Silence is more than golden, it creates moments where your creative mind can give you crate loads of brilliant ideas. Last summer when I was stressing over writing a book for my son’s 16th birthday, I realised I was over using analytical thinking and had shut down my creative mind. Embracing silence gave me the ideas to write it within a few short weeks.

I was asked this week what's the most common key is that opens up the biggest shift in performance for new leaders.

Hands down, based on research and my own experience is once you drop the need for unrealistic perfection and fear of failure, it's like taking the block away that's stopping a jet from taking off.

Most leaders I work with aren’t missing skills, they’re missing mirrors that show them how they truly land with others. Their growth has stalled not because of what they can’t do, but because they avoid the uncomfortable clarity that reflection brings.

I believe we are all better when the kindness of strangers exists. Running out of fuel while riding my motorcycle from Sydney to Melbourne a few weeks ago confirmed Australia is still a place where this exists. And lucky for me too…

Most people don’t struggle because they lack motivation or skill. They struggle because they’re looking for insights in the wrong place. This post explores why leaders often see themselves clearly but miss the wider layers shaping their reality and how that blind spot quietly limits their impact.

By asking three deliberate questions at progressively wider perspectives, you can learn how to see your reality more clearly and take the right actions to help you achieve more.

Beliefs can propel you through the toughest challenge or they can fix you in place before you start. They are powerful drivers of our behaviour. 12 months ago I started writing my new book Problem Hunter. But a limiting belief almost derailed the project after the first month. I learned a three step strategy to overcome limiting beliefs and it set me free to get done what I had thought was impossible.

The next few years will see rapid new learning by everyone who uses their knowledge to make a living. The pace of learning is not letting up. A super simple and clever hack discovered by Washington University can help you learn faster and retain it for longer.

It’s tempting and quite easy to raise your voice and let off steam at others…it’s almost normalised. What it is isn’t is a way to be heard, it’s a sign you’ve lost control. And respect. I once coached a CEO who used to brag about letting her team “have it” when they weren’t meeting her expectations. Then she realised she’d broken their trust, created an unsafe workplace and the business went further into the red. What she did next saved her business and gave her a new model for leading.

How do you overcome the wall of indifference people can have to your ideas to make things better? Bottom line: Don’t push harder to be heard— make it matter more so they start to listen. Inside are five actions to help you do this and have your ideas be heard.

Getting pushback is common challenge. Pushback met with more force just creates bigger barriers. The smart approach is isn’t to push harder, it’s to invite curiosity.

Most people look at what happened and stop there. The pros ask, “What could have happened instead?” That’s counterfactual thinking, the quiet superpower behind great problem solvers and innovators, from the engineers that saved NASA’s Apollo 13 crew to anyone brave enough to imagine a better way forward.

Focus is fragile. Your brain sips from a firehose of a billion bits per second while conscious thought crawls along at only ten. The trick to greater focus for longer isn’t working harder, it’s designing our environment and routines to optimise the little attention we can give at any one time.

Sometimes we don't realise we're already standing on a mountain of value. What unlocks it is looking at different ways of using what we already have. Inside is the story of how an engineer working on making Disney anamatronics more life like helped create one of the worlds leading guitar string brands using the same solution.

To solve twin business survival problems of drink spiking fears and cost of living pressures, Manchester’s XLR night club has just done something radical, they've borrowed a strategy used by another industry: BYOB. People can now bring their own drinks to the club in return for slightly higher ticket prices. It’s a great reminder, innovation doesn’t mean invention - it also means adaption.

Productivity isn’t about just about speed, it’s about creating greater impact. The most simple productivity hack is to cut out what’s no longer needed. What we do, day in day out, often hides a black hole of productivity loss. Taking a spring cleaning approach to what we do creates space for more of what we need to do.

Breakthroughs don’t come from thinking the same. They ‘break’ something that is usually taken for granted. A simple way to do this is to take one feature or frustration of a product, service or process and push it to the opposite extreme. Like 10x a price, cutting process time to zero or having no customer support. That’s what Apple, Atlassian and Zoom have done to create break through ideas that work.

We chase certainty because it feels safe, but Daniel Kahneman showed us that this instinct, what he called the Certainty Effect, often means we sell ourselves short. Over the past 20 years, the ASX 200 rewarded those who leaned into calculated risk far more than bonds ever did. The real lesson: slowing down, grounding decisions in data, and collaborating with others can help us escape the trap of selling ourselves short.

You hear, “The issue is our software is not working,” and suddenly every solution revolves around coding updates and testing. But what if the real problem is something else entirely, persisting with an internally developed software system that can’t keep pace with external changes? Anchoring bias tricks us into solving the first thing we hear, not the right thing. Here are three questions to ask to not get fooled by it.