Wise Wednesdays

  This week: a simple but powerful 5-step framework (GRASO) to support trauma-sensitive conversations in the workplace. For leaders, coaches, and anyone navigating emotional intensity in high-stakes environments. Last week, we touched on what it means to acknowledge and address the layers of trauma present in the workplace, as professionals, leaders, and high achievers.  I’ve always found that coaching is more powerful when it’s trauma-sensitive (even if not trauma-focused) because it draws on deeper presence and insight — now more than ever. According to Gallup's Global Workforce Survey 2024, employee disconnection from organisations had already reached an all-time high. It’s compounded by the intensification of uncertainty about future life prospects, job insecurity, and alarming news. As a reminder, Trauma is an experience of overwhelming fear and aloneness that leaves us feeling powerless. This is why trauma healing involves calming fear, creating connection, and restoring...

Although I’m a doctor by background, I’ve never primarily relied on trauma-related frameworks. However, with the increasing levels of stress in workplaces — in parallel with ongoing news of war, financial instability, and geopolitical tension — the frame has become more relevant. Trauma is an experience of overwhelming fear and aloneness that leaves us feeling powerless. This is why trauma healing involves calming fear, creating connection, and restoring a sense of agency. It’s a profound path of liberation. Being a non-trauma-driven leader means not reacting to fear and panic while remaining sensitive. It means becoming a shock absorber — with space to release that shock safely elsewhere. At advanced levels, it means transforming and releasing that shock through awareness and breath in the moment. And this is a reality that leaders must face: In times of deep uncertainty, many people experience trauma being reactivated — or even triggered for the first time. Here are 6 practices to le...

The only certainty is uncertainty. And even that is uncertain… So how do you make decisions? Option 1: Make predictions Option 2: Freeze Option 3: Take blind action Seeing news of the massive earthquake in Myanmar, which was felt all the way in Nepal where I had visited last month, was clarifying. There is no certainty. But that doesn’t mean you freeze (or even just fall back asleep, accepting the inevitability of death and hoping for the best like I did during the earthquake in the middle of the night). This is the time of visionaries, mystics, and the sombre willingness of ordinary heroes. Sometimes we have to march on dark roads. And sometimes we sit in open fields, listening for signs. Right now, my senses are heightened, picking up on patterns and attuning to accelerating trends: AI reshaping human relationships, geopolitical shifts disrupting careers, and climate change transforming financial systems. Lately, it’s taking longer for Wise Wednesdays to form in my mind—it feels like...

We started the sanctuary session last week with one of the most famous verses in history. And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action. These are the last five lines from Hamlet’s exploration: To be, or not to be? After deciding that it was better to live and face his troubles, he realised that what gets in the way of action is overthinking, over-analysis and doubt,  rooted in the fear of the unknown. Whatever I’ve studied by way of philosophy, spirituality, psychology - the message always returns: there’s what we know and then there’s what we start thinking about what we know. So if you’re feeling stuck anywhere right now, I guarantee you that you know exactly what is needed (which may be to allow things to unfold and receive more information before taking action). And I am pretty certain there’s a part of you that’s resi...

 It wasn’t enough to know about the devastating floods, droughts, and landslides in the Pokhara region of Nepal—we also had to experience an earthquake. At around 3 am, I woke to the rumbling. Part of me thought about moving, while the other part decided to go back to sleep. After all, we all have to die of something, and there isn’t much you can do in an earthquake other than drop, cover, and hold on. Besides, it wasn’t the worst earthquake I’d experienced, so my instinct had probably decided it was safe, while my half-asleep mind was making probability calculations and escape plans. When I checked the earthquake monitoring sites, I found that earthquakes had been happening all month, almost every three to four days… THE RUMBLINGS OF CHANGE The earthquake had me reflect on major life changes in work and life. We often experience change as something sudden, but in reality, it is always happening in the background. We just don’t notice it until it no longer aligns with our expectati...

 I couldn’t help but feel a chill down my spine. Still no interest in going trekking but I offered a relational Deep Dive for my coliving-coworking group and have been getting to know the people and culture around me more deeply. Interesting - and sometimes arresting - insights emerge.   The Pokhara citizens are relieved that rained has finally arrived again. Precipitation patterns have become unpredictable due to a combination of factors. The Pokhara Valley itself – the second largest in Nepal – is thought to have been carved out by an ancient flood. With droughts, catastrophic floods, melting glaciers, urban sprawl stripping away protective forests, and black carbon darkening the skies, it’s hard not to feel a sense of impending doom.  Photo: Water. Stillness. Peace. Lake Phewa, Pokhara, Nepal.   I felt a sense of familiar powerlessness in the face of monumental forces beyond my control and the sense of life’s fragility – the fear of not being able to change anythi...