Weekly Newsletter

Courtesy of Pavel Danilyuk I was chatting with someone the other day about astrology (as I am sure you do all the time!). I have always had this deep fascination with stars and planets, but I have always been sceptical about their involvement in our day-to-day life. The signs are not even in the same month anyway anymore: the zodiac is out of date since it was invented in Babylon (check out this NY Times article)! However, if you have read this newsletter before, you will kno

We all believe it to be true that one of the core goals of life is to be happy. But, I find this sentence reductive: too simple to sum up the complexity and beauty of a life well-lived. Recently, I started journalling, and I am finding the process of writing very liberating. It allows your thoughts to find a space to exist outside the confines of your head, and it helps you see them from different perspectives. Lately, I have been writing about happiness. This is a common the

The lion must be proud of my hair Yes, I know. I have not publicised much that I left HSBC three months ago. Monday I have finally taken the classic shot of me next to the lions (the bronze pair guarding HSBC's headquarters), like any respectable ex-HSBC employee must do. Why did I leave? I left because I truly realised that I do not belong in corporate anymore. The bureaucracy, the frustrations of delivering large-scale projects, the technology that always seems not to be wo

My life starts looking like a D&D adventure! The Road to Energy Something deeply weird is happening to me. Actual, real-life, stethoscope-wearing doctors have started coming to me for… healing. Yes, me. Let’s all take a collective moment to process that! To make sense of this, we need a little background. As you might know, last year I wrote the book called The Celtic Shaman. It chronicled my slightly desperate personal journey of trying absolutely everything to find the mean

Ready for hunting! [No AI was used to write this article.] AI at the gates! We are all afraid of AI, and for good reasons. Nowadays, LinkedIn is full of people is open to work, and they all seem affected in one way or another by the challenge of AI. And this applies to high-salary jobs as well. McKinsey is completing an overhaul of their pay structure because of it, as now a Gemini account can do the job of a junior consultant. Not to mention Cloud Code, where you can build f

Good Night At 2pm I am not going to lie... I have been feeling quite lethargic lately. I keep having meditation sessions that suspiciously evolve into napping sessions. Spring is a wonderful time to sleep (which apparently it is caused by the release of melatonin accumulated during the winter: with more daylight now we do not need it anymore...), so, to keep awake, I listen to podcast whilst refurbishing old furniture (yes, you read that right!) and hiking around. Here is a l

If I were an artist, I would make this. Hello! Today I want to talk this week about identity. because it keeps showing up in my coaching practice in ways most people don't see coming. I have had a lot of clients sitting on the same decision lately. Same shape every time: stay in the current role, or take a new one that pays more, has more scope, and lines up better with where they say they want to go. And then they freeze, like a deer in the headlight. If you do a clean pros-

Autumn morning. Deutsche Bank graduate induction. Day One. The instructor handed out a personality test. I did it diligently...because that is what diligent graduates do. Result: Creative. The instructor read it twice. Then he looked up. "I don't remember the last time someone on the programme came out with this profile." He meant it as a simple curiosity. But it was a warning: I spent the next 15 years ignoring it. What I did instead was the standard high-performer move when

Hi everyone, Let’s be brutally honest for a second. If my life depended on writing a single line of Python, I wouldn’t be here writing this newsletter. My smart fridge is currently outsmarting me, and I’m pretty sure my toaster is judging my life choices (yes, I can toast a scone, don't judge me). Yet, despite my complete inability to communicate with machines (but never say never!), my clients keep landing major promotions, scoring fantastic new jobs, and taking on massive n

I have always been fascinated by meditation. Mostly because the idea of actually controlling my brain sounded like a superpower. Nowadays, the tech bros call this "biohacking," but back then, I just called it "desperately trying to force-quit my internal browser" (Alt+F4 does not work with the brain - yet!). The Things I Tried (and Failed At) After my autism and ADHD diagnosis, I did what any incredibly stubborn, data-obsessed person would do: I tried to fix my brain through

Am I getting a mullet now?? As I write this, I am caught in the hottest days of the year in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The air is clear in the mountains, a stark contrast to the heavy thoughts I have been carrying. I’m sitting at a beautiful resort, surrounded by the herby and meaty dishes and a symphony of cicadas and frogs (which, like I child, I promptly run after to see if I can catch them!). I took this time off to heal: partly to nurse a lingering, self-inflicted cigarette

Hi everyone, Last week, I shared the at times terrifying, at times fantastic story of how I left the corporate world to become an executive coach, only to accidentally start a tech and training company along the way. Remember those little software tools I mentioned creating because I couldn't find anything good enough for my coaching clients? The ones that people started asking if they could use on their own? Today, I am pulling back the curtain - all for you to try. Here is

Hi everyone, A few months ago, I officially started working for myself. A big step into the unknown, I know, but I’ve been preparing for this for at least two years: daily social media posts, back to university, writing books. All so that one day I could be a solopreneur helping other people achieve their goals. Goodbye corporate life; hello uncertainty. In the beginning, my goal was to start my executive coaching practice. With eight years of experience in the banking world,

I built an AI LinkedIn Scoring Tool. And you get to try it free for 7 days. Hey there, I've been thinking for a while that The Human Spikes Labs would start using AI to give you better, faster, more precise tools. Well. It's happened. This week I'm opening up a brand new tool to the public for the first time: the LinkedIn Profile Audit. How it works Here's the idea. You upload your LinkedIn profile as a PDF, enter your SSI score (the Social Selling Index that LinkedIn gives y

Hey, Most coaching — and most corporations — assume everyone runs on the same operating system. File down your quirks. Flatten your peaks. Shore up your weaknesses. In other words: be average. But the world doesn't reward average anymore. It rewards specialization. The "well-rounded" leader who's decent at everything and exceptional at nothing? That model is failing — quietly, expensively, and everywhere. The future belongs to what I call the Spiky Profile: people with dispro

Welcome to your weekly system update. No fluff or corporate 'wellness'—just the manual for running your high-performance brain on standard MacOS infrastructure. Hey - Welcome, This week marks the Chinese New Year—the Year of the Fire Horse. Traditionally, this sign represents power, speed, and resilience. I was going to write a newsletter on the Year of the Horse, but then my ADHD kicked in, I got distracted and I realized you’d much rather have the 3-minute "Spiky" version i

Hello all, Let me tell you my experience with the workplace environment. Since the corporate world realized that people could WFH and they could save money by decreasing the office space and introduce "hot-desking", the office environment and dynamics have never looked the same. But, for someone like me who has a different - ehrm, special - brain, my experience has been absolutely horrible. Any office space with hot desking literally fills me with physical pain and deep anxie

For many years, I believed that to be a successful executive, I had to be perfect at everything. I tried very hard to fix my weaknesses. I hid my struggles, but by doing this, I accidentally limited my greatest strengths. Every year, my performance reviews were the same: "You are excellent. You bring results that no one else can. But your communication style is too... direct." I felt disappointed. Why didn't the company appreciate my honesty and transparency? I didn't know it

Willpower sucks! I am fascinated by change—specifically why I struggle so much to kick my own bad habits. We are often told that if we just push harder and apply enough "motivation," we can override decades of hardwired behavior. But following a fascinating lecture at Cambridge this week, I’ve realized that relying on willpower is like taking a long position on a depreciating asset - it is a losing investment from the start. Think of it this way: You are trying to install a C