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Welcome back and a warm hello to new subscribers! It’s great to be in your inbox again, reflecting on where we are, where we’ve been and where we might be heading next.

Last week, I left you with this prompt:

“Where in your life have you outsourced your truth and what would it look like to reclaim it, gently?”

I hope it offered a moment to pause and reflect.

It builds on a theme I return to often, that progress isn’t always about striving forward, sometimes it’s about returning to the quieter and wiser parts of ourselves. We’re often taught to ignore this wisdom so I support people to re-learn what we once knew intuitively, before the world told us who to be.

As children, many of us felt free to follow our curiosity, creativity and emotions. But over time, societal and cultural conditioning asks us to "grow up" and that often means conforming.

We begin to swap out truth for obedience and autonomy for approval. It can leave us disconnected from joy, intuition and our sense of inner belonging.

When I reflect on my own journey, I can clearly see how my burnout showed up when I had outsourced my truth in the name of security, status and trying to be ‘sensible.’ I chose the conventional career path, chasing success through money, busyness and external validation. I didn’t even realise how far I’d drifted from myself.

Somewhere along the way, I silenced the values that had been lovingly passed on by my mum - softer, wilder, more loving values I’d labelled as ‘hippy’ and buried under the weight of corporate and societal ambition.

But our bodies keep the score. We are deeply intelligent and self-regulating systems (physiological, psychological, spiritual) and when one part is off balance, the others will respond and show up in surprising ways.

I’ll never forget the moment I stood at the threshold of a workplace and simply couldn’t walk in. My nervous system said no and for once, I listened.

My mum had a saying that stayed with me. It planted a seed that helped me come back to myself. Read on and we’ll explore how we can live with this knowledge in our everyday life:

Carl Jung’s work explored the idea that we all carry a ‘shadow’. These are the parts of ourselves we repress, deny or disown because they don’t align with how we want to be seen.

These might be emotions we were taught were ‘too much’, needs we were told to suppress or truths that felt inconvenient to the life we were trying to build.

But the shadow doesn’t disappear just because we ignore it.

And the more I pushed away the voice inside me, the one whispering that something wasn’t right, the louder my body had to speak.

The more I resisted change, the more entrenched I became in patterns that drained me. I told myself I was being sensible, that things weren’t that bad and that I’d deal with it when I had more time.

Avoidance can disguise itself as busyness, indecision or perfectionism. But underneath, it’s often fear. Fear of what might happen if we let the truth rise to the surface.

So if any of this resonates, here are a few gentle prompts to help you meet what you’ve been resisting and begin Dreaming and Designing a future from that place instead:

🌱 Name what you’re avoiding.
Not to shame it, but to bring it into the light. Is it a truth you haven’t said out loud? A decision you’ve been deferring? A feeling you’ve been numbing? Write it down without judgment.

🌱 Ask: what is this resistance trying to protect me from?
Often, we avoid things not because they’re bad but because they threaten an identity or coping strategy we’ve outgrown. Understanding the why behind the resistance gives us more choice.

🌱 Imagine the vision that lies on the other side.
If this thing were no longer holding you back, what might become possible? Who might you become? This is where visioning from abundance (not scarcity) begins.

🌱 Let it be gentle.
Reclaiming truth doesn’t have to be dramatic. It can be quiet, steady and imperfect. The smallest shift in awareness can create ripples that reshape everything.

The biggest event this week is the Summer Solstice! So I hope you get time to enjoy the wonder of this powerful day.

Last year, me and a group of friends cycled through the night to Stonehenge from Bournemouth. It was one of the best adventures I’ve ever experienced so if you need any tips or route guidance, feel free to drop me a message :)

I’m doing a different bicycle adventure this year which has sold out but there’s still lots on:

• People Planet Pastry event at Patch on Thursday 26th June. Tickets here

• Summer Solstice celebrations at the wonderful Four Acre Farm on the 27th June. Details here

• ACTionism film screening with my friends at Velo Domestique in Southbourne. Provisional date is Thursday 10th July at 7pm. Tickets will be confirmed and booking link will be shared next week!

And this brings us to something I’ll be exploring next week, procrastination.

Because what we call procrastination is often a symptom of deeper resistance, a protective pattern that arises when something matters to us but feels risky to face. So before we try to ‘fix’ it, we need to listen to it.

For now, I’ll leave you with our reflection for next time:

What are you putting off and what might that resistance be trying to protect you from?

Let it sit with you this week. I’ll be back soon with some thoughts on how procrastination might not be the problem but the path.

Until then, with compassion and curiosity,

Nick