You - Stefan’s Week-notes 09/11/2025
Inspired by the weeknotes of friends and coachees including John Fitzgerald, Steve Messer and Nour Sidawi - I thought I'd give it a go.
Weeknotes - YOU
This week has been about you - the part of transformation that only you can bring. The conversations that landed most deeply were the ones where you let a little more of yourself into the work: your perspective, your courage, your history, your instinct.
When you show up fully, things shift. Structures loosen. Possibility widens. It’s a reminder that transformation doesn’t start with strategies or frameworks; it starts with you deciding to bring your way of seeing, your truth, and your energy into the room. That’s where the power lives.
1. What activities did I get up to this week?
This past week brought gentler training rides, strength work, and yoga stretches – movement that felt restorative rather than demanding.
In between, there’s been plenty of work and life admin, the kind that quietly clears space for what’s next.
A mentoring session with a chartered surveyor sparked a great question: “How do I acquire more business without being something I’m not?” The answer – be you. Whatever brought success before, replicate and repeat.
Coaching conversations ranged wide: one leader shaping their organisation’s future while working out where they fit within it; another designing their first 90-day plan and contracting with their boss and team; and an outplacement session exploring what to apply for next, what’s needed financially, and how freedom shifts when stepping outside.
There was also a brilliant conversation with a female organisation design expert about white women’s role in racism – tracing the emotional transition from offence, through indifference, to true allyship.
And amid it all, time to collect the kids for the weekend – always grounding – and a piece of writing about one of my earliest bosses, whose quiet stewardship stayed with me. I also shared reflections on how the light-touch version of test, learn and grow risks undermining the greatness it can bring.
2. What’s the central theme or thread that tied my week together?
Authenticity – and holding space for the you that you are.
It’s easy to get caught chasing versions of ourselves shaped by expectation, ambition, or comparison. This week reminded me – and many of the people I coached – that real growth comes from returning to who we already are, not reinventing from scratch.
Whether it was a mentor conversation about building business without pretending, or coaching leaders navigating new roles and identities, the message was the same: hold space for your own truth. The steadiness to stand there – not to shrink, not to perform – is what allows everything else to flow.
3. What moments lit me up this week?
A chat with Mum about her will – oddly enough – and the quiet sense of agency it gave her. There was something steadying about it: facing life’s practicalities with clarity and grace, and realising that preparation can be its own form of care.
Then, walking with my kids along the seafront on Saturday night, around 10 pm – just us. Their wisdom, humour, and inquisitiveness inspired me. We laughed, asked questions, and the world felt wide open again.
We even squeezed in a strength session together – a simple, physical moment that carried its own lineage. Just like I used to do with my dad all those years ago.
4. What did I wrestle with this week?
The juggle of home and work life.
I’ve started putting a weekly “home shizzle” morning in my diary – time for tidying, sorting, and all the bits of life admin that keep things running. But I struggled to stop work long enough to do it.
Still, it wasn’t all bad. I tidied, I sorted – and while doing so, my mind wandered in that creative way it does. I thought about test, learn and grow, about the stewardship coaching model I’m developing, and researched a change framework to support some of the ideas forming.
It reminded me that work should bring joy – even when it arrives at the “wrong” time.
5. What personal moments felt significant this week?
Writing an evening journaling note about joy.
It’s funny – when you write about what brings you joy, no matter how big or small, it makes you smile. Even now, writing this, I’m smiling.
That entry centred on the visit of a dear friend to the island. Two people talking and laughing about the madness of the world – but with an unspoken understanding that beneath it all sits something deeper, gentler, and real.
6. Where did I see stewardship in practice this week?
In the memories of one of my first bosses, Ian Duncan – someone I wrote about this week for Be The Waves.
“Start less, finish more,” he used to say – and he meant it. It wasn’t about doing less, it was about doing well – taking care with the work, the people, and the follow-through.
His example reminded me that stewardship often lives in the quiet disciplines: completing what matters, finishing with integrity, and leaving things – and people – a little stronger than before.
7. What metaphor or image captures the feeling of this week?
Freshwater Bay – where the kids and I ate a picnic lunch on Saturday.
The light, the energy of the water, the reflections. The beauty – and the pause.
It felt like a transition point: the shift from the hectic rhythm of collecting the kids into the calm of a weekend together. No football matches or pantomime rehearsals this Sunday – just space to breathe into the morning, unhurried and whole.
8. What did I notice beneath the surface this week?
A worrying absence of complexity – or perhaps a lack of willingness to deal with it.
We seem to be oversimplifying and cutting corners, turning deep work like transformation into something that can be “wrapped up in three words.” And when that happens, people take shortcuts.
Whether at the individual, collective, or systemic level, some things can’t be rushed – discovery included. It takes time to understand the patterns, to connect the dots, and to let change embed itself properly. Complexity isn’t the problem – impatience is.
9. What am I carrying forward into next week?
Calm – even though it’s a busy one ahead.
And these words of mine, still echoing from this week’s writing:
“We do not transform a system – it transforms itself. But that system requires clarity, which can rarely be found with the eyes alone that formed it.”
A reminder to stay steady, to look with fresh eyes, and to let transformation unfold in its own time.
10. What writing flowed from me this week and what am I reading?
A piece on stewardship for a 2026 publication – part biographical, part exploration of how my understanding of stewardship formed and deepened over time.
It’s both a reflection and a call: for more stewardship in leadership, in systems, and in ourselves. Writing it felt like reconnecting with the thread that runs through everything I do. I can’t wait to share it.
Flipping to coin; I’m reading Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders by Jane Robinson - a beautifully written social history of the first generation of women who fought their way into professional life after WWI. It’s helping me see how many of today’s workplace norms were shaped by structures never designed with women in mind, and why those echoes still show up in coaching rooms and leadership teams. As a white man working in transformation and performance, it’s a grounding reminder that what we call “culture” is really just inherited design – and that part of my work is learning to notice what others have had to navigate for generations.
I’m only about 20 pages in and i already love this paragraph “Try to put as much nourishment as possible into a small com-pass. Choose always those foods that are most digestible, and cook them so as to leave the least possible work for the digestive organs. Make everything look as pretty and as appetising as you can. Therefore, don't put a little broth at the bottom of a large basin, and don't serve anything with a plate or spoon that has been used before”.
It’s from a Penny Cookery Book published in 1884, and I can’t help but feel there’s both practical wisdom and a metaphor for life and stewardship in it: offering nourishment with care, reducing unnecessary effort for others, and paying attention to how things feel, not just how they function.
11. What thought or question do I want to leave myself (and others) with?
What if what you wanted was just around the corner – a certainty?
How would you act differently?
And what if acting like that now meant it came sooner?
Because how we rise shapes everything that follows.
12. How do I want to sign off this week?
I love you, beautiful people.
And if you know someone looking to transform themselves or their life, their team, or the system they lead in – send them my way. It’s what I do.
Love to all,
Stefan
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For now; thank you
I am…
An executive coach and the CEO of Be The Waves, growing stewardship for a thriving planet.
I helping good people lead great things; in other words - I empower Stewardship
Good people care about others, our planet and beauty. Great things are changes for the betterment of society and all that lives within an around it. It sounds big and fun - it is.
I'm also an endurance racing cyclist and a go getter.
You can read more about me and what I do; how I work here