Speaking
Stop Drifting, Start Deciding
TEDx speaker on judgement, drift and the decisions that build a career worth having.
Speaker, TEDxLeith
The talk
Why I gave it
I am standing in the mountains of northern Spain. Birds of prey circling on thermals, sheer rocky ridges, and far below a lake so still and so blue it barely looks real. I love the outdoors. This is exactly the kind of place that normally makes me feel alive.
And I feel absolutely nothing.
Six months earlier I had walked away from a successful career in professional services, building teams, winning awards, working on some of the biggest business failures in the country. From the outside I had made it. Inside I was exhausted and hollow, asking the same question every night. So I escaped. Campervan, Everest Base Camp, the lot. For six weeks it was brilliant. Then the emptiness came back.
The talk is about why that thinking was wrong, and what I had to learn the hard way: the problem was never where I was. It was that I had never stopped long enough to understand who I was. It ends with the five questions I wish someone had put in front of me twenty years earlier.
The real choice is not stay or leave. It is drift or decide.
What I speak about
Topics and themes
Talks cover a range of topics in professional services leadership and corporate culture, and each one is shaped around the audience. Recent themes include:
Stop drifting, start deciding
The signature talk. Why capable people build careers on defaults they never chose, and the five questions that interrupt it. Suits conferences, partner conferences, away-days and firm-wide sessions.
The competence trap
Why the people who look most in control are often the ones closest to the edge, and what firms consistently miss when they look at performance data.
From technical expert to leader
The transition professional services relies on and almost never prepares anyone for. Practical, candid, and built for a room of partners and senior associates.
Leading through change and restructuring
Drawn directly from twenty years advising on distressed and high-consequence transactions. What holds teams together when the ground moves.
Audiences
- Law firm partner conferences and away-days
- Accountancy and advisory firm events
- Professional bodies and industry conferences, including the restructuring and insolvency market
- In-house leadership and L&D programmes
- Networks, associations and professional groups
Practicalities
Longer sessions and workshop combinations available.
In person, or delivered by video.
Every talk is adapted to the audience and the outcome the organiser wants.