The Frayed Bandage

'I just can’t seem to help it!' is something I hear often in coaching. Whether it’s checking your notifications or 'just one more' chocolate, the impulse feels familiar. In a world of dopamine loops, doom scrolling, and 15-second video distractions, self-control is under siege. Like a muscle that isn’t used and becomes flabby over time, our self-discipline can waste away if not regularly exercised. The opposite holds true too: self-discipline isn’t a fixed trait, it’s trainable. But unlike motivation, which comes and goes, self-discipline is consistent and reliable. It’s the scaffolding that holds behaviour change in place. So, how can we train and develop it? This same question was considered more than 2000 years ago by Greco-Roman philosophers known as The Stoics. They recognised how crucial self-discipline was for thriving and happiness in life, along with “virtues” such as wisdom, justice and courage.  As the philosopher Epictetus said, “No man is free who i...

    “Made with Organic Cotton!” screams the flowery advert headline, trying to obscure the fact that the rest of the clothing production line has harmed the environment. This tokenism from companies is known as “greenwashing”. In healthcare, we’ve learned to sniff out tokenism quickly — and nowhere is this more obvious than in how some organisations approach staff wellbeing. Bowls of fruit in the staff room, sporadic resilience workshops, or reminders to “take a break” in the middle of an unsafe staffing crisis… these are often less about genuine care and more about optics. Welcome to the era of wellbeing washing. Wellbeing washing is what happens when employers attempt to look like they’re supporting staff — without putting in the hard yards. The result? Distrust, cynicism, and a growing resentment of the very word “wellbeing”. One of the most damaging misconceptions is that wellbeing is some sort of luxury — a “nice-to-have” rather than an essential component of a fu...

  Can You Heal Without Leaving? Recovering from Burnout While Still in Healthcare. At a recent networking event, a fellow emergency physician told me he’d just returned to work after recovering from burnout. But when he looked online for stories of others who’d come through it, he noticed something striking — almost no one who’d recovered was still working in clinical practice. Which raises a difficult question: is it even possible to heal properly while still inside the system? Or is leaving the only real path to recovery? A useful analogy here is the drowning man in a river who, kicking and gasping, just makes it to the riverbank, shattered and exhausted. After catching his breath, would the man be foolish to simply jump back in again? There seem to be two sensible alternatives here: 1) Stay on dry land entirely, or 2) If you go back in, wear a lifejacket — and try to stay in shallower waters. The reality is that talk of burnout amongst those working in high stress, high r...