Episode 5 in a short series of 6, asking what would make human beings less recruitable to war, domination, and dehumanisation.

This one is about our relationship with our leaders.

When I was eight, every Wednesday afternoon a teacher came over from a nearby school.

He was sharply dressed in a three-piece Prince of Wales check suit with a bright patterned tie.

He was a great hit with the girls, with whom he flirted.

With the boys, he delivered cruel put-downs.

I only saw a few of his lessons.

After our early encounters, I became too frightened to attend school.

Looking back, I can see he reminded me too much of a man much closer to home.

A man who made it clear he did not like me, and who seemed to take pride in his ability to hurt me.

That matters because our first leaders are usually our parents.

If early authority was cruel, frightening, shaming, intrusive, or emotionally absent, bad leadership can feel familiar before it feels clearly wrong.

And if you have only seen poor leadership, you may not even know what good leadership looks like.

Which means you are more likely to settle for too little.

After years of being led by bullying and cruel people, I eventually left and became a psychotherapist, executive coach, clinical supervisor and researcher.

These days, after years of therapy and development work, I am much less fazed by the different defences people present me with.

My job is to make friends with people, wherever they are starting from, and influence them towards the best version of themselves available to them.

That means being kind, but not naive.

Boundaried, but not cold.

Compassionate, but still reality-based.

Because good leadership is not merely having authority.

It is what you do with it.

A mature leader brings steadiness under pressure.

They help people think more clearly, not less.

They tell the truth, without humiliation.

They hold boundaries, without contempt.

They repair when they get it wrong.

They use authority in a way that leaves people more honest, more courageous, more self-trusting, and more human.

That is what good leadership does.

It does not merely extract performance.

It develops people.

So perhaps one mark of maturity is this:

we become more discerning about leadership.

We recognise poor leadership sooner.

We expect more.

We settle for less distortion.

And where possible, we do not only submit to poor leadership or complain about it.

We may sometimes be able to influence it upward.

Not always.

Some leaders are too defended, too rewarded by power, or too committed to distortion.

Wisdom includes knowing the difference.

So maturity is not only the capacity to reject bad leadership.

It is the capacity to discern when to tolerate, when to challenge, when to influence, and when to leave.

Next episode I’ll draw the series together and ask how psychologically and emotionally mature human beings become more resilient to domination without becoming less human themselves.

Look around this café.

Not quickly.

Properly.

The table.

The cup.

The coffee.

The oat milk.

The spoon.

The chair beneath you.

The window.

The light.

The floor.

The hands that served you.

The hands that cleaned before you arrived.

The person across from you.

The fact that, for a few minutes, no one is demanding anything except your attention.

It is easy to call this ordinary.

A coffee.

A conversation.

A short pause in the day.

But ordinary life is rarely ordinary when we look closely enough.

How many people had to touch this moment before we could sit here?

Someone grew the coffee.

Someone harvested it.

Someone transported it.

Someone roasted it.

Someone designed the cup.

Someone made the table.

Someone laid the floor.

Someone wired the lights.

Someone wrote the menu.

Someone opened the café early.

Someone swept.

Someone stocked.

Someone washed.

Someone smiled when they were tired.

And behind each of those people, more people.

Families.

Roads.

Factories.

Fields.

Weather.

Water.

Soil.

Time.

A whole hidden web of life making this small moment possible.

This is one of the strange failures of modern attention.

We can live surrounded by miracles of coordination, labour, nature, history and care, and still feel as if nothing much is happening.

We notice inconvenience faster than interdependence.

We notice what is missing faster than what is supporting us.

We notice the delay, the noise, the price, the imperfection.

And of course, sometimes those things matter.

But there is another way of seeing that does not deny difficulty.

It widens the frame.

It lets the nervous system register: I am not floating alone in an empty world.

I am held, however imperfectly, by countless visible and invisible forms of life.

A coffee can be just a coffee.

But it can also become a doorway.

Into gratitude.

Into humility.

Into ecological awareness.

Into the recognition that no human life is self-made.

Not really.

We are all living inside webs we did not create alone.

And sometimes emotional maturity begins with the capacity to notice what is already sustaining us before we rush to improve, fix, optimise or complain.

So here is the question I would take into your next coffee break:

What had to happen for this simple moment to exist?

And what might change in you if you let yourself feel that?

One episode in a series I call: A coffee conversation worth having.

Some people do not notice themselves enough.

Some notice themselves far too much.

Neither is ideal.

That is why adaptive self-monitoring matters.

Adaptive self-monitoring is our ability to notice what is happening in us, in real time, accurately enough to make better choices, without becoming harsh, obsessive, or self-absorbed.

A simple practice I often offer my clients goes like this:

Notice → Describe → Adjust → Re-check

Before you begin, think of a recent moment when you were not quite yourself.

Maybe:

you were sharper than you meant to be

flatter than usual

more avoidant

more defensive

too eager to please

too detached

too tense

too vague

Rate how far off you felt from yourself from 0 to 10.

0 = very much myself

10 = noticeably off-centre

Pause.

Take three slower breaths.

Then ask:

What was happening in me?

Try to describe it plainly.

Not:

I’m awful.

I’m failing.

I’m impossible.

More like:

I was tense.

I was rushing.

I was braced.

I was over-explaining.

I was performing.

I was slightly shut down.

I was not really present.

That matters.

Because adaptive self-monitoring is not self-criticism.

It is accurate observation.

Then ask:

What effect was that having?

On:

our tone

our choices

our body

our relationships

our work

Then ask:

What small adjustment would bring me back toward myself?

Maybe:

slow down

say less

speak more clearly

feel our feet

stop performing

name what is true

take a breath

leave the room briefly

come back to the task

Then make one small adjustment.

Nothing dramatic.

Just enough.

Then re-check.

What changed, if anything?

Did your body soften?

Did your thinking become clearer?

Did your tone come back?

Did you feel more like yourself?

That matters.

Because adaptive self-monitoring is not about obsessively watching ourselves.

It is about staying close enough to our own functioning that we can make useful corrections before drift becomes damage.

When this skill is weak, we often see:

blind spots,

repeated interpersonal mistakes,

poor timing,

tone-deafness,

performance drift,

or preventable rupture.

When it is distorted, we often see:

hypervigilant self-consciousness,

self-criticism,

over-analysis,

and paralysis.

As this skill grows, we often become more accurate, more adjustable, and more trustworthy in how we move through the world.

We do not need to monitor ourselves perfectly.

We need to notice enough, kindly enough, and early enough to make better choices.

That is a skill.

Note: In the developmental sequence I use, adaptive self-monitoring sits later because it depends on earlier foundations. Without enough self-worth, regulation, and emotional capacity, self-monitoring can easily become self-attack rather than useful awareness.

Why AI therapy tools may misunderstand therapy.

AI can be astonishingly useful.

It can help people think.

Reflect.

Journal.

Organise.

Prepare.

Articulate.

Spot patterns.

Find language.

I use it myself.

So this is not an anti-AI post.

But I do think many AI therapy tools risk misunderstanding therapy because they misunderstand the human being.

Cognitive psychology has shaped much of our culture.

We talk about thoughts.

Beliefs.

Schemas.

Predictions.

Mental models.

Narratives.

Meaning-making.

All of that matters.

But human development is not only cognitive.

The cognitive model is especially attractive to rational psychologists, rational founders and rational programmers because it makes human difficulty look more computational than it really is.

Faulty belief.

Faulty prediction.

Faulty code.

Rewrite the code and the person changes.

Sometimes that is partly true.

But only partly.

Human beings are not broken software.

We are living bodies.

Feeling bodies.

Relational bodies.

Developmental bodies.

Bodies shaped by rhythm, touch, shame, safety, threat, hunger, sleep, movement, voice, belonging and time.

Even emotion is often simplified too much.

We sometimes talk as if there are a small number of core feelings.

Fear.

Anger.

Sadness.

Joy.

Disgust.

Shame.

Love.

But real human feeling is vastly more textured than that.

There are countless human feeling-states.

Many do not have names.

The feeling of being subtly unwanted.

The feeling of being watched but not seen.

The feeling of trying not to need too much.

The feeling of being almost safe.

The feeling of wanting comfort but expecting humiliation.

The feeling of being with someone kind while your body still prepares for attack.

These are not just “thoughts”.

They are states.

And good therapy often works with states before they can be fully named.

That is where many AI tools may struggle.

They may help with what the client can say.

But therapy often depends on what the client cannot yet say.

What the therapist notices before the client knows it.

The slight collapse in the body.

The smile that covers despair.

The apology before a need.

The breath held before anger.

The shame that appears before language.

The grief hidden inside competence.

The feeling just over the horizon of awareness.

That is part of depth psychotherapy.

Not mind-reading.

Not magic.

But trained, relational, embodied attention.

AI may help people reflect between sessions.

It may support preparation, journalling, structure and language.

That can be valuable.

But if therapy is reduced to insight, prompts, articulation, reframing or better self-explanation, we will build shallow tools for deep problems.

Because proper therapy is not only helping people say things more clearly.

It is helping them become more able to feel, regulate, relate, grieve, repair, choose, set boundaries, tolerate shame and remain themselves under pressure.

AI has a place.

An important place.

But it needs to be built on a deep enough model of what being human actually is.

Not just cognition.

Not just code.

Not just words.

A whole human life.

Perfectionism: when doing it imperfectly feels dangerous, the problem is often not high standards.

Very often, perfectionism is not an excellence problem.

It is a procedural problem.

A task appears.

And within seconds, a whole internal sequence runs:

pressure

body tension

anticipation of criticism, exposure, or getting it wrong

control

relief

That relief matters.

Because it teaches the system something:

not “I care about quality”

but

“control protects me”.

So the issue is often not that the person values good work.

It is that imperfection has become linked to a difficult body state, difficult feeling state, and often a shame state.

The task is not just the task.

It has become:

risk

possible criticism

possible humiliation

possible disappointment

possible proof that I am not enough

And so an old procedure runs:

over-check

over-polish

re-do

delay finishing

tighten control

raise the standard again

never quite let it be done

That old procedure may bring short-term relief.

But it also has a cost.

It teaches the system that imperfection is dangerous.

So next time, the pressure arrives earlier.

The standard gets harsher.

The body tightens faster.

The shame lands sooner.

And the work becomes heavier, slower, and harder to complete.

That is why tips alone so often fail (and paradoxically may even add further pressure).

More productivity advice.

More efficiency hacks.

More standards.

More self-monitoring.

More self-criticism.

None of those reliably change the procedure.

Because the goal is not to remember more things when doing something feels exposing.

The goal is to train a different, once-learned procedure that your system can run automatically.

An old procedure says:

tighten

control

perfect

protect

A newer procedure says:

notice

stay steady

do it well enough

finish

That newer procedure has different consequences.

Less alarm.

Less shame.

Less over-control.

More completion.

More trust in yourself.

More freedom to focus on the work itself.

That usually means building stronger foundations in three areas:

body awareness

emotional processing

healthy self-worth

When those foundations get stronger, imperfection no longer triggers the same level of alarm, shame, and control.

And that helps not only with perfectionism, but in many other parts of life too.

If you’d like an overview of the Missing Foundations pathway, here’s the explainer video:
https://youtu.be/QoX7D8hChV8

And if you’d like a practical “how to” start building stronger foundations now, here’s the ‘follow-along with me’ video:
https://youtu.be/3k9Tp5YNOiU

You do not need more pressure.

You may need to train the foundations that let “good enough” stop feeling like danger.