Decisive Coaching

01/10/2026

PEOPLE MAKE A LOT MORE SENSE WHEN YOU STOP TAKING THEM AT FACE VALUE.

The woman who does everything for everyone, then quietly resents the fact nobody does anything for her.

The bloke who has to be the loudest person in the room.

The person who desperately wants a relationship, but somehow finds a reason why every potential partner isn't quite right.

The mate who's always in crisis and always needs rescuing, yet somehow nothing ever really changes.

The person who says “I don't care what anyone thinks of me” while spending half their life trying to prove themselves.

The parent who calls it helping, when actually they can't tolerate watching their child struggle.

The person who needs everything done their way.

The one who constantly apologises.

The one who never apologises.

The one who keeps choosing unavailable people.

The one who jokes about everything the moment a conversation gets uncomfortable.

The one who says
“That's just who I am.”

But is it?
Because here's something I've become increasingly fascinated by after around 15 years of working with people:
Very little human behaviour is as random as it first appears.
Underneath what somebody does, there's usually something else going on.

A need being met.
Something being avoided.
Something being protected.
A role they've learned to play.
A meaning they've attached to something.

An old strategy that's worked so many times they've stopped realising it's a strategy at all.

Eventually we give these patterns names.
Needy. Controlling. Lazy. Difficult. Selfish. Insecure. Attention-seeking. People pleaser. Commitment-phobe. Victim.
And that's usually where our curiosity fu***ng stops.

Mine doesn't.

I want to know:
Why THAT behaviour?
Why THAT reaction?
Why does it keep happening?
What does the person get from it?
What does it protect them from?
When did it start making sense?
And perhaps most importantly...
Does it still make sense now?

That's the thinking behind something I've been developing for a long time and am finally beginning to put into a teachable form.

THE ADAPTIVE METHOD
A practical way of understanding human behaviour by looking beyond what people do... and getting much closer to why the bloody hell they're doing it.
Because sometimes the thing you think is someone's problem...
started life as their solution.
More soon.

08/09/2026

Something to think 🤔 about

A conversation I had recently reminded me of something I've heard so many times over the years, particularly from men sitting in my office trying to understand what the hell has happened to their relationship.

And while I've recognised some of these patterns in my own past too, this definitely isn't just my story. It's a pattern I've seen play out in lots of different ways with lots of different people.

Quite often the conversation eventually gets around to s*x. "She never wants it anymore." "It wasn't like this when we first met." And underneath all of that is usually a bloke feeling pretty fu***ng rejected.

But there's a pattern I've noticed. Quite often Dad wasn't really there, physically or emotionally, so Mum compensated. She protected her boy, reassured him, sorted things out, made decisions and generally made sure he was okay. All done from love.

Then that boy grows up. He's got hairs round his bo****ks and a driving licence, but some of those old needs can come with him.

And this is where a little bit of psychology comes into it. We're often drawn towards what's familiar. Familiar doesn't necessarily mean healthy, sometimes it just feels normal.

So without consciously looking for another Mum, he can find himself in a relationship with a woman whose own patterns fit his almost perfectly. Maybe she has a high need for certainty. Maybe she likes being needed. Maybe being the one who organises everything, keeps everything together or knows what's best gives her a sense of control or significance.

And initially, it works. He likes the certainty she provides and she likes the role she gets to play. It's new, exciting, uncertain and they're all over each other.

Then they get comfortable and the old patterns start creeping in. She starts reminding him, organising things, making more decisions, sorting s**t out and increasingly wanting things done her way. He starts relying on her to do it.

She does more because he does less, and he does less because she does more.

Until eventually they've created the very people they both complain about. She sees him as another child she has to look after. He sees her as controlling, nagging and never fu***ng happy with anything he does. And strangely enough, neither of those roles is particularly s*xy.

But early on something else can happen too. They have a massive row. They're pi**ed off, they stop talking and suddenly all that comfortable certainty has disappeared. There's distance, uncertainty and emotion.

Maybe one of them makes the first move. They reconnect, the whole state changes and suddenly they're all over each other again. Amazing make up s*x.

Do that enough times and, without either of them consciously deciding anything, the row itself can almost become part of the reconnection mechanism. Conflict creates distance, distance creates uncertainty and reconnection brings relief, intensity and desire.

But as these patterns become more entrenched, sometimes neither of them makes the first move. They're both too dug into their own position.

Then something bigger happens. A family crisis, bad news, somebody else's drama, anything significant enough to make their own argument suddenly seem irrelevant.

And without either of them having to back down, something very convenient happens. It changes from "me against you" to "us against this."

They're connected again. Nobody had to apologise, nobody had to admit they were wrong and nobody had to lose face.

The crisis created the intimacy they couldn't create themselves.

But connection isn't necessarily resolution. Sometimes the original problem hasn't been fixed at all. It's just been temporarily outranked by a bigger one.

Eventually things settle down, the protective parts come back and the old roles return.

Then Monday morning arrives.

"Have you put the fu***ng bins out yet?"

And round they go again.

He thinks the problem is she doesn't want him anymore. She thinks the problem is she's got another child to look after.

But maybe the uncomfortable truth is they both get something from the roles they've created. His dependency feeds her need to take control and her need to take control gives him somewhere to put his dependency.

Until eventually they both resent each other for doing exactly what they've unknowingly trained each other to do.

Maybe the problem isn't simply that the s*x disappeared. Maybe it's understanding the parts of us that created the relationship we've ended up in.

And that's exactly why I wrote Part of Me.

To help us understand why we become who we become, why we keep repeating the same patterns and how to stop letting old versions of ourselves run our lives.

06/09/2026

The other day I asked a woman a question I probably ask somebody every other week.

Who comes first, your relationship or your children?

There's usually a pause because morally we think there's only one right answer.

My kids. Obviously.

We'd do anything for our kids.

But after years of listening to people talk about their childhoods, relationships and the s**t going on in their lives, I keep noticing the same patterns.

Kids don't just grow up. They adapt.

The boy who watches Dad shut down becomes the man who goes silent when his girlfriend gets emotional.

The boy who gets rescued every time he f***s up becomes the man who blames his ex, his boss, the police, his mates or anybody except himself.

The boy who never feels enough can become the man constantly trying to prove that he is through money, muscles, women, coke, fighting, s*x or bravado.

The girl desperate for Dad's attention can become the woman repeatedly attracted to men who make her earn theirs.

The girl who learns that being s*xually desired feels like being valued can end up accepting things she doesn't really want just to feel wanted.

The child who walks on eggshells becomes the adult who can detect a change in somebody's tone from across the fu***ng room.

The child who keeps the peace becomes the adult terrified of confrontation.

The child who gets love for achieving becomes the adult who never feels good enough.

The child who becomes Mum's best friend becomes the adult who feels responsible for everybody else's emotions.

The kid who is constantly rescued never learns how to rescue themselves.

And then there's another version that looks completely different.

The child who had everything.

Daddy's little princess who could do no wrong. Dad always there to rescue her and no boyfriend ever quite good enough.

Then she becomes a woman and discovers that an adult relationship requires compromise, vulnerability, accountability and occasionally admitting that maybe she's the fu***ng problem.

There's a male version too.

Mum's little boy. No girlfriend is good enough for him. When the relationship goes t**s up, Mum already knows whose fault it was.

Hers.

I can recognise a bit of that one from my own life. In my mum's eyes sometimes the girlfriend simply wasn't good enough for her boy.

Meanwhile her boy knew perfectly well that sometimes he was being a little s**t who hadn't got a clue what he wanted or how to deal with relationships.

That's not blaming our parents.

It's understanding patterns.

And here's where it gets really uncomfortable for us as parents.

Sometimes what we call putting our children first is also meeting something in US.

I need to be needed.

I need to feel important.

I need somebody on my side.

I can't bear watching you struggle.

I need to know you're safe so I can feel safe.

I don't want you to leave me.

I need to protect you because it makes ME feel like a good parent.

So we rescue.

We interfere.

We make excuses.

We fight their battles.

We remove consequences.

We tolerate behaviour from our own child we'd call fu***ng disgraceful if somebody else's kid did it.

Then we call it love.

And it IS love.

But love doesn't automatically make every behaviour healthy.

Sometimes the child ends up meeting the parent's needs while everybody believes the parent is meeting the child's.

And if the kids always come first, something else can quietly happen.

Mum and Dad stop being lovers and simply become parents.

S*x disappears. Affection disappears. Fun disappears. One criticises, the other withdraws and the kids gradually fill the emotional space between them.

Two people who once couldn't keep their hands off each other eventually barely touch.

And their children have watched the whole thing.

So maybe putting your kids first doesn't mean making them the centre of your fu***ng universe.

Maybe putting them first means giving them something far more useful.

Let them fail.

Let them hear no.

Let them experience consequences.

Let them see you admit when you're wrong.

Let them see Mum and Dad disagree without destroying each other.

Let them see affection, flirting, laughter, boundaries, responsibility and two adults who still actually want each other.

Love them enough to occasionally let them be pi**ed off with you.

Because our children aren't just listening to what we teach them.

They're learning who they need to become in the environment we create around them.

And one day they won't call those things childhood adaptations.

They'll just say

That's who I am.

And that's one of the reasons I'm writing Part of Me.

Because perhaps one of the most important questions we can ever ask ourselves is

How much of who I think I am is actually who I once needed to become?

And how much of that person is still running my life today?

04/09/2026

I was working with a woman recently who came to see me because she just didn’t feel right anymore. Tired, anxious, brain fog, poor sleep, aches and pains, digestive problems and generally feeling like she’d lost herself somewhere along the way.

As we started digging, there was a pattern I see all the time. She was the one everyone relied on. She worried about everybody else, hated upsetting people, struggled to say no and felt guilty when she did. She’d overthink conversations, take responsibility for other people’s moods and agree to things she didn’t really want to do, then wonder why she felt pi**ed off and exhausted afterwards.

The interesting question for me is always, why?

Because people don’t usually become like this for no reason.

At some point, a part of her learned that keeping people happy was safer than upsetting them. A part of her learned that being useful got love or approval, that avoiding conflict kept the peace and that looking after everybody else was more important than looking after herself.

And that part didn’t disappear just because she grew up.

It was still there, still trying to help, still running the same old programme that probably made perfect sense years ago.

That’s the bit most people don’t realise. You can be 30, 40, 50 years old, but still have a part of you making decisions based on what it learned when you were a kid.

Then years later you’re wondering why you can’t switch off, why you’re constantly tense, why your body is kicking off and why you don’t really know what YOU want anymore.

Maybe we need to stop asking people what’s wrong with them and start asking what happened that made being this way make sense in the first place.

Because quite often, the part of you causing the problem today is still trying to solve a problem from years ago.

29/08/2026

Something to think about 🤔

Be careful who you become in somebody else’s story.

We all know someone who always seems to have a villain.

Someone’s upset them.
Someone’s disrespected them.
Someone’s fu**ed them over.

And somehow, you keep getting the updates.

Before you know it, you’re pi**ed off with people you barely know, taking sides in arguments you weren’t fu***ng there for and defending a story you’ve only heard one side of.

That’s when it might be worth asking yourself…

What part have I been given in this story?

Because if they’re always the victim and somebody else is always the villain…

guess which part you’ve probably been recruited to play?

The rescuer.

And here’s the uncomfortable bit.

You might actually like the role.

Being needed. Being the good one. Being the person who understands when apparently nobody else does.

So maybe stop asking why they always have so much drama…

and start asking:

Why the f**k do I keep accepting a part in it?👈

26/08/2026

Ever feel like you're back in control... only to find yourself doing the same old s**t again a few weeks later?

Something happens.

Work. Money. Your relationship. The kids. Something somebody says. Something they don't say. Something from the past comes back up. Or you start worrying about something that hasn't even fu***ng happened yet.

You don't feel great, so you do whatever you've learned works.

Have a drink. Work more. Eat. Scroll. Watch p**n. Sniff s**t,
Have a smoke. Take something. Pick an argument. Become controlling. Withdraw. Keep everybody else happy. Whatever your particular flavour happens to be.

And here's the thing...

It normally works.

You feel better.

Then comes the “Right, I'm sorting my s**t out” stage.

Few good days. Maybe a few good weeks.

“See. I'm fine. I'm back in control.”

Until something happens again.

And round you go.

What's interesting is that two people can experience the same s**t and respond completely differently.

So maybe the real question isn't simply what's happening to you.

Maybe there's a pattern happening inside you that you've never really understood.

And if you've been doing it long enough, you might not even recognise it as a pattern anymore.

It just feels like you.

That's the bit I find fascinating.

Because these patterns aren't as random, weird or unique to you as you might think.

There are reasons we become who we become, reasons we repeat certain behaviours and reasons some things seem to have such a fu***ng hold over us.

I'm not going to give you the answer in a Facebook post.

But if you're looking at that picture thinking...

“F**k. That's me.”

Good.

Maybe that's where the interesting bit starts.

28/07/2026