There is no 5-step formula for being human. Why I'm anti-method.

We live in a world increasingly willing to outsource our understanding of ourselves to other people's frameworks. There is a methodology for almost everything now. 5 steps to a better relationship. 7 habits of highly successful people. 3 ways to regulate your nervous system. Your attachment style. Your personality type. Your trauma response. The morning routine that will change your life. The protocol, the framework, the diagnosis.

I understand the appeal. I've created plenty of frameworks over the years. I could create another one tomorrow.

Frameworks can be incredibly useful. They give us language for experiences we haven't known how to articulate. They help us recognize patterns and they organize complexity and give us somewhere to begin.

And the longer I work with human beings, the less I believe there is a methodology that can get us neatly from where we are to where we think we want to go.

Because human beings are messy.

We contradict ourselves. We know things and behave as though we don't. We want two opposing things at exactly the same time. We make decisions we swore we wouldn't make again. We stay when we said we'd leave. We leave what we thought we wanted. We achieve the thing and wonder why it hasn't made us feel how we expected.

The moment I decide in advance what your journey should look like, I stop discovering you.

That is the point where I become suspicious of any method.

Because I don't know what we're going to discover about you before we start looking. And neither do you. The business problem you bring me may lead us into your relationship with power. The opportunity you think you should want may reveal that you don't actually want it at all. And whatever we find underneath that, I'm going to question that too.

There is no predetermined destination because even where you think you want to go is open to enquiry.

There is no 5-step formula for being human.

And after decades of doing this work, I trust the enquiry more than I trust any method.

MYTH 1.

If you're self-aware, you should already know why you do what you do

Some of the most self-aware people I know are also extraordinarily good at hiding from themselves. Especially intelligent, successful people. You may have done years of therapy. You understand your childhood. You've read the books. You know your attachment style. You can explain your patterns, identify your triggers and give me a beautifully articulated account of why you behave the way you do.

You can become extraordinarily fluent in the frameworks you've learned for understanding yourself without necessarily becoming more fluent in yourself.

But being able to explain yourself isn't necessarily the same as being able to see yourself. Intelligence can actually make this more interesting because you can construct a perfectly reasonable explanation for almost anything.

I have to be this involved because nobody cares about the business as much as I do.

I said yes because it was too good an opportunity to turn down.

I'm not controlling. I just have very high standards.

My marriage is fine. We're both incredibly busy.

And every one of those things might be true. I want to know what else might be true.

When I work with someone, I'm always listening for what they're not saying. The words they choose. What they gloss over. The contradiction they don't notice. The sudden change in energy when we touch something they weren't expecting.

I don't assume I know what it means. I become curious, because there is often an enormous difference between the story we've learned to tell ourselves about our behavior and everything that is actually happening underneath it.

MYTH 2.

Once you've found the root cause, you've found the problem

This is where I depart from a lot of conventional thinking about change.

Let's say you're furious because your adult daughter isn't returning your calls. The obvious problem appears to be your daughter. She's inconsiderate. It takes thirty seconds to return a call. You're composing the message you're going to send her and becoming increasingly angry about her behavior.

So we get curious about the anger. Perhaps underneath it we find sadness. You miss her. The relationship is changing. She doesn't need you in the way she once did and you're missing something you hadn't even realized you were losing.

Now we've found the real problem, right?

Maybe. But I'm going to question that too.

Why have we decided your sadness is a problem? Why is your desire to feel needed a problem? What happens if, rather than immediately trying to heal it, reframe it, release it or turn it into another fucking thing you need to work on, you develop the capacity to sit with it?

This is one of the most important distinctions in my work. I don't stop questioning simply because we've arrived at an explanation that sounds psychologically sophisticated.

Every time we think we've found the problem, I ask:

What if that isn't the problem either?

Because what we've uncovered doesn't need fixing. It needs us to meet it differently.

MYTH 3.

Difficult behaviors and feelings are something we need to get rid of

We have become extraordinarily quick to make ourselves the problem.

Jealousy. Anger. Sadness. Exhaustion. Resentment. Grief. Loneliness. Defensiveness. The desire for attention. The need to be liked. The inability to rest.

We find something uncomfortable and almost immediately ask, How do I stop doing this?

I'm more likely to ask, What is this showing me?

If every uncomfortable reaction immediately becomes something you need to eliminate, you lose the opportunity to understand what it might be telling you.

Your jealousy may have something to say about what you want. Your resentment may have something to say about what you've agreed to. Your reactions, behaviors, relationships, desires and contradictions are information. They are doors.

And I want to discover what is behind the door rather than stand outside trying to make the door disappear.

MYTH 4.

Insight changes behavior

This one matters because I've watched people understand themselves brilliantly and continue doing exactly the same thing.

Seeing the pattern doesn't mean the pattern disappears. You can know why you choose emotionally unavailable partners and choose another one. You can understand exactly why you overwork and still open your laptop when you promised yourself you wouldn't.

Insight is valuable, but insight isn't the same as change. What awareness gives us is something quieter and, I believe, far more useful: the ability to notice what is happening in us before we automatically act on it.

And sometimes that space is tiny. You're about to send the message, say yes, explain yourself, reach for the thing you use to make yourself feel better, or repeat the behavior you've repeated a hundred times before. And this time, you notice. That doesn't mean you won't still do it. It means there is now a part of you witnessing what is happening rather than being completely consumed by it.

We are the observer of the pattern, not the pattern.

And that tiny distinction changes the relationship you have with yourself.

MYTH 5.

Change should happen quickly once you know what's wrong

I don't believe the kind of change I'm interested in happens because someone gives you the correct answer in a ninety-minute session.

Human beings have histories. Relationships. Bodies. Defenses. Contradictions. Ways of surviving that may have been rehearsed for decades. You don't dismantle that because you've finally understood where it came from.

And I'm not particularly interested in dismantling all of it anyway.

What matters to me is what happens when you know yourself well enough to recognize what's operating while it's alive.

When you hit the revenue target and feel absolutely nothing. When the man you don't even particularly like doesn't text you back and suddenly you care far more than makes any logical sense. When you hear yourself saying yes while something inside you is screaming no.

This is why my work happens over time.

We don't sit together once, identify your pattern and send you away with a worksheet. I get to know you: your tells, your contradictions, your patterns, your desires, the places you are most likely to abandon yourself, the beautifully convincing explanations you reach for when something gets uncomfortable.

And then, when the same psychology turns up three weeks later wearing a completely different outfit, we recognize it.

We work with the pattern while it's alive. That is where the work becomes real.

So what does it actually look like to work with me?

You bring me what's happening. I don't require you to know what the issue is before you arrive. In fact, I'd rather you didn't decide too quickly.

Bring me the business partner you're furious with. The daughter who isn't returning your calls. The relationship you're questioning. The decision you keep circling. The opportunity you think you should want. The money you thought would make you feel different. The behavior that makes absolutely no fucking sense to you.

We start there, and then we follow what it reveals.

Sometimes we'll find something painful. Sometimes we'll find an old pattern. But much of what we uncover isn't something that needs fixing at all.

It's you.

A desire you've dismissed. A preference you've overridden. A truth you've made inconvenient. A way of living that doesn't make sense to anyone else. Something you've known for years but haven't quite allowed yourself to know.

There is no predetermined destination because I cannot know what we're going to find before we start looking. And neither can you.

That's the point.

If you're looking for someone to give you the answer, prescribe the steps and promise that you'll be transformed by the end of them, I'm probably not the person you want beside you.

I work with women who are willing to stay in the enquiry. Women who can tolerate discovering that their first explanation might not be the whole explanation, and who are willing to become curious about the parts of themselves they'd usually judge, fix, override or explain away.

Women who understand that knowing yourself deeply is not a destination you arrive at after completing the correct methodology. It is a relationship you develop with yourself over time.

And I believe very few people ever know themselves at this level, because it requires something considerably more demanding than following five steps: the willingness to keep looking, to question your own certainty, to notice yourself while you're in it, to sit with what you find before deciding what it means, and eventually to make choices with a deeper understanding of what is actually making them.

There is you.

And there is so much more of you to discover.