I reckon one of the mistakes we make in life and leadership is confusing a blip with a trend. A blip is when something happens, and you notice it. A trend is when it keeps happening, and eventually you realise it might be trying to tell you something.

We are not always very good at knowing the difference. One person says something critical, and suddenly we think everyone must be thinking it. One meeting goes badly, and we wonder if the whole thing is falling apart. But sometimes the opposite is true. We keep calling something a blip long after it has become a trend. We say we are only tired because it has been a busy week, except we have been saying that for six months. The same issue keeps appearing, and we keep treating each occurrence as though it is unrelated.

A few weeks ago, I sent my 350th weekly email. When I started writing them, there really wasn’t much of a plan. I had a few ideas, some Post-it notes, and probably a cup of tea nearby. If I had judged the whole thing on the first few emails, I could have reached almost any conclusion. But looking back across 350 of them, I can see patterns: hope, creativity, change, curiosity, and the invitation to notice possibility. I didn’t decide all of that at the beginning. It became visible because I kept paying attention.

And I wonder how much of life is like that. The things that keep draining us. The conversations that keep returning. The work that brings us alive. The ideas that refuse to disappear. Any one of those might be a blip, but when they start repeating, it is probably worth noticing.

The same is true in organisations. One complaint does not necessarily mean there is a culture problem. One person leaving does not mean everyone is unhappy. But when the same issue keeps surfacing, good leadership gets curious.

So perhaps the question is simply this: is this a blip, or is this becoming a trend?

Has this happened before? Am I beginning to see a pattern? And if it really is a trend, what might it be trying to tell me?

A blip might need a little perspective. A trend might be inviting us to change something.

Over the years, I’ve noticed something in myself and in the people and organizations I work with. We cling to our expectations as if they were life preservers. We expect other people to behave a certain way. We expect our friends, teams, or families to stay the same. We expect our careers to follow a predictable, upward path. 

When reality doesn’t match those expectations, disappointment hits. And, rather than examining the expectations, we often double down on them. The result is a kind of emotional merry-go-round: the scenery keeps changing, but the experience stays the same. 

The hopeful part is that we are not just spectators in this process. 

We are, by God’s grace, co-authors of our stories. 

We can look honestly at our expectations and ask, “Are these expectations rooted in fear or in faith? In control or in trust? In ego or in genuine calling?” 

Small adjustments in our expectations can quietly reshape the future we’re walking into. Sometimes, burnout is less about doing too much and more about dragging a whole set of unexamined expectations behind us like a heavy suitcase.

This is my 350th email!

Yep, three hundred and fifty emails, written over six years.

When I wrote the first one, there were no books, no website, no retreats and no podcast. There was me, a wall covered in Post-it notes, plenty of tea and something I could no longer ignore.

Throughout my life, I had watched good leaders burn out, and organisations struggle to respond to a world that never stopped changing. I did not have a complete answer. I believed another way might be possible.

My big curiosity was then and continues to be today:

Could leaders make a difference without losing themselves? Could organisations respond to change with curiosity and creativity rather than fear?

It felt like a slightly mad idea.

I wrote an email and sent it to a few people who I thought might care. The following week, I wrote another one.

I have always tried to offer an original thought rather than send something simply because a new week has arrived. Sometimes an email takes fifteen minutes (usually the ones with the typos!); others take hours.

I have written them in cafés, my home office, airports, while on holiday and from many different countries. The surroundings have changed, but the rhythm of sitting down, paying attention and writing has remained.

From the beginning, I decided that these emails would not become advertisements. The writing comes first and is offered freely. I believe that when we bring something good into the world through service, without calculating what we might receive in return, trust grows and the work often finds its way to us.

That is what has happened in my life.

Today, I have the privilege of working with wonderful people and organisations across the world. There are books, a website, a podcast and opportunities I could not have imagined when I sent that first email. Most days, I still pinch myself that even one person would value me enough to invite me into their life or organisation.

Every three months, I remove subscribers who have not opened an email in that time. I do not want to add to the noise or build an audience for its own sake. I would rather remain in conversation with people who value hope, creativity and healthier ways of living and leading.

By many measures, the world is a better place than it was a hundred years ago. Yet many of us carry an overwhelming sense of uncertainty and fear.

I hope that we can move from fear towards curiosity and from helplessness towards a determination to make someone else’s life a little better. We may not change everything, but each of us can contribute something good to the world immediately around us.

Perhaps that is the lesson from 350 emails.

You don’t need a website, a concrete plan or all the answers to begin. You need something you care about and the willingness to offer it generously.

If you have a slightly mad idea of your own, perhaps you could begin by writing one honest email to a few people who might care.

I cannot promise where it will lead. But something will begin to change, even if, at first, the thing that changes is you.

Thank you for opening these emails, replying to them and occasionally passing them on. I hope they have been as helpful for you to read as they have been for me to write.

Here’s to the next slightly mad idea, and to all of us becoming dealers of hope wherever we find ourselves.

Yesterday I was talking with a fella who works as the resident DJ in a hotel. He was telling me about the previous evening, when the hotel had been quiet, the atmosphere was flat, and nobody seemed interested in dancing.

Unsure what to try next, he asked artificial intelligence to suggest a few songs that might bring people onto the dance floor. Within seconds, it produced a list of tracks and even suggested how he might move from one to another.

He followed some of its suggestions and, before long, people were dancing. The atmosphere lifted, and a quiet collection of strangers became, at least for a little while, something more like a community.

The technology found the songs, but it could not dance.

It could recognise patterns, offer suggestions and help the DJ make a decision. But it could not feel the atmosphere change, see the smiles appear or become lost in something it could neither name nor experience.

That little story captures something of the tension many of us feel about new technology. We seem caught between fear, in which we imagine everything meaningful being replaced, and blind acceptance, in which anything faster or more efficient is automatically considered better.

Neither response feels wise enough. The more important question is not simply what technology can now do, but what we want it to help us do and what we must be careful not to lose.

Picasso once said of computers, “ But they are useless. They can only give you answers.” Computers have proved to be far from useless, but his grumble still contains a question worth hearing.

An answer is only useful when we know which questions matter. Technology can offer us more choices, but it cannot choose what is worth carrying into the future.

Every technological advance invites us to carry something forward and leave something else behind. Some things can be gladly released, including needless bureaucracy, inaccessible information and processes that make life harder without making it better.

Other things deserve more care. Attention, presence, friendship, patience, curiosity and our ability to remain with an unanswered question may not look especially efficient, but they are part of what makes us human.

Perhaps our task is not to resist the journey into a new world or rush towards it with our eyes closed. It is to travel attentively, noticing what is helping us flourish and what may be quietly slipping from our hands.

The DJ used a new tool, but he still had to read the room, choose the moment and press play. The people still had to leave their seats, take the small risk of stepping onto an empty dance floor and respond to one another.

Whatever technology becomes capable of doing, it cannot live this life on our behalf. It may help us find the right song, but we are still the ones who must choose to dance.

Grab a cuppa, listen to the new Healthy Rhythms playlist and ponder this: as you step into whatever comes next, what would you like technology to help you leave behind, and what are you determined to carry forward?

Earlier this summer, I found myself driving through the beautiful Indiana countryside, surrounded by fields of corn standing nearly three metres high.

I’m still a little in awe whenever I drive through vast stretches of countryside. I think about the work of farmers, the patience required to grow anything, and how quietly their labour feeds the rest of us.

Yet before long, that corn will be harvested. The fields will look bare, the landscape will adjust, and another season will begin to emerge. Nothing in nature remains exactly as it is.

Harvesting is also an act of separation. The kernels are removed from the cob, while the stalks and husks that carried and protected them are left behind. What served the grain in one season does not necessarily accompany it into the next.

Perhaps something similar happens in our own lives.

We enter threshold moments, those times when we are no longer where we were, but have not quite stepped into what comes next.

A threshold is the strip beneath a doorway. 

And if you grew up in an Irish house, you’ll know that a doorway is no place to settle. Stand there too long, and someone will eventually shout:

“Would you come in or go out, and stop letting the heat out of the house!”

Yet we do this so often in life.

We linger between what has been and what could be. We know a season has ended, but we’re reluctant to release the things that belonged to it. We wait in the doorway, hoping for certainty before taking the next step.

Change is constant in nature, and so it is in us.

In yesterday’s podcast episode, I explored these threshold moments through the opening chapter of The Imaginal Coach: why we linger, what may need to be released, and how we begin stepping towards the life that is trying to emerge.

If you find yourself standing in a doorway at the moment, I hope you’ll have a listen here.

And consider asking yourself: What has served its purpose, and what might be waiting for me on the other side of the door?

The other day I dropped a glass into the kitchen sink, and there was that split second when I knew exactly what was coming next: the crash, the broken glass and the slight annoyance at myself.

Except none of it happened.

The glass bounced.

I picked it up, slightly surprised that it had survived, put it away and carried on with my day, and it got me thinking about how many things go right in an ordinary day that we hardly ever notice.

You leave the house expecting traffic, and somehow every light turns green. You turn the key, and the car starts. You flick a switch, and the light comes on. Your suitcase appears on the airport carousel. 

Nobody writes home about these things, and nobody gathers the family around the dinner table and announces, “You’ll never believe what happened today. The toaster worked again!”

We expect things to work, so when they do, we barely notice.

Let’s do something similar with people.

Someone holds the door for us, a stranger lets us into traffic, the person making our coffee smiles and actually waits for the answer when they ask how our day is going, or a friend sends a message at exactly the right moment. Someone laughs at our terrible joke, a conversation goes better than expected, or a child waves at us for absolutely no reason.

Tiny things, really, and yet when you begin adding them together, you realise that an extraordinary amount of ordinary goodness is happening around us all the time.

Perhaps the problem is not that goodness is absent but that we have become very good at noticing everything else.

Think about buying a red car, and suddenly the roads seem to be full of red cars. They were always there. You just weren’t looking for them.

I wonder how much of life is like that.

If I expect people to disappoint me or the world to be frightening and hopeless, I will find plenty of evidence. But if I begin paying attention to generosity, kindness, beauty, laughter, grace and things quietly going right, I begin seeing those too.

This isn’t about pretending everything is wonderful. Some glasses really do smash, some people hurt us, and some seasons of life are incredibly difficult.

But those things aren’t the whole story either.

Perhaps one of the practices of living a healthy life is simply learning to notice the whole story.

So this week, notice the green light, the working toaster, the unexpected kindness, the good conversation, the person who makes you laugh and, of course, the glass that somehow didn’t break.

And perhaps at the end of each day, ask yourself one simple question:

What happened today that was good, but I nearly didn’t notice?

There may be much more than you think.

Yesterday I spent some time walking around Belfast during the Fleadh, one of the world’s largest celebrations of Irish music and culture, and the city was absolutely alive. Major artists were playing on big stages, traditional music spilling out of pubs and cafés, and little children sitting on street corners playing fiddles, flutes and other traditional instruments.

More than a million visitors have been recorded at the festival, which is quite remarkable for a city the size of Belfast (Northern Ireland only has a population of 1.5 million!).

As I walked through the city centre taking it all in, my mind went back to a very different Belfast and to walking into the city with my granny when I was a boy. I can still remember being stopped by armed soldiers who checked our bags for explosives before allowing us through, and then walking past shops that had been bombed.

That was Belfast too.

Yesterday, decades later, I was walking some of those same streets surrounded by music, laughter, families and people who had travelled from all over the world to be there. At one point I passed the Europa Hotel, which became famous during the Troubles for being one of the most bombed hotels in the world, and I couldn’t help thinking about just how much can change in the course of a lifetime.

Those of you who know me well will know that I can sometimes appear overly optimistic about life and our world, but there is nothing naive about my hope.

I remember the soldiers and the bombed-out buildings, and I remember growing up in a place where at times it was genuinely difficult to imagine that things could ever be different. So when I tell you that I believe the future can be better, I truly mean it.

My optimism is grounded in what I call realistic hope. It doesn’t mean pretending that everything is fine or ignoring the difficult realities around us. In fact, I think it’s almost the opposite. Realistic hope looks honestly at what is, sometimes in all its brokenness, while refusing to believe that what is must always be what will be.

There’s a line in The Imaginal Coach that I’ve been thinking about:

“You may not see the butterfly yet. But that doesn’t mean nothing is happening.”

Sometimes change begins long before we can see any evidence of it. That can be true in a person, a relationship or an organization, and yesterday I was reminded that it can even be true of a city.

I increasingly believe that the future is never neutral. We are all playing some small part in shaping it through the stories we tell, the possibilities we choose to imagine, the conversations we have and the decisions we make each day.

Yesterday, walking through those Belfast streets filled with music, I was reminded again that the way things are today does not have to be the way things will always be.

So whatever part of your life or world feels particularly stuck at the moment, don’t give up too quickly on what it could become.

Perhaps something is happening.

Oh, and the Fleadh is happening next year, in the first week of August, so if you wanted to go on that trip to Ireland, do it!