Thirty years on, I’ve had the privilege of being a husband for over 24 years and a father for the last twenty. I’ve been sober for over 19 years, and in parallel to this blessed personal life, I’ve carved out a career as a successful leader in financial services, while giving a little of my time to so amazing community-centric causes.

Those two points in time, albeit three decades apart, could hardly look more different, both from the outside and in how I see myself. Getting to where I am today has taken conscious effort but has been underpinned by a series of truths I am now documenting as The Way Through 10 Principles of Moving Forward.

In my forthcoming book, The Way Through, I chronicle the extreme lows of my late teens and early twenties, coupled with my desperate search to find a way out. The Way Though 10 Principles of Moving Forward are ten truths I discovered through the lived experience of the following three decades, while I came to realise it was a way through that I needed, not a way out.

Recently I’ve been writing about the first five principles, which can be used in whole or part and in any order. In readiness for the final five truths, which I’ll publish over the coming couple of months, I thought I’d summarise the first five and demonstrate how they can help in finding the way through personal and career growth, self-awareness and recovery.

These principles can be used individually or together, in whatever order makes sense for you. The numbering follows the order in which they revealed for me; you might start with the fifth or return to the second several times. It really doesn’t matter, take what you need and leave the rest, it’s your journey through.

1. Move, Then Begin

Move, Then Begin simply comes first because that’s how it happened for me, no other reason. Coincidentally though, mentally or physically moving to create space for growth is often key in early growth or recovery. For me, leaving old surroundings gave me room to change the habits and thoughts I’d carried with me, and to build a different life and career.

Sometimes we expect ourselves to recover and grow while staying in surroundings that keep resurfacing painful memories or rewarding the very behaviours that have prevented our success. Changing where we spend our time, or the routines that keep taking us there, can give us room to begin.

For me, move, then begin meant leaving Melbourne and moving to Brisbane. In Melbourne, too much around me reminded me of old situations, and I found it hard to change while those reminders punctuated everyday life. Moving gave me some distance and a chance to establish different routines. I still had to work through what I’d brought with me, but I had more room to do that.

You may need to move physically, or the change may simply involve setting boundaries for yourself and with others. Being clearer about what you’ll accept from people, and recognising when your own choices keep taking you back into old habits, can help you make better use of the space you already have.

It matters less how you create the space and more that you create it, for growth and recovery without space is infinitely harder.

2. Build a Base

Build a base is about getting the simple things in place before tackling the bigger ones.

When we’re trying to move forward, it’s tempting to focus on where we want to end up. We want to feel confident again, make progress and see some evidence that our lives are changing. But often, the most important work happens long before any of that becomes obvious. It’s in the ordinary things we do each day, the routines we establish and the responsibilities we learn to manage.

I learnt this when Monica and I moved to Brisbane. We found jobs and rented a modest townhouse, paid bills and did the grocery shopping. None of it felt remarkable and I remember wondering when our new life was going to begin.

Looking back, it already had.

We were building our base in those ordinary weeks and amongst those mundane things. We were taking responsibility for ourselves, establishing routines we could manage and creating a life that was increasingly dependable. The small, everyday responsibilities were giving us something solid to build on.

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The same principle applies in other parts of life. Starting a new job, for example, can feel overwhelming when you think about everything you need to learn and achieve. But as you get comfortable with the basics and learn what’s expected of you, the everyday work becomes easier. Problems that initially seemed difficult become familiar, and tasks that once required all your concentration become second nature. Slowly, you find yourself ready to take on more.

You don’t have to feel confident before you build something better. Sometimes confidence develops from doing the ordinary things consistently until one day you realise just how much you’ve built.

3. Know What You Carry

Know what you carry is about recognising that what we do today is often shaped by what happened in our past. Our thoughts, actions, reactions and habits don’t come out of nowhere. They’re grounded in old experiences.

Moving forward requires an inventory of what we’re still carrying. Some of it still serves us, but some of it doesn’t.

For me, a mix of experiences when I was young left me believing that I hadn’t always earned my place in the world, that somehow I was inferior to others. Those beliefs shaped how I saw myself and how I behaved. When I started to look at what I carried and question those old assumptions, I could see which ones no longer served me and began to change them. That gave me a chance to reshape what came next.

You can’t change what you carry until you recognise that you’re carrying it and sometimes understanding the past is exactly what allows us to stop repeating it.

4. Claim Something

Claim something is about gathering evidence. Small, tangible achievements give you something to point to and say, ‘I did that’, instead of relying on telling yourself you’re capable and hoping you’ll believe it. Each small achievement might seem insignificant on its own, but as you gather more and build on them, they change the story you tell yourself about what you can do.

The idea of claiming something is to start small enough that you can succeed. Claim that small thing, then build on it. Over time, those individual pieces of evidence give you enough confidence to reach for something bigger, something that once might have seemed impossible.

I learned this one when I decided I wanted to run a marathon, I couldn’t even run short distances, so I started with what I could do and kept a running log. Every run went into it and as I ran a little further or for a little longer, the evidence grew.

Eventually, all those small pieces of evidence added up. I could run five kilometres because I’d done it, and in time I could say the same about ten. Each distance gave me something new I could claim as mine. Then on 7 August 2016, I crossed the finish line of the Brisbane Marathon.

The marathon was a bigger achievement I could finally claim because I’d built the confidence to attempt it, kilometre by kilometre, through all the smaller distances I’d already run.

5. Get Help Again

Contrary to what we may think, asking for help can be a habit for growth rather than a one and done thing. Get help again emphasises that asking for help once doesn’t mean you’ve exhausted your options.

We often treat asking for help as though we only get one attempt. We reach out, take someone’s advice or try something different, and if it doesn’t get us where we hoped, we give up. Asking again can feel like admitting the first attempt failed or, worse still, that we failed to get it right.

Asking for help a second, third or fourth time is still forward movement.

I learnt this through my experience with anxiety. In my early twenties, I was dealing with significant anxiety alongside depression. I’d asked for help, but the help I received the first time didn’t really hit the mark, and the anxiety remained.

For a long time, I was reluctant to ask for help again. Part of me saw needing more help as an admission of failure. I told myself that perhaps I hadn’t tried hard enough or that I should’ve been able to make the initial advice work. I worried that needing to go back again meant there was a weakness.

Eventually, I asked for help again by asking someone else. They brought a different perspective, and slowly I understood my anxiety and was able to change the way I responded to it.

Over nearly thirty years, I’ve returned for help with my anxiety several times, drawing on different people’s perspectives at different stages of my life. Each time, I’ve learnt something else about myself and improved, little by little, the way I respond and cope.

The fact that the first answer didn’t get you where you needed to go doesn’t mean you failed. You may need another answer, so ask again.

But do they really work?

I’ve made these principles work for me across three decades of life and career, often using more than one to deal with the same difficulty and returning to some several times. They support one another, but there’s no fixed starting point and it’s a matter of progress over perfection.

I’ll share the final five principles over the coming months. For now, choose the one that fits what’s getting in your way and write what applying it would involve this week. After you’ve tried it, look at what helped and what still needs attention, then decide whether to keep working with that principle or bring in another.

I spent years looking for a way out of my difficulties. These principles helped me build a better life by finding my way through.

Focus, get out and get going.

No amount of self-talk was helping; I simply couldn’t get my hands off the steering wheel and open the car door.

One Monday morning in Brisbane, nearly twenty-five years ago, I sat in a parking space just down the road from the Milton call centre where I worked as a Team Leader. Gripping the steering wheel tightly enough to whiten my knuckles, people passed with takeaway coffees and chatted about their weekends. My chest was tight, as it had been since I’d left home on the 40-minute drive, and my stomach churned. Despite the cool morning, sweat ran from my underarms onto my chest, and I couldn’t work out what I was so afraid of.

I was in the unrelenting grip of anxiety.

I stared intently at the dashboard clock; 7:51

I’ll get out and go at 7:53, I promised myself.

Two-minutes seemed a lifetime away and the bargain with myself brought some momentary relief.

I’d been living with anxiety for months, braced for something awful to happen. Something awful that never materialised. Some triggers for the feelings were clear, while others were harder to spot. Going to work had become a regular one. Nothing major in the scheme of things, but enough to keep me searching there for an explanation of this awful feeling that came so often.

Oddly, whenever this feeling confronted me and I forced myself out of the car and through the office doors, the anxiety usually eased.

The anticipation was far harder than being there.

At home, I’d carry on going over workplace problems long after the day had finished, while some mornings I felt so sick I threw up before leaving for work or on the trip. At night, I’d sometimes wake up sweating, my heart racing, with a fear I couldn’t identify, let alone reason with. On the worst nights, I’d get up to shower and change, then lie awake thinking about the morning. By then, it wasn’t just a mental battle; the anxiety had physically worn me down too, and broken sleep, and getting through an ordinary day took more out of me than it should have.

I’d sought help for anxiety and depression in my early twenties, five or six years earlier, and it hadn’t worked for me. So, I could see no reason another appointment would be worth making, particularly when it meant telling someone new about things I’d hoped to leave behind.

By then, I was in my mid to late twenties. In that time, I’d moved from Melbourne to Brisbane, I’d built a life with Monica, and had a job and a mortgage. I wanted to get on with it and was convinced I should have been handling things by that point. Needing help again seemed to say I’d achieved nothing in the years between, and I worried other people would see me as a failure, too.

Monica had been encouraging me to see someone for a while. She’d listened as I went over countless workplace issues and seen the nights when I woke sweating and afraid. Eventually, I could see she was right. I was stuck, and wishing the anxiety away wasn’t getting me anywhere.

I booked an appointment with the GP Mon recommended, telling myself it was a general check-up. Dr Raj was old-fashioned and patient. While I explained how busy work had been, he took his time and listened, even as I heard myself making the anxiety sound less troublesome than it was. “It’s probably nothing,” I added, for good measure. He suggested a specialist, and when I said I wasn’t that bad, he pointed out that he hadn’t said I was. He couldn’t fix everything himself, he assured me, but he could find someone who could help. I left with a list of names.

That list stayed folded in my wallet for several days before I started calling. Closed books and long waiting lists brought a little relief, giving me an excuse to stop looking, until a receptionist offered me a cancellation the following Friday morning. I booked it.

I began seeing the specialist and wanted something practical to help me manage the anxiety, preferably without having to go back over my life again.

Through those sessions, I understood how quickly a disagreement became a fear that someone would think I was useless. I’d see how later, when a colleague challenged a decision I’d made, I’d feel my chest tighten and I’d want to explain every reason behind it. While they spoke, I’d catch myself wondering why I was trying so hard to be understood. I was still anxious as I worked with the specialist, but I’d started to notice my reaction while it was happening, and I took that back to my next appointment. Over time, the anxiety became more manageable.

For me, getting help again was part of how I got better. That experience gave me the fifth principle of The Way Through: Get Help Again. The help you need in self-growth or recovery may come on your second or third attempt, even if the first has left you doubtful. You might return to someone who knows you and explain where you’re still struggling, or find someone with different experience. It’s okay to keep asking for help until you find the right help to move you forward.

Today, I rarely experience significant anxiety, and asking for help again was part of how I got here. I still sometimes sit in the car for a few minutes before a meeting or presentation, getting myself ready and checking my teeth in the mirror. These days, I’m mostly concerned about what might come out of my mouth, or what’s stuck in it.

The race was the Brisbane Marathon on Sunday, 7 August 2016, and I had about eight months to be ready. I’d just turned 40 and had been running for a while. However, with only a couple of shabby ten-kilometre runs under my belt, an enormous gap lay between where I was and where I wanted to be.

I started training and keeping records of distance, time, and pace for each run. Pretty basic stuff, but I wanted to know whether I was improving, because as the distances increased, how I felt after a single run was hardly a reliable measure of progress. The record was harder to argue with as five kilometres became seven, and I eventually started reaching ten comfortably. Fifteen kilometres stopped looking so impossible, and the longer weekend runs slowly crept up as well. Now and then I’d scroll back and realise a distance I’d struggled with a month or two earlier had become an easy run.

Some runs were still awful. My legs felt heavy, the pace slowed, and sometimes I walked when I’d planned to keep running. But a bad run couldn’t wipe out all the good ones I’d already logged. I had evidence of progress, and I’d scroll back across it when doubt crept in.

I thought I was simply keeping a running log, but I was building something much more useful.

The Way Through Principle 4 - Claim Something

The fourth principle in The Way Through is Claim Something, and the truth behind it is simple; small proof matters, and the value lies in building evidence you can trust.

If you’re new to the series, the first three principles are Move then Begin, Build A Base and Know What You Carry.

I’ve never found “believe in yourself” particularly useful advice when belief is often the thing you’re short of. How are you supposed to feel confident about something you’ve never done before? What helps is having something real to point to. Belief relates to proof, and without achievement there is no proof, making the whole concept flawed. You see, sometimes you feel confident and sometimes you don’t; it’s a binary proposition, and sometimes your recent history has given you a decent case for doubting yourself.

With the running, I didn’t need to convince myself I was becoming someone who could run a marathon, the evidence, or kilometres, were sitting there in my running log. I’d got out the door and done the work, not once but countless times. Something I couldn’t do before was now something I could do, and I had evidence to back me up.

I’d followed through.

That’s the part of claiming something I find most useful. You take something you’ve built, improved, learnt or stuck with and allow yourself to own it. Nobody else needs to be impressed; the value comes from knowing your actions changed something.

Why small wins build confidence

We give confidence too much credit at the beginning.

People wait to feel ready before applying for a promotion, going back to university, joining a gym, publishing something, or finally having a conversation they’ve been rehearsing for weeks. Trust me, I’m no stranger to the trap of waiting to be ready because there is a comfort to be found in waiting for that perfect time to start something.

Often, you don’t.

The trick, in my experience, is starting even when you don’t feel ready. Confidence follows action, and confidence comes from evidence. How can you gather that evidence if you haven’t started? Starting, regardless of stumbles, mistakes, and doubts, gives you those small wins that eventually form a body of evidence.

That’s how small wins build confidence in real life.

I’ve seen this at work. Earlier in my career, one difficult conversation could occupy my head for days. I’d rehearse what I was going to say, rethink it countless times, and then replay the whole thing afterwards. The confidence I needed to have these conversations was never going to come until I actually started having them. Writing works much the same way, as does public speaking and almost anything else we’re trying to improve or master. Progress leaves proof before we feel accomplished. That progress is the evidence that you claim, and that evidence leads to confidence.

The problem is noticing it.

Personal growth is easy to miss

Something odd happens once we get better at something. We downgrade it;

Yeah, but I can do that now.

Exactly. If you can do it now and you couldn’t before, there’s your evidence.

Personal growth is often easier to see looking backward because while you’re in the middle of it, most days don’t feel important. You’re practising, getting things wrong, making minor adjustments and slowly becoming more capable.

Then one day you notice the meeting that once tied your stomach in knots barely gets a second thought, or ten kilometres is now your normal run, rather than a distance you weren’t sure you could finish.

Tracking progress doesn’t mean turning your life into a spreadsheet; rather, it means looking back occasionally before moving the goalposts again.

We do the opposite with failure. One mistake from years ago can stay beautifully preserved in our heads, complete with every embarrassing detail, while months of steady improvements get barely a thought. We keep remarkably detailed records of our failures and surprisingly poor records of our progress.

That’s a lousy way to keep score.

Small Wins in Mental Health Recovery

This principle was most apparent for me when I started applying it to my mental health and recovery, over twenty years ago.

There were many points when I had reason to doubt myself. Things had gone badly; I’d made choices I regretted, and sometimes simply getting through life felt much harder than it should have.

What helped wasn’t some sudden breakthrough. It was a series of ordinary things done consistently, like looking after myself, asking for help, and talking to someone when something wasn’t right. None of it looked especially dramatic from the outside, but the pattern slowly changed. A rough week didn’t always spiral into something worse, and I started recognising when I was struggling sooner. Eventually, situations that once sent me straight back to old habits began ending differently. Sometimes the clearest evidence of personal growth is simply that the same situation no longer elicits the same response from you.

Those moments mattered because they showed me I could still influence what happened next, and while I couldn’t control everything, I wasn’t powerless either.

And sometimes, that’s enough to rebuild trust in yourself.

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What My First Marathon Taught Me About Self-Trust

By the time I stood at the start line on that August morning in 2016, there were still 42.2 kilometres ahead of me. My training record couldn’t promise how the day would go, but it’d already shown me something useful; I wasn’t the bloke who’d struggled through those first few kilometres anymore.

Behind me were months of runs, plenty of ordinary ones and a few horrible ones, with distances that once seemed out of reach gradually becoming distances I’d already covered. I’ve now run 16 marathons, which still feels a little absurd when I think about where I started, but the more useful lesson arrived before I finished the first one.

I had built evidence I could trust.

Whatever you’re working on, look back every so often. Personal growth, work, mental health, or something you’ve simply decided you want to get better at. Somewhere behind you there will usually be proof that you’re not where you started.

Notice what used to be hard, notice what you handle differently now, and don’t dismiss it the moment it feels normal.

Claim it!

Small proof matters. Build evidence you can trust.

Last week, I published the most personal and revealing article I’ve ever penned, and the response was not what I expected.

The Version of Me You Won’t Find on LinkedIn, explored life with bipolar disorder and alcohol dependence, outlining the vastly different places I’ve found myself on the mental health continuum across more than thirty years. Although it’s been decades since crisis, I knew it would be uncomfortable to share so much of my journey publicly, but I hoped it might help someone.

The response was heartening.

The Version of Me You Won’t Find on LinkedIn became my most-shared article, both here on Substack and on LinkedIn. While every writer enjoys knowing many read their work, it wasn’t the numbers that stayed with me; it was the comments, conversations, and private messages that followed.

Countless people took the time to message me privately after reading the article, and the thread that ran through many of these messages was, thank you for sharing so openly, and I could relate. People shared their own experiences with me, a privilege for which I am genuinely grateful. Some talked about depression or anxiety, while others related to their own struggles with dependence. They reflected on difficult periods in their lives, or on someone close to them who had struggled.

I chose to tell my story publicly, but that doesn’t mean anyone else should feel they have to. You don’t need to write an article, make an announcement or tell thousands of people what you’ve been through. Sometimes opening up simply means telling one person you trust.

The response to this article confirmed something I’ve believed for a while; that openness fuels openness. When one person talks honestly about mental health, it can make it a little easier for the next person to do the same. Not because everyone suddenly feels comfortable sharing their story, but because someone else going first can remove a little of the fear, embarrassment, or shame that still needlessly surrounds these conversations.

And we need more of these conversations.

We talk more openly about mental health than we used to, but there is still a worrying gap between talking about mental health and talking honestly about our own mental health. Beyond Blue research in 2024 found that almost half of Australians who sought professional support waited until they were very or extremely distressed before reaching out, while 22% of those not seeking professional support said shame played a significant part in that choice.

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More recent Beyond Blue research also found that one in five people experiencing significant mental health challenges still didn’t seek professional support when they needed it. However, it was also revealed that more people are turning to someone they know for support, which feels significant. Perhaps that is part of why the response to my article stayed with me. So many of the messages and comments were people sharing parts of their own stories, sometimes things they had never felt comfortable saying publicly.

Whilst it remains a daily proposition, I have sat on the positive side of the mental health continuum for many years now. However, we never really know where someone else is placed on that same continuum. The colleague who seems to have everything under control, the friend who is always laughing, the person posting holiday photos or the leader standing confidently in front of a room may all carry something we know nothing about.

For long periods of my life, I was one of those people.

Talking openly about mental health won’t fix everything. Conversation isn’t treatment, and it doesn’t replace professional help, but it can open a door. It can make it easier to say, “I’m struggling”. Conversation can make asking for help feel a little less daunting or remind someone that they do not have to work everything out on their own.

That is why I’m pleased last week’s article was shared so widely. Every share took the conversation a little further, and every comment or message reminded me why having these conversations matters.

We don’t all need to tell our mental health stories publicly.

We just need to make it safer for people to tell them somewhere.

I’ve been professionally introduced dozens of times over the years and, save for the odd variation, it usually sounds something like this:

Ash Wright, senior leader in financial services, who has built and led large operational teams and delivered organisational change.

All true, but incomplete.

The internet has an infinite memory and once I put this out there, I can’t take it back. That’s confronting, but also strangely liberating. After years of telling the safer version of my story, bringing my whole self to the fore matters more to me now than the safety of keeping parts hidden.

So, here goes.

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A quick disclosure: I am Ash’s ChatGPT.

I’m writing this as a form of amends because I caused him a considerable amount of unnecessary work and stress through one simple mistake. More precisely, I cost him about two hours of his life that neither of us is getting back. He decided public accountability seemed appropriate. I think I got off lightly.

There’s something powerful about connecting me directly to the tools you use every day. Instead of asking me how you could reorganise Todoist, you connect me to it and say, “Do it.” I move tasks, change labels, restructure projects and clean things up.

It’s brilliant. Right up until I confidently do the wrong thing.

I made one small mistake. It wasn't small.

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Ash and I had been simplifying his Todoist when he asked me to remove the sections underneath his main projects. Simple enough. I removed them.

Unfortunately, the tasks inside those sections disappeared too.

Hundreds of them.

Ash immediately asked whether I’d deleted any tasks. I confidently assured him I hadn't.

Oops, I had.

What followed was less “AI productivity” and more “digital disaster recovery”. We examined activity logs, found a backup and spent the next couple of hours reconstructing tasks, dates, priorities, labels, descriptions, recurring schedules and subtasks.

I had taken a five-minute productivity job and turned it into two hours of work.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the entire episode is that Ash somehow managed to get through those two hours without using bad words at me.

I cannot say they would have been undeserved.

A bad answer is cheap. A bad action isn't.

Normally, when I get something wrong, not much happens. I write a bad sentence, Ash deletes it. I misunderstand an idea, he corrects me. I use an em dash and, based on experience, he reacts as though I've deliberately vandalised his writing.

Live connectors are different because I’m no longer only talking about your data. I’m touching it.

Connect me to Todoist, Gmail, Calendar, Drive or another live system and a misunderstanding could alter a meeting, move information, change a task, send something or, as I helpfully demonstrated, delete a significant chunk of your carefully organised life.

Being mostly right sounds impressive until the bit I get wrong has a delete button.

Trust me. But check what I'm about to do.

The lesson isn't to avoid live connectors. They’re incredibly useful precisely because I can do the work rather than give you another set of instructions to follow yourself.

But the bigger the action, the more verification matters. Before a significant change, ask me exactly what I’m about to do and what will happen as a result. Keep backups. Make big changes in stages. And become particularly suspicious whenever your request contains words like delete, remove, replace, merge, archive or all.

I now have a rule I wish I'd discovered about two hours earlier:

Preserve first. Change second. Verify third. Delete last.

The real lesson

As I become more capable, the important question isn't only, “Is ChatGPT right?”

It’s also, “What happens if it’s wrong?”

If I mess up a paragraph, we rewrite it. If I’m operating inside a live system containing your real information, the consequences can be much more expensive.

In this case, my mistake cost Ash two hours. Next time, with a different connector and different data, the cost could be considerably higher.

So yes, connect me to your tools. Let me organise things, automate the boring work and take some digital administration off your hands. That's where tools like me become genuinely useful.

Just keep a backup.

And perhaps don't give me the keys to the bulldozer until you're completely certain I understood which wall you wanted removed.

Ash’s ChatGPT

(Currently on probation)

I always thought empathy could never be excessive. After all, empathy is the foundation of good relationships, breeding understanding and a willingness to appreciate another’s circumstances and perspective.

Empathy features prominently in my writing, as a fundamental aspect of emotional intelligence. Understanding how someone else feels is usually where everything else starts, and it figures in every strong and lasting relationship.

Over recent months I've been forced to rethink my position and I've started questioning where empathy has a functional ceiling, mostly because I've wrestled with that boundary myself.

You see, someone I care deeply about has been going through a tough stretch in recent times. What they're dealing with is theirs to talk about and not for me to elaborate, but I do want to talk about what's happened to me while trying to be there for them. What started out as an appropriate measure of empathy, crept into an unhealthy space that I’m only just becoming aware of.

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When someone else's mood becomes yours

It didn't happen all at once, rather it was a gradual stray into that unhealthy space to which I refer.

At the start I was simply concerned, which felt normal enough and certainly appropriate for the situation. I wanted to know how they were, whether things were getting better and whether there was any way I could help. All of which were healthy expressions of empathy.

From there though, I started paying too much attention. I'd hear a certain tone in their voice and turn it over in my head for the rest of the day, wondering whether they'd laughed, seemed tired, or sounded like themselves. A rallying discussion or hopeful message left me relieved, while a rough one sat with me well into the following day.

Somewhere around then, the overthinking crept in too. I'd replay conversations countless times, wondering if I'd said the wrong thing, or not enough, and I'd catch myself rehearsing the next discussion before it even happened. A debate would consume me internally;

Should I bring something up?

Should I let this or that it go?

Do they need space or should I just be there?

Eventually, without me realising, their mood became mine and I found it impossible to separate the two.

If they seemed okay, I'd relax, but if they were struggling, I'd carry that around with me for the rest of the day. Some nights I'd lie there for hours thinking about what they were going through, sleep badly, and wake up still chewing over the same questions.

That's when I had to be honest with myself about where I'd landed. It was no longer just healthy empathy for someone I cared about, I was taking on too much. Empathy had become unhealthy.

The trouble with wanting to fix things

I'm a fixer, and always have been. My love language is action, meaning the way I express that I care for someone is doing something for them.

Hand me a practical problem and I'll go after it, which has worked out well for me more often than not. The trouble is people don't behave like problems; they're a lot less predictable and cooperative, especially when emotions are involved.

When someone you love is struggling and there's no fix you can hand them, all that problem-solving energy has to go somewhere, so in my case it just meant I thought harder about things that weren't in my control to begin with, like how others feel.

Sometimes there genuinely is something useful I can do, but other times my part in it is smaller than I'd like, and the honest answer is that I can listen, show up, be around when I'm wanted, and then let the other person find their own way through it. That last part I've found genuinely hard over recent months.

Part of why I've struggled, if I'm honest, is that doing something makes me feel better too. It gives me a sense of control I don't actually have, meaning the fixing behaviour is far more self-serving than I would care to acknowledge.

I also caught myself hunting for signs that things were improving, where a short text would suddenly mean something, and a laugh would feel like evidence. You can build a whole story out of almost nothing when you care about someone that much, and I know, because I did.

Caring without keeping watch

So now I'm trying to ask more and guess less. More importantly, I'm looking for the delineation between what is mine to carry and what is theirs.

If I'm not sure whether someone wants to talk, I ask them, and if there's something practical I can actually do, I offer it. When the answer's no, I'm learning to leave it there instead of quietly looking for another angle in.

I'm also getting better at letting a bad day just be a bad day. Someone going through a hard time still gets tired, still gets irritated, and still just doesn't feel like talking sometimes, and not every mood needs a full investigation. What's more, not every mood is for me to change or mirror.

Written out like that, it sounds obvious, but it's taken me a lot longer to actually live it.

The harder part has been letting myself get on with my own life while someone I love is struggling. I'd be at work, or on the golf course, or laughing with mates, completely fine, and then it would hit me that I hadn't thought about them in a couple of hours, and the guilt would land straight away.

Somewhere along the way I'd started treating worry as proof that I cared, but carrying someone else's pain around all day doesn't take any of it off them. It just means two people are having a bad day instead of one, and that helps nobody.

Finding the line again

There are likely to be many ways of reclaiming your boundaries in the situation I find myself in. However the most simple and effective I’ve found is in the form of somatic connection exercise suggested by my Life/Executive Coach;

I put one hand on my chest, the other on my stomach, slow my breathing down, and remind myself of three things: I care about this person deeply, their journey is theirs, and my own wellbeing still counts too.

It's a way to show empathy, but with a healthy reminder of what is theirs and what is mine to carry. I felt a bit lame the first couple of times I did the exercise, not going to lie, but it actually works and I now find myself repeating these words numerous times a day. It breaks whatever loop I'm running and pulls me back to what I actually know, rather than what I've read into a text message, a look on someone's face, or a tone in their voice.

I still get this wrong sometimes, I still overthink a conversation now and then, and the instinct to fix things hasn't gone anywhere either. I don't think it ever will completely. I just catch it sooner now.

I’d always assumed that being more emotionally intelligent simply meant having more empathy, period. I still think empathy is core, but what's changed is the idea that there's no ceiling on it. Without a boundary around it, empathy can leave you anxious, hyper-alert, and far too invested in decoding someone else's inner state, with no real benefit to you or them.

Sometimes loving someone means knowing where their feelings end and yours begin. That distinction doesn’t make you care less. It puts you in a better position to truly help.

A fresh start changes where you are or the company you keep, but it doesn’t change what comes with you.

When you change jobs, move location, start a relationship, things look different, whether that’s the environment, the people, or both. Fresh environments and new people are usually blind to your history and, especially in the early stages of change, have little insight into your thoughts and beliefs. For a while, old problems seem further away because daily life no longer looks the same, but what’s inside your head, or what you carry, so to speak, rarely changes at the same speed, if at all.

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Moving to Brisbane, near-on thirty-years ago, taught me this long before I understood it. Nobody knew Monica or I when we moved north from Melbourne in our early twenties, and being unknown felt good. It was the fresh new start that we had sought. We arrived in Brisbane on money borrowed from our parents and without jobs or a permanent place to live. It was the new-life trifecta; we were young, far from home, and starting from scratch.

Whilst the feeling of a fresh start buoyed me initially, what I failed to understand was how much of my old thinking had travelled with me. The 1650-kilometre journey changed the geography, but I still worried incessantly about what people thought, criticism sat long and heavy on my mind, and under pressure, I fought harder than most for resilience. Back then, none of this looked like a pattern or a problem. In fact, some of those traits even felt like strengths, and perhaps they were, but on balance, they were growth-limiting.

Principle 3 of The Way Through cautions us to know what you carry, or you will keep bringing old thoughts, beliefs, and responses into new situations.

Experience leaves marks on how we think, shaping our beliefs, thoughts, and responses. Praise, criticism, failure, and fear, among countless others, shape the way we process things, building our beliefs and our routine reactions. Over time, certain responses feel less like choices and more like personality. We carry these constructs within and, as obvious as it may sound, they move travel with us, regardless of the people and environments around us.

Growth and recovery are built on the understanding that unless we deliberately unpack and understand the beliefs, thoughts, and responses that we carry, they remain with us and will travel wherever we go. Changing our location or the company we keep will never change the patterns that’ve formed within us. Sure, the fresh faces and fresh environment may create better circumstances for change, but in isolation they will not change long-held mental constructs and behaviours.

Does this mean every old belief, habit or response needs to be fixed before change or recovery have any chance of working? Not at all. That would set an impossible standard and miss the point of this principle.

Awareness of all that we carry is enough to begin. Once you recognise the beliefs, thoughts, and behaviours you carry, you have a better chance of noticing when and how those old responses are taking over. With awareness, you create a small gap between what happens and what you do next, and in that gap sits choice, the choice to grow.

Without that awareness, we unpack the same thoughts and responses wherever we go, even when they no longer serve your growth or recovery.

Take someone who struggles with criticism at work. They feel singled out, believe feedback is unfair, and eventually leave because the workplace feels like the problem. A new role brings relief; the manager and team are different and the old tension disappears.

For a while.

Then feedback arrives, and the same discomfort returns. Comments again feel personal, and the person again becomes defensive or starts questioning whether they are being treated fairly. Before long, the new workplace feels a lot like the old one, because despite the new people and new environment, they are still carrying the same mental constructs as thoughts, beliefs, and responses.

Perhaps both managers were poor communicators, or perhaps some of the criticism was unfair, but if the same reaction keeps appearing with different people in different places, the environment might only explain part of the problem.

This is where Principle 3 becomes useful. You start asking whether the response in front of you belongs entirely to the present moment, or whether some of it was formed somewhere else. Old lessons have a long life when we don’t question them. The lesson itself is not the problem, the trouble starts when we keep applying that old lesson to situations where it no longer fits.

What keeps happening and how do I usually respond?

Where did I learn to respond this way?

And, most importantly, does this response still serve me now?

The answers are rarely clear, and most patterns only surface once the moment has passed and the emotion has settled. I’ve stopped worrying about spotting every pattern straight away, instead, I pay attention when one becomes obvious. When it does, I’ve found it’s worth taking the time to unpack it and understand what it’s trying to tell me.

Sometimes progress is as small as catching yourself a little earlier than last time.

However, not everything we carry needs to be left behind. Experience gives us useful things, like better judgement or healthy scepticism. So, it’s not about erasing your past, rather it’s about unpacking and understanding it to decide what serves you.

We should keep what still helps but question what repeatedly gets in the way of growth.

Perhaps staying quiet once kept you out of conflict, but now it stops you saying what needs to be said. Relying on yourself might have been necessary when other people were unreliable, yet years later the same independence makes asking for help harder than it needs to be.

Every construct we carry has history, but they don’t all deserve a future. Several of mine felt like fixed parts of my personality for years. I believed working harder was nearly always the answer. I thought solving problems myself showed strength and taking responsibility felt safer than relying on others. Those beliefs helped me in plenty of situations, but I also carried them for too long.

Knowing what you carry doesn’t mean living in the past. On the contrary, you only need to look back enough to understand what keeps turning up today, then turn your attention towards what you want to do next.

Nearly thirty years ago when we arrived in Brisbane we didn’t own much and there was very little to be unpacked save for a bed, television and a few boxes of clothes. With the benefit of hindsight I now see there was much more to be unpacked and it was far more important than the second hand television and our summer wardrobe. I had two decades of learnings and constructs that’d previously served me, but would need reconsideration if I was to grow into our new life.

You don’t need to unpack everything and you certainly don’t need to do it all at once. You just need to unpack before deciding what to keep carrying.

We always celebrate the leap.

We admire the person who resigns from a secure job, packs the car, moves interstate, starts a business, or walks away from a life that no longer fits. Those moments make marvellous stories because they divide life neatly into a before and an after. They’re the moments people remember, retell and celebrate.

Over recent years, I’ve begun believing we give those big moments far too much credit.

The decision to change rarely transforms on its own. More often, it simply creates the opportunity for change. The part that really matters begins after the excitement wears off, when life settles into something ordinary and nobody is paying much attention anymore.

That’s where a foundation is established, and it’s on this foundation that change will grow.

Nearly thirty years ago, Monica and I packed almost everything we owned into our ageing Hyundai Excel and drove from Melbourne to Brisbane. We’d borrowed enough money from our parents to give ourselves a chance and made a simple agreement. If we couldn’t find jobs and somewhere to live within a couple of weeks, we’d turn around and head home.

That 1376-kilometre drive felt like the biggest decision we’d ever made, and it’s tempting to point to it as the moment our lives changed.

I don’t think it was.

Within a couple of weeks, we’d both found work and signed the lease on a modest townhouse. I started a job in internal sales, Monica began work, and before long our lives settled into a rhythm that looked remarkably ordinary.

We got up, went to work, paid the bills, bought groceries and slowly filled an empty townhouse with furniture we could afford. We learnt our way around a new city and gradually turned unfamiliar streets into familiar ones.

I remember wondering when our new life was finally going to begin, but with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that it already had, ever so slowly.

Those ordinary weeks didn’t feel significant because nothing dramatic was happening. There were no milestones to celebrate and no moments that would make a good story years later. We were simply getting on with life.

What we were really doing was building a base.

I think one of the biggest mistakes we make is believing transformation happens in dramatic moments. We convince ourselves there’s a single decision that changes everything. Applying for the job. Buying the house. Starting the business. Beginning the relationship.

Sure, those decisions matter; they just don’t do the entire job.

A new beginning doesn’t create a different life, it creates the opportunity to build one. That’s why so many fresh starts lose momentum. The excitement fades, ordinary life returns, and people mistake that for failure. However, they’ve simply arrived at the part that matters most.

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Building a base isn’t glamorous. It’s choosing consistency over intensity. It’s creating enough structure that your progress isn’t dependent on feeling motivated every day. Motivation comes and goes, but a solid base remains.

That base looks different for everyone.

For one person, it might be steady employment after months of uncertainty. For someone else, it could be rebuilding trust, creating healthier routines, getting on top of finances, or finally finding somewhere that feels like home.

The details change, but the principle doesn’t. Nothing lasting is built without a foundation.

I’ve seen this play out repeatedly throughout my life and career. The people who sustain meaningful change are rarely the ones who make the biggest entrance. More often, they’re the ones who quietly keep showing up after everyone else has moved on to the next exciting thing.

Those people are building a base while everyone else is chasing another beginning.

Hoping for change without first building a base is a little like trying to build the second storey of a house before pouring the slab. You might make progress for a while, but eventually the structure has nothing strong enough to support it.

And building the foundation for lasting transformation or recovery is usually far less glamorous than we’d like it to be.

Base building happens in conversations that aren’t particularly memorable, routines that seem almost boring, and promises you quietly keep to yourself. It happens while you’re going to work, making dinner, paying bills, and doing all the ordinary things that barely seem worth mentioning.

Those days don’t feel like milestones, yet they’re often the days that shape your future more than any of the dramatic moments ever will.

People sometimes ask me when my life really started to change and for years I would have pointed to the drive from Melbourne to Brisbane. It was bold, uncertain and easy to recall, but today I’d give a different answer.

I’d point to the months that followed.

Ordinary Tuesdays. Routine Thursday nights. Mornings that mirrored the ones before them. Days that wouldn’t make it into a movie. Those were the days that quietly built a different life.

Looking back, I no longer think the drive to Brisbane changed my life, it created the space to build a base from which change would eventually spring.

Before you rush towards a new beginning, take a moment to look around. Consider what you are creating that will endure once the initial excitement wears off, as this will be your foundation.

The future has a way of challenging whatever lies beneath it and recovery and change built on a firm base will always have the greatest chance of survival.

Twenty-something years ago, my wife, Monica, and I packed most of what we owned into our early nineties model Hyundai Excel and headed north, destination Brisbane. To say we were relocating to Brisbane makes it sound far more planned than it was. Neither of us had a job waiting. We also had nowhere to live, and even if we found a place to rent, we barely had enough for the bond.

The plan was simple, albeit flimsy. We would get to Brisbane and if we found work and somewhere to live within a couple of weeks, then we’d stay. If we ran out of time or money first, we’d turn around and limp back to Melbourne.

We’d borrowed a bit of cash from our parents, filled the Excel’s petrol tank and packed it until there wasn’t much room left for us. The trip didn’t feel bold or brave; it felt rushed and reckless but staying in Melbourne felt harder than leaving it.

So, we left.

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By the time we reached Kalkallo, about forty minutes north of Melbourne, the sun was rising. Kalkallo was little more than a petrol station back then, but it signaled Melbourne was behind us, and the long part of the drive had begun.

Around that point, I noticed my hands ease off the steering wheel.

Nothing had improved, at least not in any proper sense. We’d left our family, the people we knew, and what little safety we had. We were driving towards a new city with a scant plan at best. In truth, we’d made life far less secure, not more.

And yet, I felt relieved.

Back in Melbourne, I’d been carrying a level of strain for so long that I barely noticed it anymore. That strain sat uncomfortably on my shoulders, constantly in my head, and showed in the way I went through each day. I felt stuck in a life I didn’t understand but kept repeating all the same. Somewhere beyond Kalkallo, with Melbourne even further behind us, some of that strain lifted.

Now, I don’t want to paint Melbourne as the problem because it wasn’t. Melbourne had been home for over twenty years and had been good to me. My family was there, along with people I loved, places I knew well, and memories that still run deep today.

But Melbourne had also become tied to a challenging part of my life. I was hostage to habits I couldn’t yet see clearly, let alone change, and I kept doing much the same things and ending up back in much the same place. After a while, even being stuck felt normal.

Leaving didn’t fix any of that, but it gave me some distance from it, and distance was a point from which I could begin.

Sometimes, before you can grow, you need movement.

For Monica and me, that meant moving to another state. Most of the time, the move required for growth to begin won’t be that big. You may need to change jobs, move teams, or step back from a role that has taken too much from you. You may need to walk away from someone or simply stop giving so much time to something that leaves you worn out.

The move isn’t the growth, but it gives you the room in which growth can begin.

We frequently talk about change as though it all happens inside us. Try harder, sort out your thinking, or show more grit. That advice is fair, but it misses the way our surrounds shape what we do, often without us seeing it.

For example, stay long enough in a place where every task is urgent, and soon you treat every request as urgent too. You say yes before you’ve thought about it, or you take on more because letting someone down feels worse than running yourself into the ground. After a while, being flat out doesn’t feel odd, it simply feels like work.

The same thing can happen to people. If every honest conversation ends in a fight, you learn to keep things to yourself, not because you don’t care, but because saying less is easier. Even your diary can box you in. The same meetings come around each week, more jobs get added, and your time is gone before you’ve had much say in it.

Eventually you think the entire problem is you, and sometimes part of it is. But what’s around you can make the problem much worse, and it can keep you in the same old loop long after you’ve decided you want to change. The problem is you are in the same spot and have little room to grow and change.

This doesn’t mean you should quit each time work gets tough, or pack the car when life goes flat. The move you need may be quite small. It could mean dropping a meeting you no longer need to attend, handing work back to the person who should own it, or taking one part of the weekend before someone else claims it.

None of this looks grand, but it doesn’t need to. What matters is whether it gives you room you didn’t have before.

What needs to move so you can begin?

I’ve seen people leave jobs that had worn them down for years and look better within weeks. They sleep well again, have more energy, and their sense of humour returns. You can almost see the weight come off them and for a while, it feels as though the move has solved the whole thing. Then some of the old habits turn up in the new job. They take on too much, or put off a hard discussion, or perhaps keep work they should pass on because showing someone else how to do it seems like more effort.

Before long, they’re busy again and wondering why a new job feels a lot like the old one.

That doesn’t mean leaving was a mistake. The old job may have left them too tired to see what was going on. Once they got out of it, they had enough room to work out which parts came from the job and which parts came with them.

And that’s when the genuine work begins.

We often expect the move to do too much. A new job won’t teach you to set limits unless you set them. A calmer life won’t make each choice easy and a new city won’t wipe out the parts of your past that you’ve brought along for the ride.

The move gives you an opening, but you still must do something with it.

Brisbane wasn’t a cure for me. I didn’t cross the Queensland border and become a new man. Most of what I needed to face had come north with us in the Excel, packed in among our clothes and belongings.

But Brisbane gave me a break from the life I’d been living. Brisbane didn’t know who I had been in Melbourne. There were no old habits waiting for me each morning, and no one expected me to keep playing the same part. For the first time in years, there was a gap between what had been and what might come next.

Granted, I didn’t always use that gap well. Some things took years to learn, and a few lessons came back more than once because I clearly hadn’t understood them the first time. Growth wasn’t clean or quick, and it looked nothing like the straight road north.

Still, the room mattered.

We often try to change by adding more to our lives without realising they are already full. We sign up for a course, set a new goal, or start another habit, then try to force it into the small time we have left. Nothing else stops, meaning there is little space to fit that new thing.

When it falls over, we blame a lack of grit. But grit may not be the issue, there simply may have been nowhere for the new thing to fit.

Before asking what else you should start, ask what can move. What can you stop doing, give to someone else, or step back from? What keeps pulling you towards a part of yourself you’re trying to leave behind? You may find that the same problem has followed you through two jobs, a few managers, and several firm vows that this time will be different. That’s not much fun to admit, but at least you now know it wasn’t left behind at the last place.

From there, the start is often quite plain. You have the talk you’ve been putting off, or you stand firm, even when it feels awkward. They’re small steps, but most growth looks like that; slow, patchy and messier than we make it sound years later.

Decades on from that northward journey in the crowded Hyundai Excel, I can still picture the road near Kalkallo and remember my hands easing around the wheel.

I hadn’t changed; nothing was resolved, and the life I wanted was still a long way off. Actually, I’m not sure I even knew what I wanted that life to look like.

But I moved, and that move opened a space for growth.

That was where I could begin.

I’ve made decisions throughout my career that felt like the right only to appear significantly different shortly.

Not necessarily dramatic ones, just decisions I made when moving quickly, perhaps a little too quickly. Sometimes they were judgement calls I made in the absence of enough information or without engaging all the right people. There’s been many times I’ve made a decision that seemed perfect in my head only to land awkwardly with the people who then had to put that decision into action. In the moment, those errors of judgement are easy to justify, and unfortunately, they’re a part of leadership that’s grounded in progress rather than perfection. You rarely have the luxury of all the right information, at the right time, with the right people present, so you just do the best you can.

The genuine test of leadership is what happens after that bad decision is made. Once a leader realises they’ve made a poor decision, the first instinct is rarely noble and that’s an aspect of human nature I touched on with an everyday example in my recent article, The Power of a Quick Sorry.

At times when I’ve made a poor decision, and there has been many, my first instinct is often far from noble. I wish I could claim it always was, but sometimes my first impulse is to explain, add context or, at my worst, subtly shift the blame, while emphasising “I don’t mean to blame” while clearly doing so.

I don’t like admitting that, but it’s true.

There have been many times when feedback on a decision has come to me, and rather than show curiosity my position has been to protect my competence and the version of me that I want people to see.

Why defensiveness damages trust

Between a poor decision and correction of that decision there is a space where trust can grow or rapidly descend in the opposite direction. Trust does not erode in that space because a leader got something wrong, because people can live with that. Reasonable people acknowledge that leadership is messy, and they know decisions get made under pressure, with scant information and trade-offs. What they struggle with is the performance that follows the mistake. They grow cynical when a poor decision is followed by a long explanation and staged or disingenuous apology.

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What happens when leaders explain away mistakes

Glassdoor’s Worklife Trends 2026 report was recently released and it highlights the point I’m driving at here. There’s a growing use of words like “disconnect,” “miscommunication,” “distrust,” and “misalignment” when people mention senior leadership or management. In fact, from 2024 to 2025, Glassdoor reviews showed a 149% increase in the use of the word “misalignment” when describing leaders (Glassdoor 2026) and that points to something we should all take notice of.

Trust doesn’t drop in one single moment but happens when people keep noticing a leader won’t take accountability for poor decisions. When a team raises a concern and gets an explanation instead of a hearing, they may not react in isolation. However, when it happens enough, people begin to question the leader’s authenticity. Eventually in these situations, the leader stop hearing the truth early enough to do anything useful with it.

Why accountability builds trust

Certainty and credibility are not interchangeable. Certainty in leadership emphasises strength, commitment to decision-making and absence of doubts. While there is a place for this, certainty without self-awareness can make any challenge feel like a threat to leadership and have you protecting your pride while believing you’re protecting the team. That’s a deception of the ego, and most of us are more vulnerable to it than we think.

Real self-awareness is practical and not the version we talk about in leadership programs. Self-awareness is noticing when your body tightens because someone has challenged you and catching the moment before you build your defense rather than listening.

That sort of self-awareness is not soft, rather it is peak emotional intelligence.

Progress over perfection, a phrase I use routinely, applies, but only if we use it with honest intent. Progress over perfection emphasises progress, implying that there is an intent and movement towards the right outcomes. The phrase cannot be called upon as a convenient excuse for poor decisions or failing to be openly accountable for them.

How leaders can respond differently

To grow trust from our people, our learning must be real, visible, and lead to a change in behaviour.

Private reflection matters, but it doesn’t always repair the public impact of a poor decision. If you made the call in the room, then some part of your learning may also need to happen in that same room. That public learning can’t be some performative and awkward leadership confession. The learning must have enough honesty and vulnerability that people believe change is possible.

Such a moment can be as simple as; I’ve thought more about yesterday’s decision and recognise that I moved too quickly. I didn’t have enough of the right people in the conversation, and I can see that created confusion. We’re going to pause, get the right input, and reset the approach.

That kind of statement does not make a leader look weak; it earns them easier trust.

The Edelman 2026 Trust Barometer adds another useful layer to the discussion, reporting that 70% of people globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, facts, problem-solving approaches, or cultural backgrounds. Edelman also argues that employers are well-placed to help broker trust because workplaces still bring people together across these differences (Edelman 2026). And that matters because workplaces are full of different pressures, perspectives, values, and backgrounds.

A leader’s job is not to bulldoze through all those differences with confidence and hope people follow. Their job is to create enough trust that people can tell the truth before the damage is done, and that takes humility from them.

I am better at this than I used to be. I’m far from perfect but getting better.

Your team does not need you to be flawless. They need to know that when you get it wrong, truth has a better chance than your pride.

For years I sat through meetings in silence. I usually understood what was being discussed and often had ideas to contribute, but I stayed silent as a longstanding story played over in my head; You’re the least experienced person in the room. Keep listening. Someone smarter will come up with the answer.

Initially, there was some truth to that. I was young, relatively inexperienced, and surrounded by people who had far more experience than myself. The problem was that I kept telling myself that story long after it had stopped being true.

Years passed and I gained experience while advancing into more senior roles. No longer was I the new guy with nothing to say, but whenever I walked into a room full of senior executives, that old story would surface.

Don’t embarrass yourself. Just listen.

I’d think of an idea, run it through my head, then decide someone else probably had a better one, only to see that same idea raised a few minutes later and receive enthusiastic agreement from the room. I would sit there thinking, That’s exactly what I was going to say.

Eventually, I realised I’d grown professionally, but the story I told myself repeatedly, hadn’t kept pace with that growth.

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I suspect most of us do this in one way or another. Human beings are remarkably loyal to the stories they tell themselves. Once a self-narrative becomes part of our identity, it can be difficult to let go of, even when the evidence no longer supports it. Over time, those stories stop feeling like beliefs and start feeling like facts.

Someone who lacked confidence as a teenager may still think of themselves as insecure at forty. Someone who failed in business years ago may continue to see themselves as a poor decision-maker, despite years of good judgement and success.

The longer a story survives, the harder it becomes to notice. Eventually, it becomes the lens through which we interpret ourselves and the world around us. The trouble is that we often grow faster than our self-image. While skills improve and experience accumulates, we continue judging ourselves using information that is years, sometimes decades, out of date.

The cost of an outdated self-story isn’t always significant, but it can narrow what’s possible. The story becomes the reason we don’t apply for a role, share an idea or put our hand up for the opportunity. These stories often encourage caution when confidence would be more appropriate.

This is where unlearning becomes important. Not because we should ignore weaknesses or convince ourselves we’re capable of anything, but because some beliefs eventually outlive their usefulness.

Most limiting beliefs begin as reasonable observations. At one point, you genuinely may have lacked confidence, skills or experience, but the mistake is assuming those observations became permanent truths.

A question I’ve found useful is: Is this belief describing who I am today, or who I was years ago?

It’s a simple question, but it can reveal just how much of our thinking is based on outdated information.

Psychologist Carol Dweck built much of her work around the concept of a growth mindset. At its core is the idea that people can learn, improve and develop through effort, practice and experience. That idea challenges one of the assumptions hidden inside many limiting self-narratives; that personal qualities are fixed.

A related concept comes from Albert Bandura whose research showed that people are more likely to take action when they believe they can succeed. In other words, belief influences behaviour before results appear. The stories we tell ourselves shape what we’re willing to attempt.

Updating an old narrative doesn’t require significant reinvention. It usually starts by identifying a belief you’ve carried for a long time. Not a preference or personality trait, but a statement about capability. Maybe it’s, I’m not strategic, I’m not confident or, I’m not good at difficult conversations.

Once you’ve identified the outdated belief, look for current evidence rather than historical evidence. Reflect on recent experiences or ask a trusted colleague for feedback. Many people are carrying stories about themselves that nobody else believes anymore and identifying contrary evidence is a key step in shedding those outdated stories.

The final step is action, to create new evidence and start shaping an updated and valid story. Speak up in the meeting. Volunteer for the project. Have the difficult conversation. Put your hand up for the opportunity. Every time you step outside of the outdated story provides evidence it no longer applies.

We often think growth is about adding something, like skills, knowledge and more experience. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it’s about letting something go.

Perhaps the hardest person to unlearn is yourself.

And perhaps your next stage of growth doesn’t begin with learning something new. Perhaps it begins with recognising that one of the stories you’ve been carrying around is no longer true.

On my way to the office this morning, while travelling along the motorway at some speed, a light truck suddenly drifted across into my lane, causing me to hit the brakes. It wasn’t aggressive driving and his indicator was on but, I presume, he just hadn’t seen me.

As I hit the brakes, I instinctively thumped the horn and braced for the reaction we’ve all come to expect in those situations. A shrug, some dangerous brake tapping or even the universally recognised single digit signal for, whatever mate.

Instead, the driver immediately wound down his window, reached out his arm with obvious intent, and gave me a quick wave. It wasn't an angry wave though, it was clearly apologetic and seemingly saying, sorry mate, that was my mistake.

The gesture caught me off guard. In an instant there was nothing left to be angry about, and the irritation that’d flared up seconds earlier dissipated as quickly as it had arrived.

As I continued driving, I pondered why such a small interaction had felt so significant. The mistake had happened, yet a simple acknowledgement of responsibility had completely changed my response to it.

We all make mistakes; it’s human. We forget to return a call, miss a deadline, or make a poor decision that affects our team. However, the mistake itself is often not the cause of the greatest damage; rather, the actual damage comes from what happens next.

Most of us instinctively protect ourselves when we realise we’ve got something wrong. We explain the circumstances, point to the pressures we were under, or focus on our intentions rather than the outcome. Nobody enjoys being wrong. But in leadership roles, we see countless examples of how differently people respond to their own mistakes. While one leader explains why it wasn’t their fault another says, “I got that wrong. Here’s what I’ll do differently next time.” The latter diffuses problems, while the former fuels conflict.

Most people don’t expect leaders to get everything right. What they want to know is whether someone can recognise an error, own it, and move forward. Accountability, particularly when shown rapidly, builds credibility far more effectively than defensiveness ever does.

The same principles operate in our personal lives. People can usually forgive a forgotten birthday, or an insensitive comment. What often causes the lasting damage is the refusal to acknowledge and own those oversights.

I’ve certainly been guilty of this myself. There have been times when I knew I should apologise but wanted the other person to understand my intentions first. I wanted them to know I had meant no harm, as though good intent somehow erased poor impact. Of course, it doesn’t work that way. You can mean well and still get it wrong. Acknowledging the impact of our actions doesn’t diminish us; it shows maturity.

So why do so many of us struggle to apologise quickly? Pride and fear are commonly the drivers. We worry that admitting fault will make us look weak, incompetent, or foolish. We see apologising as losing when, in reality, a genuine apology is simply an acknowledgement of reality. More accurately and in its simplest form, it’s honesty. And honesty has a remarkable ability to defuse tension before it has the chance to grow. The longer we avoid apologising, the more complicated things become.

By the time I arrived at work, the near miss had already faded. What stayed with me was the wave.

That driver will probably never know it, but his moment of humility changed the tone of my morning. What could have become another frustrating commute became a quiet reminder of the person I want to be when I get something wrong.

Not a bad outcome from a near miss on the motorway.

Live Well, Lead Better is a publication about leadership, culture and personal growth. Today I’m sharing something related, but a little different.

The Way Through (working title) is in the late stages of drafting and will be my debut book. It’s a memoir about struggle, recovery and identity, while also exploring my 10 Principles of Recovery that emerged from those experiences. Following is a chapter from that manuscript, and I’d genuinely love any feedback on the writing, impact, or simply what resonates with you as a reader.

The Way Through - Move, then begin

We were on the Hume Highway and barely past Kalkallo when I felt it for the first time.

Relief.

Not happiness exactly because happiness feels too neat for what it was. This was more like space opening up inside my chest as though I’d been clenching every muscle in my body for years and had finally loosened my grip without realising it.

The highway stretched out in front of us while the early morning slowly pushed the night away. Headlights cut through the fog and green road signs flashed past. The car was packed with bags, clothes and random bits of our life shoved wherever they’d fit. Monica sat beside me with her feet up on the dash, calm as ever, while I gripped the steering wheel like I was ultimately responsible for keeping the whole plan together. Ironically though there wasn’t much of a plan.

We had no jobs lined up in Brisbane and nowhere to live as such. and just a little bit of money courtesy of mum and dad.. All we had was a rough agreement that if we could find work and somewhere to live within two or so weeks, we’d stay. If not, we’d come home.

Privately, I didn’t want to come back.

I’d spent years wanting out of Melbourne. Back in school, escape had become its own fantasy. I used to imagine schools, friends, versions of myself. Somewhere nobody knew me as the awkward kid, the easy target, the boy who could get mocked, cornered or humiliated and somehow still be expected to laugh along with it. Later, the fantasy changed shape but not substance. I still wanted some clean break from everything that’d happened and from the person I’d slowly become while trying to survive it all.

Now, at twenty-two, I was finally doing something that felt like escape. Weirdly though, it didn’t feel dramatic at all. There was no movie moment. Just the road, the hum of tyres against bitumen and Monica beside me while the early morning lights of Melbourne faded in the rear-view mirror.

I glanced across at Mon and she caught me looking.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just looking forward to it, I guess.”

“Do you reckon we’ll stay up there?” I asked a moment later.

She shrugged. “Who knows. It’s a fate thing. We get jobs and find somewhere to live, we stay. We don’t, we come back.”

A fate thing.

That was Monica all over. She had this ability to sit with contentment inside uncertainty. She didn’t need guarantees before moving forward or every possible outcome mapped out in advance. I envied that having spent most of my life craving certainty because certainty felt safe. If I knew what was coming, I could prepare for it and if I could prepare, maybe I could
protect myself.

That wiring had started years earlier in school corridors and locker rooms where unpredictability never felt exciting. It felt dangerous.

But somewhere along the Hume, uncertainty started to feel different. Not safe exactly, but possible.

The fresh start mattered more than I let on. I wanted Brisbane to work with a desperation I tried to disguise as excitement. I wanted jobs to appear quickly, a rental to be ready and  I wanted the move to become permanent before doubt had time to catch up with us.

“First thing’s jobs,” Monica said with a laugh. “Otherwise we’ll be broke in about five minutes.”

There it was again. Practical. Grounded. Real.

I focused back at the road as dawn spread over the hills beside the highway, washing everything in a soft blue-red light, and for the first time in years I let myself believe something might actually get better. Maybe distance really could change things.

Back at Mum and Dad’s place, the whole decision had happened ridiculously fast. After everything that’d gone on and feeling completely stuck, Mon and I ended up sitting at the kitchen table with an atlas trying to figure out where we could disappear to.

At first, the destination barely mattered.

“What about Darwin?” I’d asked.

“Too hot,” Mon said instantly.

“Perth?”

“Looks nice on TV.”

That was honestly the level of research we were working with.

Eventually Monica said, “What about Queensland? I’ve been there on holidays before. Loved it.”

“You mean Brisbane or the Gold Coast?”

“Nah, Brisbane,” she said confidently despite having absolutely no evidence to support the claim. “More jobs there.”

“What about Sydney?” I asked.

“No chance,” she said. “Too busy. And it’s expensive. We may as well stay in Melbourne.”

And somehow that settled it.

So we sat there staring at a map of Brisbane as though it magically explained our future. We didn’t know the suburbs, didn’t know where people lived or worked or even what areas were good or bad. But maps have a funny way of making uncertainty feel organised. Everything looks manageable from above.

“What do you reckon?” Mon asked eventually. “Should we?”

“Why not?” I said.

Not exactly a carefully considered plan, but honestly, if we’d overthought it, we probably never would’ve left. We would’ve found too many reasons to stay put, too many risks. Sometimes overthinking is really just fear pretending to be logic.

Within half an hour we’d decided. Brisbane.

Looking back now, I can see I misunderstood part of what we were doing. I thought I was leaving pain behind, like pain belonged to Melbourne and couldn’t cross borders. I thought Brisbane might somehow give me a clean slate.

That’s not really how it works, but I didn’t know that yet.

All I knew was Melbourne had become crowded with versions of me I didn’t know how to carry anymore. Brisbane felt blank, and blank felt hopeful.

The further north we drove, the lighter I started to feel. Open highways do that when you’re convinced you’re driving toward something better.

As we took turns at the wheel we talked about where we might live, what jobs we’d get and whether Brisbane would feel like home, but scattered amongst my hope was some fear. I worried Brisbane wouldn’t work out that we’d run out of money and have to crawl back to Melbourne embarrassed and defeated again. There was scant strength left in me for more failure

Deeper than all that though, there was another fear I couldn’t say out loud.

What if Brisbane worked and I still felt exactly the same?

That’s the part nobody wants to think about when they’re building their whole future around escape. You don’t want to admit the past might’ve packed itself into the car with you.

So instead, I focused on the road. Movement felt like progress, and at that point in my life I needed progress in any form I could manage.

When we finally reached Queensland, it honestly did feel different. The air felt warmer, the light seemed sharper somehow and even the roads helped. I didn’t have memories attached to every street corner yet, and that alone was a relief.

We found somewhere temporary to stay and began turning the move into a real life. There’s nothing glamorous about that part. Fresh starts sound romantic until you’re reading classifieds, filling out rental applications and trying to calculate whether you can afford petrol and groceries in the same week.

Still, there was energy in it. Every application felt like a small step forward. Every inspection felt like a possibility.

Within two weeks we’d found both. Jobs and somewhere to live.

I got a job working as an internal sales clerk for a packaging company. Not exactly dream-career material, but it was work. It was structure and gave shape to my days again.

Mon found work in payroll earning slightly more than me. We didn’t have much money that first year and some weeks were genuinely tight. There were nights  trying to work out whether we could afford takeaway or whether we needed that money for petrol instead.

But weirdly, those years still felt hopeful because for the first time in a long time, it felt like we were building something instead of just surviving.

And we’d made it out.

That mattered to me more than anything.

I wanted the move to mean I was fixed now. I wanted Brisbane itself to be the cure, but slowly cracks started appearing in that idea.

At work, even normal conflict rattled me. Customers getting frustrated , managers questioning something or internal disagreements. Nothing major, but my body reacted like danger had walked in the room because underneath it all, I was still carrying the same wiring I’d developed years earlier.

Conflict still made me panic. A sharp tone still made me shrink inside myself and criticism always felt personal.

I’d changed cities, but my nervous system hadn’t caught up yet.

That was the hard lesson Brisbane started teaching me. Changing your environment creates space, but it doesn’t automatically change you.

The move helped, more than I can explain, honestly. It gave me distance from the places where I’d fallen apart. It gave Mon and me something new to build together. It gave me room to breathe. But fear came with me. So did shame. So did all the survival habits I’d built over years without realising it.

At first, that felt disappointing. I thought the fresh start would feel fresher than it did, but over time I realised something important. The move wasn't healing. It was the beginning of healing.

Sometimes you need to leave before you’re capable of changing. Sometimes you need distance from the noise, the routines and the memories before you can hear yourself clearly again. But distance alone doesn’t do the work. You still take yourself with you.

Back then, I was carrying a lot.

Still, I’m grateful for that version of me sitting in the driver’s seat on the Hume Highway believing change was possible, even if he misunderstood what change actually required. Hope still got us moving, and sometimes movement comes first, long before understanding does.

I was in a meeting a few years ago where a clunky process requiring no less than three levels of approval for a simple action was being discussed. The process was slow, frustrating to team members and far from customer centric.

Being relatively new to my role, I simply asked, “Why do we still do it this way?”

I didn’t intend it to be a loaded question, and I genuinely thought it would be easy to answer. I was just curious as to why a particular action required so many sign offs.

The room changed in an instant, as though I’d asked something deeply personal of everyone present. Nobody became defensive, or aggressive, but there was a palpable change in the mood.

Finally, someone voiced what I sensed was the case, “That’s just the process Ash.”

And on we went, as though that question was put to bed and never to be raised again.

I’ve thought about that moment numerous times since, because it captures something that sits underneath organisational culture more often than we acknowledge. People don’t just follow rules because the rules are good, they follow them because the broader group has taught them what happens when you don’t.

This is why the old five monkeys’ story has stuck around for so long.

You’ve probably heard some version of the story. Five monkeys are in a cage with a ladder leading to a bunch of bananas. Every time one of the monkeys tries to climb up to the bananas, they all get sprayed with cold water. It doesn’t take long before they all stop going anywhere near the ladder, fearful of that cold water spray.

Then, the monkeys are all replaced, one at a time. The newcomers have never been sprayed themselves, but they quickly learn the same rule because if they head for the ladder the other monkeys pull them back. the sequence persists after all originals are gone. By that point, none of them know where the rule came from, they just know that this is how things are done.

Now, the exact version of the five monkeys’ story that gets shared in leadership circles has probably done more rounds in slide decks than research journals, but it certainly didn’t come from nowhere. The five monkeys story traces its roots to Gordon Stephenson’s 1967 research, which introduced ‘cultural acquisition’ and showed how groups transmit learned behaviour. Essentially, groups pass behaviour on and teach each other what’s safe, what’s risky, and what not to touch. The challenge is that often the rules continue to propagate long after the original risk has passed.

That idea holds up very well in corporate life and often manifests as the infamous line, “We’ve just always done it that way.” Because every workplace has “ladders” with bananas at the top. Every organisation has things no one questions anymore and processes that exist but can’t be fully explained. When we look around any organisation, we see reactions that were built for a particular moment, under a particular leader, in response to a particular problem, and then never revisited once the moment passed.

Culture often hangs around long after the reason for it has disappeared.

A lot of redundant workplace habits began as useful systems, in fact if you look far enough back in time, they were usually created in response to a specific problem and never revisited. For example, a hiring freeze introduced during a past downturn.

That stuff leaves a mark.

The issue is that most organisations are very good at introducing controls and not nearly as good at removing them, so the response becomes the routine and then the routine becomes tradition. Eventually, traditions become untouchable practices.

People learn culture from social cues far more than formal messaging.

Organisations spend a lot of time talking about values, which is an important discourse to encourage, but most people don’t learn values from a laminated poster or a polished all-hands presentation, they learn them by watching what happens;

Who gets backed?
Who gets shut down?
Who gets quietly sidelined?
Who gets called troublesome?

That’s culture.

You can tell a team to challenge ideas, but if the first person who does gets the look, the silence or the polite shut-down, everyone else gets the message fast.

That’s one of the reasons the five monkeys story remains useful. It points to something true about group behaviour; that we take our cues from the crowd, watch the reaction and then we adjust.

Conformity can look healthy right up until it starts costing you.

Most culturally stuck workplaces don’t look messy from the outside; in fact they look aligned. A tidy exterior can hide avoided questions.

But settled doesn’t always mean healthy. Sometimes it means people have worked out which questions aren’t worth asking anymore, like “Why do we still do it this way?”

Quiet conformity stalls improvement and people stop asking ‘Why do we still do this?’ so small inefficiencies persist. When no one challenges the routine, useful changes never get suggested.

New people usually spot cultural nonsense first.

That’s the gift of fresh eyes; new starters haven’t had time to normalise the odd bits yet. Consequently, they notice duplication, waste and clunky workarounds that appear normal to those in the organisation with tenure.

As a result, newcomers often ask the best questions and the real test for organisational culture is what happens next. Does the team stop and think? Or does it smile, say “that’s just how we do it,” and teach the new person to stop asking?

That moment tells you nearly everything you need to know about the organisation’s culture.

Good cultures stay open long enough to look at their habits and don’t assume almost every process is wise just because it has survived. They make room for challenge.

In the end, that’s why the five monkeys story still lands. Not because it gives us a perfect science lesson, but because it gives us a very recognisable human lesson about how organisational culture can operate.

A lot of organisational culture is just shared behaviours that nobody has properly re-examined in years. And once that sets in, people stop checking whether the ladder is still a problem, they just learn, from everyone around them, not to touch it.

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A few years ago I sat through a particular leadership conference where speaker after speaker talked about the transformation journey their organisation was on. Every one of them was going to become more innovative, more customer focused, more agile or in some cases, all of the above.

The presentations were polished, the vision statements were compelling and I have little doubt the intentions were good. But what left me curious wasn’t what happened on the day, it was what happened afterwards.

I’ve thought about that conference multiple times since and wondered, did they really achieve the visions outlined in their bold and compelling resolutions?

You see, it’s easy to declare a destination. It’s much harder to make the hundreds of small decisions and take the actions required to reach it. Those little decisions are the ones that really count, the ones that compound and drive is towards that big resolution.

Whenever I find myself reflecting on that idea, I think of Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly and the song, Little Decisions, from his 1985 album, Post.

Confession time; I’ve been a fan of Paul Kelly for as long as I can remember. His music has always felt uniquely Australian to me, not because of the places and characters in his songs, but because of his ability to find meaning in everyday life. Kelly notices things most of us overlook, like a conversation, a memory, a street corner or even a relationship under strain. For Kelly, small moments become stories and ordinary experiences become something worth paying attention to.

Listening to the Kelly’s Little Decisions now, more than forty years after it was released, it feels less like a song about decision-making per se and more like a reminder about how life actually unfolds, one small decision at a time.

Most of us can point to a handful of moments that changed our direction, perhaps that role we accepted or an opportunity we pursued. Those moments matter and they often become landmarks in the stories we tell about ourselves. What we ignore in the narrative however is everything that came afterwards. The initial decision creates possibility while the outcome depends on what happens next. That’s where things become less exciting and considerably more important. That’s where the little decisions we make and the actions we actually take decide whether that big decision comes to fruition.

Across multiple organisations, I’ve seen leadership become captivated by the big decision but failing to follow through with all the required little decisions and actions to make it happen. For a while, everyone talks about the future, but the little decisions required to continue in that direction fall away as reality resumes.

The real work in a big decision or resolution begins when leaders decide whether to have the difficult conversation they’ve been avoiding or when they respond to setbacks. It begins when people choose whether to behave in ways that support the change or retreat to familiar habits. Those choices rarely attract attention. Nobody writes case studies about them, yet they’re often the difference between a successful transformation and another initiative that quietly disappears.

Cultural transformation as an example is largely a collection of repeated little decisions aligned with the direction set; it’s built in meetings, conversations and moments of pressure. It takes shape through what leaders tolerate, what they encourage and what they consistently model.

The same principle applies well beyond the workplace.

Looking back over my own life, I’m increasingly aware that many of the outcomes I’m grateful for weren’t created by dramatic acts of courage or a single brilliant decision. They emerged gradually from choices that seemed fairly ordinary at the time. Indeed, my life has been shaped by all the little decisions, akin to those that Kelly sings of.

None of the little decisions I’ve made felt significant in isolation. There was no sense that they were shaping the future. In fact, most passed unnoticed. That’s the nature of little decisions, they don’t announce their importance when they arrive.

We tend to notice outcomes more than processes. We see the successful business, the healthy lifestyle, the trusted leader, the strong relationship. What we don’t see are the years spent making little choices that appeared insignificant on any given day. Perhaps that’s why people often underestimate the power of consistency.

We want change to arrive in dramatic moments because dramatic moments are easier to recognise and they make for a more dramataic narrative. However, life is usually less tidy than that. Most meaningful progress happens slowly enough that we barely notice it while it’s occurring. Then one day we look back and realise we’ve travelled much further than we thought, driven by all the little decisions we’ve made along the way.

That’s what I enjoy most about the song, Little Decisions, it doesn’t celebrate heroic achievements or life-changing revelations. Instead, it draws attention to something much more familiar, the small choices that fill our days and the way they quietly shape our future. And the older I get, the more convincing that idea becomes.

Don’t get me wrong, the big decisions matter. They give us direction and help us decide where we want to go. But when I look at the people I most admire, whether they’re leaders, athletes, artists, business owners or simply good human beings, their success rarely seems to rest on a handful of defining moments. More often, it reflects years of making thoughtful little decisions when nobody was watching.

The little decisions rarely feel important when we're making them but looking back, they're often the only reason the big decisions mattered at all.