The truth is… Everything I teach and share — I’ve had to survive first.

Welcome to Newsletter Number 3!

Last week on LinkedIn, I shared something personal: The truth is… everything I teach and share — I’ve had to survive first.

That post struck a chord, because it wasn’t polished strategy — it was real. It was about how the insights I bring into Boardrooms and governance environments aren’t just learned. They’re lived.

When I talk about the pain of being shut down, dismissed, manipulated, or labelled difficult… it’s because I’ve been there. And when I support others through similar dynamics, I do so from a place of deep understanding, not theory alone.

But let’s talk about theory for a moment — because it matters, too.

I’m what you’d call a pracademic. My work lives at the intersection of lived experience and academic rigour. My behavioural governance frameworks draw on organisational behaviour, systems thinking, ethical leadership models, psychological safety research (thank you, Amy Edmondson), trauma-informed practice, and power dynamics theory.

It’s not just gut feel — it’s grounded. And it’s also painfully human.

Because the truth is, governance doesn’t just happen through structures. It happens through people in rooms — each carrying their own stories, survival patterns, and nervous systems into spaces where big decisions get made.

That’s what behavioural governance is really about.

It’s the constant interplay between the environment we walk into — the hierarchy, tone, unspoken norms, power plays — and the person we are when we walk in — our confidence, values, wounds, conditioning, and capacity for presence.

Sometimes the room shapes us.

Other times, we shape the room.

Often, both are happening at once — silently.

Here’s what I know to be true: we can’t always change the room.

The Chair might be immovable. The culture might be slow to shift. The politics might be thick.

But we can change how we show up in it.

We can bring awareness to our responses — the urge to shrink, to over-explain, to please, to freeze.

We can learn to regulate, reflect, and respond with integrity — even when the space isn’t safe.

And we can choose presence over performance.

It’s hard. And sometimes, you need a space to figure it out.

That’s why I built my Sounding Board Circles, Roundtables, and Strategic Leadership Forums — high-trust peer environments for governance leaders navigating the messy middle between personal integrity and organisational power structures.