What I'm up to

This is a living page. I'll add to it as things evolve, and in time I want to write a proper post about each of these — the story behind it, what it means, what I'm learning. For now, here's where I am.

Music, community and the Voces8 Foundation

I'm a trustee of the Voces8 Foundation, and it's one of the things I'm most proud to be part of.

Here's one of the latest recordings featuring Voces8 conducted but their Artistic Director - a movement composed by their composer in residence, Taylor Scott Davis. If that doesn't capture and move you (highly unlikely) try this

People sometimes assume that my connection to music education is only about the arts — about nurturing the next generation of musicians, or preserving a cultural tradition. That's not only it. What moves me about music education is what happens to a child, or adult for that matter, when they learn to play or sing with other people. Something shifts.

Music teaches you to listen — really listen — in a way that almost nothing else does. It teaches you that your voice matters, and that it only works when it's in relationship with other voices. It teaches confidence, not the performative kind, but the quiet kind that comes from having done something hard and discovered you could. It teaches you about harmony — that difference, held well, creates something more beautiful than sameness ever could. And it teaches teamwork in its most honest form: there's nowhere to hide in an ensemble.

These are life skills. They travel. A child who learns them through music carries them into every relationship, every team, every difficult conversation they'll ever have.

I also chair Morabe Rural Music, a Suffolk-based charity bringing music education into primary schools. Same conviction, different scale — and I'll be writing more about both of these soon. You can watch our showreel here or below - arm yourself with enough tissues!

Studying with the Relational Life Institute

I'm currently completing a coaching certification with Terry Real's Relational Life Institute.

I came to Terry Real's work through bell hooks — through her unflinching exploration of how power operates inside love, and how the structures of patriarchy damage not just women but men, and the relationships between them. Real is, as far as I can tell, the only person in couples therapy willing to name what's actually happening when connection breaks down: that one person has moved into shame — the one-down position — while the other has moved into grandiosity — the one-up position — and that neither place allows for real intimacy.

You can't be truly close to someone from a position of superiority. And you can't be truly close from a position of inferiority either. Both positions are a kind of hiding.

What Real calls relational democracy is the only ground on which real intimacy becomes possible — a meeting of peers, each with their own needs, neither superior nor inferior. Just human, and present, and honest. That's not a therapeutic technique. It's an ethic. And it maps directly onto everything I believe about what good coaching looks like.

More to come. Watch this space.