On that first afternoon, I did what I always do when I’m somewhere unfamiliar: I found a bookshop. I can’t walk past one without going in for a good browse. It’s one of my indulgences. As I was working my way along the shelves, a member of staff came past with the very latest release. I Eat the Stars, by Sarah Wilson.
With a title like that, I was at the till before I’d read the back cover.
This is a hard and an easy read, all rolled into one. Wilson writes about the collapse of the world order we’ve always known — how it’s happening, how we’ve brought it about, and why, for those of us who can see it clearly, there’s very little left to avert. What struck me wasn’t the subject. It was the phrase she uses for what many of us are quietly carrying: ambiguous loss. The grief you feel when you don’t know what you’re grieving. The loss of certainty. Of structure. Of institutions that once felt solid and no longer do.
That was it. That was what I’d been sitting with for months without quite being able to name it.
My 1:1 day was focused on clarity, the kind that comes from within, not the kind we construct from the outside in. Not from our assumptions or the judgements we’ve internalised over years of functioning in a complex world. Just clear-seeing. No diagnosis. No drama. Just: what is this, really?
And sitting on a terrace in a city I didn’t know, in a way I rarely allow myself to slow down, I found I could actually see it. Not with anxiety, not with grief, not with the particular brand of helplessness that tends to arrive when we confront things we can’t fix. Just with clarity.
The question that came with it was a big one: what is my role in this? In creating it? In maintaining it? In shifting it?
That’s the question I’m still sitting with. It’s brought me back, full circle, to my life’s work.
Here’s what I want to say to the leaders I work with: reflection isn’t a box-ticking exercise. It isn’t the 10 minutes you carve out on a Sunday evening before the week swallows you again.
Real reflection requires two things simultaneously and they’re hiding in the word itself.
The first is to dive. To go beneath the surface of your day-to-day and actually think — deeply, slowly, without agenda. To let the pool of your own thoughts settle enough that you can see what’s in it.
The second is to look at what’s reflected back. Not at the problem, the strategy, or the next action. At yourself. What does the still water show you? What do you see when the noise stops?
Most of the leaders I work with are running on full power, all the time. They are excellent at doing. What they rarely do is stop long enough to see clearly. And when the world shifts in ways that are ambiguous — not dramatic, not a single event, just a slow, quiet unravelling — that capacity to see clearly is the thing that determines whether you lead, or simply manage the noise.
Liverpool gave me that. A good book, a city I didn’t know, and a coach who helped me put the outside world down long enough to look inward.
Your next reflection doesn’t need to be a retreat. It just needs to be real.
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