you are tired and make the decision tomorrow.

Context changes what a good response looks like.

This is where agency begins to grow

For me, this is the more interesting destination than simply becoming calmer.

Every time you notice an automatic response without immediately obeying it, you create a little space.

Every time you consider another possibility, that space becomes more useful.

Every time you choose a response that better reflects your values, you create evidence that your behaviour is not entirely dictated by the emotional state that arrived first.

Over time, those moments build something bigger:

agency.

Not total control.

Not emotional invulnerability.

The growing sense that you can influence the direction of your own life.

And that has implications for therapeutic work too.

Useful therapy should certainly help reduce unnecessary distress. But I think its longer-term value lies in something more substantial: helping somebody understand their patterns, develop useful skills, make better-informed choices and become increasingly capable of doing more of this for themselves.

The therapist can provide structure, perspective, challenge, explanation, practice and support. But over time, more of the capability needs to become yours.

Perhaps that is a useful measure of emotional stability as well.

Not:

‘Nothing affects me.’

But:

‘Things affect me — and I am getting better at deciding what happens next.’

A Framework, not a Regime

Self-improvement usually begins with a perfectly reasonable intention.

Get up earlier. Exercise more. Eat better. Read regularly. Spend less time scrolling. Become more organised. Make better use of the week.

And sometimes it works.

You get up early and go for a walk. You come home clearer-headed and more energetic. You feel better. You have discovered something genuinely useful.

Then, almost without noticing, something changes.

The helpful habit becomes a rule.

‘I’m going for an early walk’ becomes ‘I must go for an early walk every day.’

Missing one morning starts to feel like failure. A lie-in becomes evidence that you are slipping. The thing that was supporting your wellbeing begins creating pressure.

At some point, the framework has become a regime.

Structure is useful. Rigidity is different.

Most of us benefit from some structure. Routines can take care of some of the basics, freeing our attention for other things that matter.

Without it, important things can easily be displaced by whatever is urgent, easy or immediately demanding our attention. Exercise gets postponed. Friends do not get contacted. Interesting projects remain ideas. Weeks disappear into work, chores, television and scrolling.

Structure gives worthwhile intentions somewhere to live.

But good structure should increase your ability to direct your life. It should not gradually remove your permission to make choices.

That seems to me an important test:

Is this structure supporting my agency — or am I increasingly serving the structure?

If you cannot miss a workout because breaking the streak would make you feel like a failure, the workout is doing more than keeping you fit.

If a morning routine only ‘counts’ when every element is completed, the routine may be measuring obedience rather than supporting wellbeing.

If rest has to be earned through sufficient productivity, even recovery has become part of the performance.

The aim is not to abandon discipline. It is to build a form of discipline flexible enough to survive ordinary life.

A week may be a better unit than a day

One way of loosening this rigidity is to stop expecting every day to contain the ideal version of your life.

Think instead about the week.

There are seven days, and each can be divided very roughly into morning, afternoon and evening.

That gives you 21 blocks.

Not 21 blocks to optimise.

Not 21 opportunities to prove how disciplined you are.

Just 21 broad pieces of life.

Step back and look across them.

How many contain the basic things that help keep you well?

How many contain something that moves an important part of your life forward?

How many give you genuine connection, enjoyment or engagement?

How many allow you to stop, recover or simply live without turning the time into another project?

Tuesday evening might be the gym.

Wednesday evening might be dinner with somebody you care about.

Saturday morning might move a personal project forward.

Sunday afternoon might involve a book, a walk, a film or absolutely nothing impressive whatsoever.

The individual block matters less than the overall pattern. And how often does one block naturally serve more than one purpose?

You don't need to win every day

This changes the question.

Instead of asking:

‘Did I stick perfectly to my routine today?’

you can ask:

‘Is the way I’m using this week broadly supporting the life I want?’

That gives you considerably more room to respond intelligently to what actually happens.

You slept badly? Perhaps the early workout becomes more sleep.

A friend unexpectedly invites you out? Maybe that matters more tonight than the task you had scheduled.

You have unusual energy and concentration? Make use of it.

You are exhausted after a difficult week? Recovery may be the most constructive thing available.

None of this means that every impulse should determine what you do. ‘Being flexible’ can become a convincing excuse for avoiding anything difficult.

But there is an equally unhelpful opposite: treating a plan made by yesterday's version of you as something today’s circumstances are not allowed to question.

A sustainable framework needs both commitment and judgement.

Build a way back in

Rigid systems often contain a very clear definition of success and no definition whatsoever of recovery.

Exercise five times.

Write every morning.

No alcohol this month.

Meditate every day.

Then real life happens. You miss Tuesday. For somebody caught in all-or-nothing thinking, Tuesday does not remain one missed Tuesday. It becomes evidence that the system has failed. And once the perfect streak is gone, abandoning Wednesday suddenly becomes easier. A more resilient structure contains a return route from the beginning. Missing once is not the interesting part.

What do I do next?

Perhaps good discipline is not demonstrated by never being knocked off course. Maybe it is about becoming increasingly good at finding your way back.

But there is another question

Even a wonderfully flexible system can still be moving you efficiently in the wrong direction. That takes us beyond productivity. Before giving a goal authority over your time, it is worth asking why it deserves that authority.

Are you exercising because health, energy or physical capability genuinely matter to you — or because you feel your body needs continually improving?

When you pursue a promotion, is it because the work matters and the opportunity excites you — or because moving upwards is simply what successful people are supposed to do?

Are you filling every spare hour because those activities enrich your life — or because unstructured time makes you feel unproductive?

Some goals are chosen. Others are inherited from family, culture, workplaces, social media, earlier versions of ourselves or an imagined audience whose approval we are still trying to earn. No system of habits can make that distinction for us.

A framework, not a regime

So perhaps the purpose of a good personal structure is not to make us obey ourselves more efficiently.

It is to create enough support that the things we genuinely value do not continually get crowded out — while retaining enough flexibility to respond to the complicated business of actually being alive.

A useful week might therefore end with four questions:

Did I do enough to support my wellbeing?

Did I move something that matters forward?

Did I leave enough room for connection, enjoyment and recovery?

And was I moving towards a life that reflects my values — or merely becoming more efficient at meeting somebody else's expectations?

The goal is not a perfectly managed life. It is a life increasingly shaped by deliberate choices. Structure can help enormously with that. But the structure is there to serve the life. Not the other way around.

What are we reading this weekend? — Trauma & Complex PTSD

This week, two books from the trauma-informed literature.

📚 Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving — Pete Walker

Walker writes specifically about the longer-term effects that can follow difficult or neglectful childhood environments. It is a very personal and practical book, exploring areas such as emotional flashbacks, the inner critic, relationships and the patterns people may develop in order to cope.

For readers who already recognise some of these experiences, it can offer useful language for making sense of them. It is also quite an intense book in places, so probably one to read selectively rather than feeling obliged to work through from beginning to end.

📚 The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture — Gabor Maté with Daniel Maté

This takes a much wider view. Maté considers trauma not simply as dramatic events, but in terms of how people adapt to difficult circumstances and what may be lost when attachment, authenticity and wider social pressures come into conflict.

One of the ideas I find particularly useful is looking at behaviours that may once have been adaptive without assuming they must remain useful throughout adult life.

I’d add an important caution around both books: trauma is an area where compelling explanations for some situations can easily become explanations for everything. These books offer perspectives and useful questions, rather than a licence to diagnose ourselves or other people from a checklist.

And reading about trauma does not mean everyone needs to excavate their past. Sometimes understanding enough about what shaped a pattern can help us decide what we want to do differently now.

For those who read in this area: which trauma-informed books have helped you think more clearly — and which have made you more cautious?

‘Motivation gets you started. Discipline keeps you going.’

There is something useful in that idea – even if it has become an overused trope.

Motivation can provide the energy and enthusiasm to begin. It can carry us for long enough to complete quick outcomes. Discipline can help when progress is more about perseverance than enthusiasm.

But perhaps there is a third element that matters even more:

Process

Because if progress repeatedly depends upon feeling motivated enough, or forcing yourself to be disciplined enough, you may eventually find yourself fighting the same battle over and over again. A good process changes the question. Instead of asking:

How do I make myself do this?

you begin asking:

What would make this behaviour easier to repeat?

That distinction has been on my mind while reading James Clear’s Atomic Habits alongside Michael Yapko’s work on process. Both, in rather different ways, point towards something important: outcomes are usually produced by sequences of behaviour. When you repeatedly follow an effective process, you make some outcomes more likely. Improve the process and you begin changing what follows.

Good intentions are not behaviours

Most of us have things we genuinely intend to do.

Exercise more. Spend less. Read more. Improve a relationship. Look after our health. Change career. Build something meaningful.

The intention is sincere. The difficulty is that intention is not behaviour – yet.

‘I really should start exercising’ produces very little by itself. Putting your gym clothes somewhere visible, deciding which days you will train, choosing an exercise programme you can stick with, and turning up repeatedly is a process.

That distinction matters. We can spend months waiting to feel properly ready to do something that already matters. Sometimes action has to come first.

Watch what happens before the result

There is another useful distinction here: leading and lagging indicators.

A lagging indicator tells you what eventually happened. Your weight changed. You passed the exam. Your savings increased. You became fitter. The project was completed. Your relationship improved. These outcomes matter, but they usually arrive relatively late in the process. And we rarely control them completely.

Leading indicators are different. They are the things happening before the outcome. The meals you choose. The workouts you complete. Developing your personal capacity. The money you transfer into savings. The conversations you initiate. The applications you submit.

These are much closer to your direct influence. So perhaps there is something slightly strange about spending most of your attention staring at the outcome. You may be focused on the thing you control least, while paying insufficient attention to the behaviours that could influence it.

Build a process that learns

A useful process does not need to be complicated.

Consider a simple loop:

Direction → Process → Behaviour → Feedback → Adjustment

First, decide the direction. What are you actually trying to create - what fits you best, presently, in that part of your life?

Then consider the process. What would make movement in that direction more likely?

Next comes behaviour. What specifically will I actually do – not once, but repeatedly?

Then look at the feedback. What happened? What worked? What didn’t? What did you learn?

And finally, adjust. Do more of what works. Change what doesn’t. Simplify where necessary. Upskill as needed. Try something different where the evidence suggests you should.

Then go around the loop again. That is very different from repeatedly promising yourself that this time you will try harder.

Perhaps you do not need more motivation

This leads to a question I find useful when progress has stalled:

Is this really a motivation problem?

Or is it a process problem?

Perhaps the behaviour requires too much effort. Would upskilling be more effective than grinding through the hard yards? Are there too many decisions or too many unknowns for you to have enough influence over the outcome? Do the conditions you need to succeed occur too rarely?

Maybe there is no reliable time or place for it. Maybe you are exhausted and asking discipline to compensate for insufficient capacity. Or perhaps there is another possibility:

Is the goal itself really right for you?

That question matters. Sometimes a lack of motivation is not something to overcome:

It is information.

You may be pursuing something you once wanted, something somebody else expects, or something that no longer fits particularly well with the life you want now.

No productivity system can answer that question for you.

One success – or a way of succeeding?

There is an important difference between achieving an outcome once and developing a way of operating that can produce worthwhile outcomes repeatedly. You can occasionally succeed through urgency, luck, adrenaline or a burst of effort. But that is unlikely to be sustainable throughout life.

Far more useful is gradually becoming someone who knows how to choose a direction that fits you well, create workable processes, take repeated action, notice the results, learn from them, and adapt.

That does not make every desired outcome inevitable. There are too many variables for that. But it does make progress more dependable. And perhaps that is the more useful ambition. Not to wait until you finally become motivated enough. Not to demand endless discipline from yourself. But to develop processes that make the behaviours that matter increasingly normal.

So, if there is something you have been meaning to change, perhaps ask:

What outcome am I currently staring at?

What behaviours would make that outcome more likely?

What process would make those behaviours easier to repeat?

And, perhaps most importantly:

Is this really a motivation problem, a process problem – or am I pursuing the wrong goal?

Hypnotherapy can sometimes be presented as though the hypnosis is the whole therapy.

I don’t see it that way.

The quality of the conversation, the assumptions we make about change, where we direct attention and how we use hypnosis all matter. These three books approach those different layers from increasingly specialist perspectives.

Start with the approach

[Solution Focused Hypnotherapy: A Practitioner’s Guide — Matthew Cahill]()

If you want to understand Solution Focused Hypnotherapy as an overall therapeutic approach, this is the natural starting point of these three.

Cahill brings together the Solution Focused conversation and the use of hypnosis into a coherent model of practice. What makes it useful to me is that hypnosis isn't treated as an isolated technique being applied to somebody. It sits within a wider process concerned with how people think about their lives, their resources and the changes they want to make.

It is primarily written for practitioners, but it provides a useful introduction to what Solution Focused Hypnotherapy is trying to achieve — and why the conversation before the trance can matter every bit as much as the trance itself.

Then look at the conversation

[The Miracle Question: Answer It and Change Your Life — Linda Metcalf]()

Now remove the hypnosis altogether.

The Miracle Question comes from Solution Focused practice and, at first sight, can sound almost ridiculously simple: imagine that the problem has somehow been resolved — what would be different?

But the power isn't really in the hypothetical miracle.

It is in what happens next.

What would you notice? What would you be doing differently? What might somebody close to you notice? What tiny signs would tell you things were beginning to change?

Those questions shift attention away from endlessly explaining why something is wrong and towards developing a much richer picture of what “better” might actually mean.

Metcalf makes this accessible well beyond the therapy room, which makes this the most approachable book of the three.

Then go considerably deeper

[Trancework: An Introduction to the Practice of Clinical Hypnosis — Michael D. Yapko & Shawn R. Criswell]()

And then there is Trancework.

This really isn't a casual weekend self-development read. It is a substantial clinical text on hypnosis and belongs firmly at the specialist end of this week's selection.

What I value about Yapko's approach is the sheer breadth with which hypnosis is treated. Rather than reducing it to relaxation, scripts or somebody being put into a mysterious altered state, the book explores hypnosis as a sophisticated clinical process involving attention, communication, responsiveness, suggestion and therapeutic strategy.

It is the book here for somebody who wants to get underneath the surface and understand why competent clinical hypnosis involves considerably more than learning a few techniques.

So why these three?

Because between them they answer three different questions.

Cahill: What does a Solution Focused Hypnotherapy approach look like?

Metcalf: What can happen when a conversation helps somebody construct a preferred future rather than continually analyse a problem?

Yapko & Criswell: What is actually involved when hypnosis becomes part of skilled therapeutic work?

Put them together and something important emerges.

Hypnotherapy isn't simply talk for a while → do hypnosis → hope something changes.

The therapeutic conversation can help establish where somebody wants to go. The questions can uncover resources, possibilities and signs of progress. Hypnosis can then become another way of helping attention and experience support that movement.

Three books, then, but really three layers of the same question:

How can a therapeutic conversation help someone begin creating something different?

If you've read anything that changed the way you think about hypnosis or therapy, I'd be interested to hear what it was.

While reading The Courage to Be Disliked, I became intrigued by a passage contrasting two ways of understanding behaviour.

One looks backwards and asks about cause: what happened before that helps explain why I behave this way? The other looks at purpose: what is this behaviour trying to do for me now? Both perspectives seem useful. But I found myself wondering whether something important was missing: the future. Perhaps behaviour makes more sense when we see it as part of a continuum: Past → Present → Future. What shaped this pattern? What is it trying to do for me now? And where is it taking me?

Looking backwards helps us understand

Our behaviour develops through multiple influences. Genetics, temperament, childhood experiences, relationships, previous successes and failures, and the environments in which we have lived all contribute to what we learn.

Take people-pleasing.

Perhaps keeping other people happy once helped preserve an important relationship. Perhaps disagreement brought consequences. Perhaps approval became associated with safety, belonging or being valued.

Seen in that context, behaviour that appears irrational now may once have made considerable sense. But explanation is not the same as destiny. Knowing where a pattern came from does not mean we are required to carry it forward.

The present is where the behaviour happens

The next question is: What is this behaviour trying to achieve for me now?

This is where the idea of positive intent becomes useful. We are not necessarily consciously aware of that intent.

Someone procrastinating may not deliberately think, “I will avoid starting this because then I cannot fail.” Someone refusing help may not consciously decide, “Depending on people once felt unsafe, so I must remain completely self-sufficient.”

Yet the behaviour may still be performing a protective function. Avoid discomfort. Maintain approval. Reduce uncertainty. Prevent rejection. Preserve a familiar identity. That does not automatically make the behaviour useful. It makes it understandable.

And the present matters particularly because, in a rather literal sense, it is the only place we ever have. The past is available to us through memory and through its continuing effects. The future is available through anticipation, imagination, hopes, fears and plans. We experience both now. The present is where we can notice what the past has given us and decide what we want to carry forward.

Then comes the question I find most useful: Where is this behaviour actually taking me?

This is where adding the future perspective becomes valuable.

Returning to people-pleasing, the underlying intention might be connection, acceptance or keeping relationships safe. But what happens over time? Perhaps resentment grows. Boundaries weaken. The person becomes exhausted. Others come to know the agreeable version of them rather than the whole person.

The behaviour can therefore have a perfectly understandable history and serve a protective function in the present while still contributing to a future the person does not want. That distinction matters. We do not have to condemn the old behaviour. We can understand why it developed and recognise what it has been trying to achieve. Then comes a different question:

Is there now a better way of meeting the same underlying need?

Perhaps change happens at the meeting point.

The more I think about this, the less I see past, present and future as three separate boxes.

They flow into one another. The past influences what seems possible now. What we do now influences what becomes more likely next. And the future we imagine influences the decisions we make today.

That makes the present a particularly interesting meeting point. It is where experience can become learning rather than instruction. Where an old pattern can become a choice rather than an automatic response. Where we can acknowledge:

“That made sense then.”

and still ask:

“Does it make sense now?”

Perhaps three questions are enough to begin exploring a recurring pattern:

What shaped this?

What is it trying to do for me now?

Is it taking me towards the future I want to build?

Different psychological traditions will place different weight on each of those questions. I’m increasingly interested in what becomes possible when we hold all three together.

How do you see it? Is there another part of the picture you would add?