There's a name for the flat bit.
Six of them, actually. Twelve questions tell you which one is yours, and why the holiday, the gym and the next big goal never touched it.
- Can't sit still in an unstructured hour
- Receives a compliment as information rather than as a feeling
- Can't remember the last unplanned hour
- Has confused having no problems with having no pulse
- Feels the stomach drop at anything unscheduled
- Calls avoidance prudence, and half believes it
- The anticipation is reliably better than the thing
- Owns a cupboard that is a museum of the last six attempts
- Holds an answer to what they're made of, and knows it's out of date
- Tells the old stories slightly less often than they used to
- Can't answer what's wrong, and has stopped trying to
- Feels the gap most sharply at moments that were meant to feel meaningful
Three steps, and the first one is free.
Take the twelve questions
Two minutes. No email needed to start. You'll get one of six traps, named.
Read what it costs you
A specific report on your trap: the tells, and why the holiday, the gym and the next big goal never touched it.
Pick the one you'd actually do
Thirty mornings, one night, or three days. Same mechanism, three sizes.
A few years ago I got properly lost in the Victorian high country.
I was walking on my own, and the fog came in. I stopped, had a look around, and couldn't tell you which way I'd come from. Not because the fog was thick. Because I'd been walking for two hours thinking hard about work, and I hadn't looked at anything. No ridgeline, no creek, no sun.
So I had to pick a direction. On my own, with nothing to go on, and a weather front coming in.
Here's the part that stayed with me. I hadn't made a bad call out there. I hadn't made one at all, and I hadn't noticed I'd stopped.
I stood in that fog and realised I'd just described eight years of my career.
Not a crisis. By every measure anyone would check, I was fine. That's exactly why nothing had moved.
Everything I've built since is one thing, in three sizes: a real decision, on bad information, said out loud.
I bailed on an engineering degree, got a commercial pilot's licence, and spent a while kicking meat bags out of planes, that's the industry term, not something I made up to sound interesting. Since then: government work, defence, and I helped build the metaverse go-to-market for one of the big four. That was a real job. I hear it too.
These days I run Northentic as a qualified executive coach, with CEOs, founders and leadership teams across government, defence and private enterprise. Same work I do in the boardroom, taken somewhere the boardroom can't follow.
There's a version of me who turns up to those meetings in a pocket square and a ten-thousand-dollar watch, smelling expensive. My hunting mates have never met him and I intend to keep it that way.
Turn a month, a night or three days into first-hand evidence of what you're capable of.
Turn a title you're proud of into a person you still recognise.
And turn a decision you've been sitting on into a next move you've said out loud.
I didn't leave with all the answers. But I left thinking, and I've kept thinking since. That's more than I can say for any workshop I've sat through.
CEO and FounderThe thing that stayed with me was the stillness. I haven't been able to shake it. With everything going on in a busy life and a busy career, that's rare.
CEO, Founder and Board ChairI left my computer behind and escaped for a moment. I could slow down, let my insides settle, my outsides soften.
Senior Digital Delivery ProfessionalTrent had a knack for putting everyone at ease right from the start, which made diving into the thought-provoking content feel natural and safe.
Director, Big Four
