I didn’t know it was the beginning of something transformative.

I didn’t know anyone could shake like this.

And I sure didn’t think I’d spend a year learning how to teach this to others.

Shaking brought me back to life after I went through burnout and depression. It rewired my nervous system and released years of tension, dissociation and shame. It shifted things that decades of meditation hadn’t touched.

TRE® (Tension/Trauma Releasing Exercises) is a modern way of teaching the body to safely shake. Folks I’ve already worked with have noticed improvements in anything from chronic pain to anxiety:

• “an incredible TRE session with Dan that left me feeling grounded and empowered”.

• “release built-up tension and experience a newfound sense of ease.”

• ”this is effortless, the body knows exactly what it needs and how best to get it when given the chance.”

• “my soul felt a release of tension it didn’t know it was holding”

• “definitely try it to bring more awareness to the body and process trauma in a way that doesn’t involve talking.”

But my favourite review was someone asking me if I remembered what it was like to be a kid, and for everything to feel new and exciting, and then telling me that 20 minutes of shaking had helped them experience that for the first time in decades.

Are you interested in reconnecting with a more spacious, less highly-strung version of yourself? As of today, my practice doors are open! I’m offering sessions in-person, in Bristol, and globally over Zoom.

My website is TREBristol.co.uk, and you can book sessions online in less than a minute:

Visit the new website ✨

You don’t need to know anything in advance, and afterwards you’ll be able to practice on your own. It’s a free and powerful tool to have in your back pocket.

One favour 🙏🏻

If you have any friends who you think might be interested, please share this email or the website with them! It helps if you say something extraordinarily nice about me at the same time.

I’m also developing a couple of TRE programmes that will help you go deeper over multiple sessions:

1. TRE for meditators 🧘‍♂️
   How to unite embodiment and insight whilst avoiding dissociation.

2. TRE for burnout 🫩
   How to bring the body back online after experiencing burnout.

If you’re interested in either, drop me a message and I’ll share more.

Well, not entirely on a whim. There was some building pressure: I’m an over-thinker who loves ideas, but gets tangled up in them and then struggles to share consistently. I had also just finished reading some Francis Keller, who reflected that the pieces of ourselves we hide, we experience as a kind of loss. This resonated, and I wanted a blank canvas to write about anything and everything that interested me, without censoring for particular audiences.

I’ve been rebuilding my writing since my life went into meltdown. Writing was part of what pulled me out of that hole. And this year, I felt curious about publishing more and seeing what would emerge if I didn’t prescribe any outcomes.

The Challenge

I did what I set out to do: I published for 100 days straight. You can view all the posts here, from Apr 1 to July 10.

I learned a lot:

• I starved my perfectionism of its oxygen

• I raided my bag of treasures

• I reduced and clarified my thinking

• I got a better handle on my taste

• I became a ruthless editor

• I got more confident providing value at velocity

• I was better able to retain and articulate ideas

But it wasn’t all peachy:

• Shorter pieces enforce a nauseating style of writing

• I wish I’d free-written more

• I used AI, but not much

• Publishing in silence is hard

• Writing is still writing

I usually wrote first thing on a laptop, in Obsidian. Sometimes I’d write from scratch; other times I’d have a fragment I wanted to expand upon. Six of the days were handwritten in a Moleskine journal while on a meditation retreat and transcribed when I got home.

I always wrote in blocks—25-minute, focused sessions. On a good day, I’d write a draft in one block, and edit and publish in the next one, with change to spare. I would then paste everything into Grammarly, accept some changes, and move the finished copy into a Markdown file for Hugo to turn into a new page. I did this all on my personal website, for reasons I outlined here.

Some days were a joy, some days were like pulling teeth. Towards the end, fatigue set in and I fell behind, but caught up. After the challenge finished, I opened a spreadsheet whilst I re-read each piece. I added tags, left comments and rated it out of 5. You can see that spreadsheet here if you’re interested.

The obvious benefits

I starved my perfectionism of oxygen

I published more high-quality writings than I expected. But, perhaps more importantly, I published some sub-standard posts without the world imploding.

Publishing each day means experiencing the pain of never being able to say anything completely. Or rather, trading that off for saying something.
I highly recommend this for over-thinkers and perfectionists.

Your perfectionism won’t suddenly disappear. You don’t need to dismantle it—this is just another flavour of perfectionism. What happens is that you create a parallel space in which you do ship things and they’re not perfect, and everything is okay and often better than ok.

You start to pay more attention to that space, and the more attention you pay to it, the more you come to inhabit it. You realise that this is the real world, and that you were living somewhere else.

I raided my bag of treasures

Having to write every day means that you have to raid your bag of ideas, your precious ideas that you were saving for the perfect time or the ideal level of inspiration.

When you start emptying the bag, sometimes a spark will begin glowing inside of you. Other times, your ideas will clatter as they hit the ground, echoing in the hallway of unmet expectations.

The good news is that it’s a net positive either way. You bring the treasure into the light of day, or realise it was no treasure to begin with. Some of the things I’ve published are things I’ve been thinking about for ten years. And now some small version of them is out there. That feels wonderful.

I reduced and clarified my thinking

You can write and edit ‘til the cows come home, but there is something unique to hitting the publish button that is impossible to recreate. As I wrote on Day 7:

…things clarify rapidly when your finger is hovering over the publish button. That haggard paragraph that survived 3 drafts meets its end. The witty tangent that you couldn’t let go of seems like a painful distraction.

All the superfluous cruft that you’d been holding on to evaporates before the impending eyes of other human beings. Publishing each day raises this clarifying process to a fever pitch.

I got a better handle on my taste

I recommend that you think of a challenge as a way of refining your taste, rather than delivering a particular outcome. Your taste is what you value the most, and which ideas most frequently draw you into their orbit. Each published piece is a chord in the larger symphony of your taste.

This won’t be easy if you have a lot of interests. I had an intuitive sense of my taste, but by dipping into so many of the topics that interest me and repeatedly publishing whatever I felt like, I was able to see:

• What I’m drawn to the most

• The patterns in the pieces I’m proudest of

• Which pieces sounded natural and engaging, and which sounded stuffy and abstract

Knowing your taste and what you value is the primary fuel for everything worthwhile you want to do in life.

Here were the most common topics I wrote about:

In short, I wrote a lot about growth, with a spiritual edging (dharma), including plenty of personal stories and reflections on the practice of writing itself.

I became a ruthless editor

Like any good procrastinator, I’ve always enjoyed editing. But I still hung on to flaky ideas or smart-ass sentences, in the hope that they’d suddenly elevate the piece to new heights.

Publishing each day simply left no time for that. I had no time to let things linger. So I cut a lot more. Because the pieces were small and I could publish again tomorrow, this felt easier.

I became much better at distinguishing one idea from two or three. Oftentimes, I’d think I was communicating one thing, but then I’d introduce a new metaphor or perspective that would muddy the waters. After a few weeks, this became very obvious. I could feel the pull, the awkwardness of trying to follow two tracks. Sometimes, I would allow two ideas to remain—time be damned—but on reflection I’d always feel that the piece was weaker for it.

Closely related to the editing, I was also repurposing. One of the hardest parts of the challenge was that it was more than just daily publishing. Every Wednesday and Friday, I was also sending out newsletters! One was a summary of my daily writings, and one was targeted to a more technical audience.

Even that wasn’t everything. As I was publishing so much, I thought I should share some of it on social media. So I rejoined several social networks. Repurposing the writings and pulling out the most salient themes got me even more ruthless about editing.

I got more confident in providing value at velocity

Confidence was never my primary issue beforehand. But being able to take an idea and publish something interesting on it within 30-60 minutes was confidence-building.

I’m proud of 75% of the pieces. They read well, and I think they have something important to say. I also had people reaching out to tell me they liked what I was doing, had a few discovery calls from people reading these daily musings, and picked up new founding members of this Substack.

As another benchmark, Derek Sivers spent 3-6 hours per post in his 30-day challenge. There’s no wrong or right answer to how long you should spend, but by the end of it, I certainly felt more confident in being able to provide value at velocity.

I was better able to retain and articulate ideas

I predicted:

…thinking and learning improvements beyond the actual content I’m writing about. Rapidly moving from private ideas to public articles trains your articulation and communication; qualities that lie upstream of any one idea.

This held up.

I learned a lot very quickly through acting each day. Each day, ideas were clarified and fed into the next post. I did a lot of networking and a couple of interviews during this time, and many of the insights felt easy to articulate and share. I was also better at translating fresh ideas into other projects I was working on, like launching The Tech Coach.

Other lessons

Shorter pieces enforce a nauseating style of writing

Having to publish each day meant leaning into a short, pithy style that I didn’t always like. It’s a popular writing style—a fatigued contrarianism, or a story sandwiched between a hook and a hot take. See Seth Godin, the entirety of LinkedIn, etc.

Most worthwhile ideas resist this level of compression, and I care a lot about those ideas. But when you have to publish each day, it’s hard to avoid it.

I wish I’d free-written more

The pieces I wrote from scratch were the best ones.

One benefit of a note-taking addiction is that you have plenty of ideas to work with. Quite often, I’d pull a note with some scattered reflections and write that out. But it was always more forced than freewriting:

Instead of just writing, I’m trying to prop up existing statements. It’s like starting with 4 or 5 islands and then slowly building bridges between them.

It’s brittle. Because I’ve given the statements more solidity than they’re worth. I’ve sacrificed how I might say something now in favour of justifying how I said it then.

It feels more comfortable. There’s lots of incremental re-arranging because the notes usually have no narrative flow. It’s obvious now that this is a momentum killer. It’s jumping straight into editing, instead of writing.

Free writing starts with a blank page and involves a higher pace. It’s not easy, but it’s very satisfying and the results are often better.

I wish I’d done more of it. If I were to do the challenge again, I would make this a rule: always start with a blank page.

I used AI, but not much

Did I use AI? Not much. I’d say 80% of the posts had zero AI input.

I used it mostly for idea generation, riffs on a topic, and for helping me end pieces more definitively—I struggle with tying off shorter pieces. For example, it gave me the hinge metaphor for one piece, which I thought worked well. I occasionally used it as an editor when my piece felt too meandering, and asked it to explain why it suggested changes it did. I would copy over a few sentences if they read well.

Publishing in silence is hard

Working in silence and shipping each day to crickets is a lonely business. I did this on my personal website, so no one was getting emailed. I did summarise my posts each week on this Substack and got some great feedback from that.

But most days, you publish and don’t hear anything back. This was liberating at first, but tiring as the days ticked by.

Writing is still writing

I fell into some illusion that in producing and sharing a certain volume of thoughts, something magic would click, and I’d be in a different place with my writings. Like, finally, the groundwork would be laid, and the rest would be more accomplished and less chaotic. If that sounds awesome, I have bad news for you.

Instead, I just published a lot. I now have more writings out there. Some of them are quite good. There were some interesting emergent trends, but I still sit down with the same fears and internal battles as when I started the challenge.

Now I just have better-honed skills and more confidence in the process than I did before.

Highlights

In case you didn’t show up every morning at my website, here are my 10 favourite pieces:

1. Publishing every day is a full-body workout

2. Undistractability is a superpower

3. The world needs you to consume less news

4. How’s that working for you?

5. Widen the view

6. Why most intellectuals avoid the inner life

7. The primacy of practice

8. Practice is stupidity prevention

9. Being best friends with yourself

10. Beyond obeying and struggling

I was also happy with the personal stories I shared along the way, which were a mix of butt-clenchingly painful and revelatory. You can read them all here. If you want one to start with, try Meeting Mr Cool.

—Dan

What I’m enjoying

• I read Pema Chodron’s Living Beautifully on retreat. I don’t think it’s a great title, but it is a fantastic book. One of those books that would be as interesting to someone 1 week into meditation as someone a decade in.

• I also read Adyashanti’s Way of Liberation for the 2nd or 3rd time. It’s quite a change in tempo from his normal style of teaching, and I love it. The PDF is freely available.

The Hermitage

See you next week,
—Dan

This week, I had a great conversation with Darrell and Olly from HUM4NS on the mess behind the success of being a founder. One theme from that chat led me to write Boundaries = Dignity, on the self-respect that boundaries engender. My favourite piece from this week’s writing was Widen the View, inspired by this conversation between and .

Finally, an earlier interview I did on the Purpose People podcast went live. I talk about my journey from being a tech-obsessed kid to a successful founder and then veering into burnout and other mental health struggles.

What I’m enjoying

• 🎶 Fables of Faubus by Charles Mingus.

• 📘 Between fox stake outs, I’ve been reading Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks. I give it 5/5 so far, and starting a daily story log has been more powerful than I thought. Thanks Ilona for the recommendation!

• 🔊 ’s sermonettes, particularly This is it (7 min watch), and his later piece on the book Living Beautifully. I agree that Pema Chödrön is far more radical & potent than her marketing suggests. Her books had a big impact on me (at crucial times), and next week I’m taking the book David reviewed on retreat at Sharpham House.

• 📄 ’s important, nuanced take on autism, diagnosis and identity, set amidst the very unnuanced political skirmishes of 2025. (7 min read)

• 🗣️ David Whyte on Tim Ferriss. I love David’s poetry, alongside his takes on Zen and other fashionable terms. I could listen to him talk for a day straight. (2hr listen)

This week’s writings

• The one-week experiment (Apr 29)

• Starting a daily story log (Apr 28)

• We have no home in our own story (Apr 27)

• Boundaries = dignity (Apr 26)

• Curiosity is stress relief (Apr 25)

• Widen the view (Apr 24)

• I am a degenerate Daoist (Apr 23)

See you next week,

—Dan

The flavour of my writings this week has been the overlooked power of simple, open-ended practices: walking, meditating, and writing. Things we pursue to cultivate a more positive inner state, instead of straining towards a particular outcome. Cultivating state is less precise, but has more profound benefits over time.

My favourite and most controversial post this week was The world needs you to consume less news. I also wrote about one of my favourite questions and how it turned things around for me on a meditation retreat. My favourite metaphor was the hinge and the cathedral door.

Personally, I kicked off two new coaching clients and enjoyed another round of HUM4NS talks. Tomorrow, I’m chatting with HUM4NS cofounders Darrell and Olly in front of an audience at Lexus Bristol (tickets). I baked a lot of bread over Easter, and it was my first time experimenting with polenta in a loaf.

My favourite conversation this week was a geeky 3-way discussion about AI with John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Jordan Hall. It discusses how personal AI can buffer us against the incentives of larger LLMs; wonders how a personal AI might help us foster integrity and wisdom, and stretches beyond the default perspective of one small human interacting with one big LLM. I came away with a lot to think on, and it’s encouraging me to get back to my local LLM experiments.

One song on repeat: Checkmate by Dirty Blonde. I also read South of the Border, West of the Sun by Murakami in 24 hours. I love his minimal style and how the story moved from heart-warming love into something much less comfortable. 5/5.

This week’s writings

• The practice works, you’re just not following it (Apr 22)

• Easter reflections and a book (Apr 21)

• The Counterfeit Culture (Apr 20)

• How’s that working for you? (Apr 19)

• Small hinges, big doors (Apr 18)

• Tend to your state and good things follow (Apr 17)

• The world needs you to consume less news (Apr 16)

Each piece can be read in under 1 minute, but I hope they’ll stay with you a little longer.

The most popular piece was Sometimes you just need to be asked. Read it to learn how to use AI to help you better articulate what you already know.

If you want something more vulnerable and you’ve struggled with energy at work, try I woke up at 20 percent, which I wrote amid a very groggy morning.

If straining toward your future goals is making you feel rotten today, you should read When the goal gets in the way.

The award for least legible title goes to Fire tender, bottleneck detective, deadwood collector. It’s about the different roles coaches play.

When you block out the noise, growth is your natural state. That’s why Undistractability is a superpower.

7 days of training is about the joy of training, my next event and my longest run in years.

Finally, struggle lets off smog. Letting go of the struggle allows the air to clear. Acceptance is what we call clarity as it dawns in a person.

p.s. Next week, I’m in conversation with Ollie and Darryl from the HUM4NS community. You can get tickets here.

I’m 8 days in. You can see all the posts here. I have to write Day 9 after I send this out. It’s been exhilarating so far. Ask me again in 50 days time.

On top of that, I’m also reviving my social media presence to share these ideas further and wider. After I quit nearly all social media in 2021, I’m starting from scratch in many places. So please help a guy out and follow me on X, Bluesky (X’s sweet cousin) and Instagram.

I’m summarising the best of these daily writings each week in this newsletter. I thought this was kinder than showing up in your inbox every morning. That said, if you want to follow along each day, there is an RSS feed. I’ve not even set up an email list for the daily writings yet, but if you’re interested, then reply/comment and I’ll make it so.

On Day 1, I talked about starting this project:

So I’ll be publishing something every day this quarter. I feel inundated with ideas and I’ve had so many of them languish under writing roadmaps and prolonged editing. I also want to push the boundaries of “what I write about” to essentially include anything that goes into my daily notes in Obsidian. That feels terrifying right now, but I’m excited to push the boundaries.

I explored the strange origins of this desire to share, featuring an economist and a grief counsellor:

These words stirred something in me and I started journalling. I found it interesting to reframe what we deem unacceptable in ourselves as a kind of loss. What do I hide or feel is defective?

The next question was: how do I give these parts of me a voice?

My North Star in these daily writings is to follow what’s interesting to me, and I reflected on why what’s interesting is so interesting:

To follow what’s interesting is to trust your sense of salience. Salience is an exquisitely complex way of pulling meaning from the world. It’s fast, yet utterly personalised. A lot of it happens beneath your awareness. You don’t know all the inputs and you never will.
…
I think of it as building a philosophy from the bottom up. It stays open and panoramic in the short-term to create something bold and holistic in the long-term.

I’m sharing all of these writings on my personal website, which is nearly 20 years old! I explored why, but the long and short of it is: content ownership, SEO, algorithmic immunity & creative freedom.

In 80/20 writing, I hijacked an idea from running (going well, thanks) and applied it to writing:

80% of my writings will be frequent, lower intensity notes. These will be guided by my sense of salience, rather than any agenda. And I’m avoiding the grey zone of mid-length essays that take a lot of effort with little payoff.

The act of publishing every day is a potent cure for many things writers struggle with:

It starves perfectionism of its oxygen by continually shipping imperfect things. It also accelerates your thinking: things clarify rapidly when your finger is hovering over the publish button. That haggard paragraph that survived 3 drafts meets its end. The witty tangent that you couldn’t let go of seems like a painful distraction.

Repeating this process over and over again refines your thinking and improves your confidence.

I extended this to make the case that publishing every day is a full-body workout, ideal for writers, founders and freelancers. One daily routine that trains all of these skills at once:

Every day I have to:

• Write, knowing something has to be online in the next hour

• Delete, because there’s not enough time to fart around with every idea

• Access the courage needed to continue to share, even when I think I’m a worthless slug

• Refine my metaphors so that people “get” my ideas

• Refine my structure so there’s some narrative flow

• Give the piece a good title, so people are intrigued

• Run through my publishing loop, from writing in Obsidian to migrating it into Hugo to viewing it on the Internet

• Repurpose the content according to different social networks; emphasising productive takeaways in some places; personal reflections in others

• Stay disciplined on social networks, so I can do this all without developing intense misanthropy

• Engage with people who are interested in my ideas, understanding what calls to them and what they want more of

Overall, I’m proud of the quality of writing so far. It’s a lot of work, but I refine the process each day. The rate of learning is high and is its own form of motivation. Getting to share something I thought about yesterday, 12 hours later, is a wonderful feeling.

See you next week.

p.s. I still have one coaching slot available for April. If you’re hovering in a twilight zone and want to take the next leap forward in work, let’s talk!

After a failed job search at the end of 2024, I now have a solid coaching practice, have started teaching TRE (see below), write every week in another newsletter I launched earlier this year, and have the time to meet lots of interesting folks in Bristol.

There are also plenty of new subscribers to this Substack since I last wrote to you: hello folks 👋

This isn’t a standard post, but an intermediate Dan-update before we resume regular service.

In that spirit, here are 4 updates, including several pictures of my face.

In a book

It’s always been my dream to write a book. I’m not there yet, but I did feature in one recently.

In January, I attended the book launch of The Burnout Doctor. I reached out to the author, in 2023. We were both writing here on Substack. She’d gone through burnout herself and brought an original perspective as a GP and neuroscientist.

Some time later Claire told me she was writing a book. She asked if she could include my experience and it was an easy yes.

I first published my burnout story in 2023, but people are continually discovering it, through one route or another. Recently, someone commented: “It is great to read something that is so recognisable. Thank you for writing this down and sharing it with the world.”

When you go through something as disruptive as burnout, reading other people's candid reports is a lifeline. That's why I was so keen for my story to be included in the book.

Interesting side note: I’ve had more coaching clients come through reading my story than any other content I’ve written. People are drawn to authenticity and vulnerability, even when the story is about as far from a marketing pitch as possible.

That part of my life was a furnace but there was so much growth in its wake. It’s why I’m still so passionate about working with people wrestling with burnout or those who sense a crisis on the horizon.

If you’re already finding yourself increasingly overwhelmed, or just want to learn more about burnout, check out the book!

Subscribe now

On a stage

In February, I talked about the burnout years in front of the HUM4NS community in Bristol.

After condensing what was originally a 3-year period down into a 10,000 word story, I managed to further compress it down into a 15-minute talk, book-ended with some reflections:

• Sometimes, all you can do is bear witness (thanks Pema Chödrön)

• Grief comes in many guises (thanks Elizabeth Gilbert)

• Hobbies that feel like luxuries might one day be lifelines. For me, that was writing (thanks Stephen King)

• People light up when you bare yourself

It was both 1) terrifying and 2) a privilege to speak. In the vein of the last reflection, I’ve connected with some interesting new people and there are a couple of podcast appearances in the works.

HUM4NS is a special community, and there aren’t many other places I would have felt comfortable sharing this story. If you’re in the South West, there are talks every month. I loved their ethos from my first visit—their holistic focus on happier, healthier, smarter & kinder aligns with how I’ve always approached life, and how I support the people I coach.

Shaking it out

At some point, after many years of meditation, I started shaking.

I would be sitting on my cushion when my hips started rocking back and forth. Sometimes my belly would contract and my whole body would wave forward and back, like riding a bucking bronco.

It wasn’t scary. It felt natural and I mostly just let it do its thing.

It was only years later that someone sent me a video about TRE (Trauma/Tension Releasing Exercises), a method that induces the tremor response. With this reflex activated, people could consciously “shake off” tension and even trauma.

Fast forward, and I’ve had a personal practice for 2 years. Last year, I started my training as a TRE provider. I love being able to work with people in this way and in the future I’m going to develop some unique programmes that combine coaching and bodywork.

So many people I work with have a tightly-wound nervous system. They’re locked into anxiety-patterns and fight-flight responses, struggling with all the symptoms that can stem from that over-activation. They don’t know how to release. Others feel constantly dissociated; adrift from life and numb.

TRE is a safe and effective way of teaching the body to release tension whilst increasing our sense of vitality. It helped me enormously when I was burned out. I shake 2-3 times a week to reconnect with my body, release physical tension and allow more emotional freedom. I’ve meditated for 18 years and I find TRE a necessary complement to that practice of stillness.

In February, I finished my final in-person module, training with Steve Haines at the Body College in London. Whilst working towards my final qualification, I’m offering people free sessions. You don’t need to know anything about TRE, and I’ll talk you through the process on the call. If that’s interesting to you, get in contact.

I originally embarked on the training for personal development, but teaching it has been so much fun, and the practice such a revelation to people, that it feels destined to be a bigger part of my life than I’d guessed.

I’ve just launched a new website for my TRE practice: TREBristol.co.uk

Please help Google understand that it is a reputable website by clicking through and nodding appreciatively.

Writing for nerds

If you’re a leader, techie or founder, I’m writing weekly at Code & Compass. I share insights, stories and new ways to build, lead and thrive without losing your mind.

It’s the first time I’ve shared more about my professional work, what it takes to lead and how to be the calm in the chaos. A lot of people I coach have a Tech background and I still consult & advise startups if you’re struggling to get your engineering singing.

I quit and deleted all social media in 2020. The only thing left standing was LinkedIn, for professional reasons. In a strange turn of events, I’m now pretty active on LinkedIn. If you want a taste of what I’m sharing in Code & Compass, come follow me there.

But I’m also bursting with other writing ideas at the moment. As of 2025, I have a sustainable lifestyle where writing comfortably features. Sometimes I remind myself that this is a literal dream come true.

• I missed technical work.

• I missed being part of a team; the shared purpose, daily feedback and conversations with people who are not my dog.

• I wanted to buy a house.

In short, I wanted out of the freelance life. It was lonely and overwhelming. I didn’t think I was doing a great job of it.

So, I started interviewing. I revealed the results of that process last week. If you want a summary, imagine turning up at a new school, being held down and kicked in the balls for 3 minutes before everyone runs away and later denies that anything happened.

This gave me the nudge to rethink my direction. Behind the scenes, other things had also been changing:

1. Less anxiety. The fatigue that’s been around since burnout seemed to lift. My anxiety significantly improved after a painful flare-up last Summer and my low mood evaporated with it.

2. More energy. Anxiety is exhausting. Extra energy I didn’t know was available started to return as my anxiety diminished.

3. I read David Cain’s How To Do Things which provided the keys to working more consistently than I had in years. It also gave me a vital clue about why this might have been hard for me in the first place. More on this in another post.

4. My housing situation unexpectedly changed, meaning that I am no longer living at the whim of a landlord.

After sitting with all this for a while, I still felt I had so much to offer people and I ached to get back to that. Several people must have overheard my inner monologue and booked discovery calls to drive the point home.

No one cracks this the first time. I was listening to Coach Builder by Donald Miller recently and he said it takes three years for a coaching career to fully metabolise. I felt relieved. That includes all the work required to tell people what you’re doing, get your marketing infrastructure set up, get enough people interested enough to invest, and for your old job title to disappear from their minds.

I sketched out a vision and set some ambitious goals. I met a new friend with a similar background, who’d given himself 3 months to kickstart his freelance life and our conversations threw further fuel on the fire. My friend is Gavin and you should speak to Gavin if you want to talk to a fellow engineer about optimising your hiring process and finding quality hires, faster.

If I was going to try this again, some things would need to be different. I read a couple of marketing books over Christmas and realised:

• My initial coaching offering was too broad. Coaching is effective in many situations and I enjoyed working with different folks. But this made it difficult to find and serve a particular group.

• When natural niches did arise, it was hard to keep them interested because I was writing about note-taking one week and the risks of spiritual bypassing the week after.

• I didn’t do a great job of explaining how I can help people. I was too tame.

• I didn’t link coaching to the other ways I work with companies as a consultant and fractional leader.

• I didn’t have CRM, I did no cold outreach, I didn’t have a product ladder…

It was a miracle I had anyone knocking at the door, but referrals and my writings did bring some wonderful people into my orbit.

All of which is to say: I’m taking another shot at this. But with a few key changes. My coaching will be targeted at technical founders of early-stage companies. Here’s an elevator pitch for you:

I’m Dan—a founder, engineer and accredited coach who works with early-stage, technical founders to elevate their leadership, deliver more impact & deepen their resilience. (i want those things!)

I’ll also be stepping up my involvement in a few companies that want my hands-on support to solve their engineering, product & management problems, in an advisory or fractional role. (wow interesting, I need one of those)

I’m excited about working with people in this way. I get to return to supporting people 1:1 whilst staying technical and engaged in the kind of work that I find most challenging. It feels like the sweet spot between what previously appeared as two different directions.

I’m also going to write more for this audience: engineers, leaders and founders. Trying to do that here would be trying to do too much with one newsletter. So I’m splitting these writings off into a new newsletter called Code & Compass. (✨🧭)

There are some great technical newsletters out there, but not so many that explore the intersection of building great products, leadership and personal resilience—e.g. how to scale yourself. Are you taking the elevator back down?

Code & Compass is a newsletter for founders, leaders and engineers looking to elevate their craft whilst scaling themselves.

I will not add anyone’s email to this new list by default. But I would love to have you on board:

Click here to signup without hesitation

If you cannot see the above button in your email, visit this link without hesitation.

Not out but through is not going anywhere. It will continue to be a deep dive into anything and everything that interests me—learning, writing, fitness, philosophy & meditation—alongside personal updates & unsolicited reflections.

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I have a lot of material in the works to get people trembling with excitement about what I’m offering. But in the meantime, you could accelerate your 2025 claim to sainthood by referring people to me:

• If you have a friend or colleague starting out as a technical founder, or perhaps a more experienced hand struggling with growth post-fundraising, then please send them here.

• If you’re running an early-stage company and want more hands-on support from an experienced technical leader, let’s talk.

• I’m also holding unoffice hours. I don’t have a specific time block for this yet, but I’d love to chat with new folks and hear what you’re working on. You can jump directly into my calendar here.

For anything you can do—thank you!

In fact, I didn’t even get an offer.

The last time I went through this process in 2021, I had three offers for engineering leadership roles after ~6 weeks of interviewing. When I felt excited about a role and interviewed well, it was a solid indicator of progression. This time, it was nearly impossible to guess.

I was rejected at the final stages by two companies—Boxt and CircleCI—with zero feedback. I had to chase both of them to discover this outcome. CircleCI made matters worse by telling me the feedback was “really positive” a few days before evaporating into thin air, being chased by me and then remembering to hit the Greenhouse reject button. My automated rejection email was delivered shortly after. I followed up asking for actual feedback but never heard back.

It’s a shame because many of the people who interviewed me seemed like smart, kind engineering leaders that I’d enjoy working with. But the hiring process deflated this good impression. I often wonder if engineering leaders realise what’s happening outside of their interview bubbles.

It’s not hard to get this right. I understand talent teams have a lot going on, to say the least. But one or two sentences of genuine feedback make a world of difference. Most of these processes involved four or five interviews and many hours of preparation. Taking the time to write a tweet-sized piece of feedback in an email is not asking much. Failing to round off the process leaves a lingering, bad taste.

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There was more fun. I got rejected for a Head of Engineering role after solving a checkout challenge but not making my solution extensible enough. I got rejected for another “people-first” EM role, which apparently required a low-level algorithm test—the most deplorable I’ve endured to date. I didn’t do well; I hadn’t spent the requisite week on HackerRank remembering all the array methods I only learned to pass interviews. But still… is this really getting companies the right candidates? One company took getting the right candidates very seriously, with their nine-stage interview process, the longest I’ve ever seen. I liked the company, so I continued, but it didn’t work out.

I got rejected at CV stage more than ever before. I worked nearly two years at GoCardless but couldn’t even land an initial screen with Monzo, something of a sister company. Recruiters were another struggle. One silently vanished after a final-stage rejection; others never followed up after initial conversations.

Of course, there were justified rejections, too. I bombed my first system design interview, which was a shame because I was genuinely excited about that particular company. But they sent a couple of paragraphs of great feedback, so I was able to course-correct.

At another company (GoodStack), I was pipped at the final hurdle by someone with more relevant experience. They jumped on a call with me to give me that feedback. I’d been excited to work there and, after the initial punch of the rejection, found myself liking the company even more for how they’d handled it. I’ll continue to follow their progress. The same can’t be said for CircleCI—you’ll find my review alongside their other EM candidates on Glassdoor.

In the end, only one company remained.

The interviews were hit-and-miss. In one, I nearly left the call early because the interviewer was so curt that I had to reverse interview them to figure out what questions they were asking.

In the same process, another interviewer admitted they’d barely slept and then spent 10 minutes explaining something they’d just launched. I hadn’t asked for any details and had read all their release blogs. Few things are more frustrating than being ready for an interview only to watch the time fritter away whilst someone rambles or can’t decide on a question, asking 4 at once instead.

I persisted with this company to the fourth stage. After a week of silence, I chased them and got my final automated rejection email with zero feedback. The email told me they’d love to keep my resume on file. I told them I would not love that. A day later, I got some great feedback—via a LinkedIn DM. Whatever is going on inside that company to force someone to respond outside of an email chain… I just don’t want to know. The feedback was good, though, and I thanked them for their time.

I sat in the rubble at the end of it all and scratched my head. I have significant experience as an engineering leader and founder. I helped raise $40m in my last founder role. I’ve worked in anything from 3-person startups to 800-person Fintech unicorns. I’ve built a side project that was acquired. I’ve built engineering teams and cultures from scratch, I’ve managed multiple teams, managed managers and I still write code. I’m also an accredited coach. And I couldn’t land an Engineering Manager role.

Mentors and friends told me it’s a buyer’s market, with intense competition for roles. I’ve heard the term “bloodbath” used on more than one occasion. It’s hard not to take it personally sometimes.

That said, if I’d endured another month or two I’m sure I would have landed a decent role. But did I still want to? More on that next week.

The result is a spiritualised inner critic (SIC), a monster without compare.

Here are some things mine tells me:

• You should be seeing impermanence more.

• Your body feels tense; that must mean you’re still holding on. Why can’t you let go?

• Uh, it looks like you’re feeling bad again; why aren’t you practising equanimity?

• Why are you angry again? Why are you still buying into that?

• Why do other people annoy you so much? Can’t you be more mindful?

• Seriously, why are you shouting at those cars?

• Can you even do jhanas anymore?

• All things are empty; you shouldn’t need jhanas.

• Hm, this person’s experience sounds deeper than yours and you’ve been doing this for years.

• Lost in thought again? You can’t even focus on this blog let alone recognise the ultimate nature of things.

• You’re feeling really selfy today.

• Maybe your energy system is blocked? You should be doing more tai chi.

• You need a better set of pointers to keep the ultimate truths close to hand.

• You only need to surrender. Why aren’t you surrendering more?

• If your deepest nature is effortlessly and always the case, how are you still missing it?

• You have all these incredible teachings available, you have a better chance at this than anyone in history. And yet…

• Why are you still struggling with the basic stuff like loneliness?

• How can you feel lonely if there’s no self?

I visualise my critic as The Rani; the obnoxious, self-proclaimed Spiritual Authority in Aldous Huxley’s Island. The Rani swoons around in white muslin and gaudy jewellery, wafting a sandalwood stench. She is on a Crusade of the Spirit. She appears to be of a Different Order, and that is exactly the message she wishes to convey.

If left unchecked, the SIC can grow from an irritating companion to the biggest hindrance on your quest, reinforcing the very deficiency it promises to heal. From a rational, innocent desire to understand the deepest truths grows an unparalleled source of inner tyranny.

The key to breaking the hold of the SIC is a two-step movement. First, we have to see why spiritualised judgement is unique and secondly, we need to see why it’s not.

Why the spiritualised inner critic is unique

The SIC holds particular sway in our minds for a few reasons:

1. Its concerns are spiritual. It’s not just berating you for looking puffy in your holiday pics or failing to land that joke at the work party. It’s not your average conformity-inducing parental judge. It has in its sights your spiritual evolution and the nature of reality.

2. It’s focused on universal truth, beyond your relative opinions. So its helpful judgements are not only 1) way more important but 2) true in any possible moment. This allows the critic to pipe up in pretty much any situation whereby you are not feeling entirely free of suffering (see: life)

3. Sometimes we are blind to the above points because we think we’re already nailing this spiritual stuff; we’re already knee-deep in teachings of love, acceptance and compassion. There’s no way we could be secretly constructing an even more sophisticated form of self-flagellation, right…?

4. Living with a SIC inevitably leads to resentment and protest. The SIC has a trump card for this: there’s no self, asshole. How can I be hurting you? In playing the victim you’re just reinforcing a sense of self. This rod of punishment is all empty such-ness! Why are you hitting yourself?

Why the spiritualised inner critic is the same old

So the SIC carries a special weight through its lofty goals, universal remit and questionable understanding of shunyata.

But it’s important to see that, despite the ethereal aura of spiritual judgements, they are made of the same black sludge as any other. And like most judgements, they take the essential form of:

You are a shit, unless…

The topic of the judgement is largely irrelevant; if it fits this format, your essential value is (supposedly) under question. Spiritualised judgement is no different.

Ways forward

The SIC had me in its jaws for many years and I still have to chase it down the garden path now and then. But I have managed to transform an unconscious, exhausting struggle into something more manageable. Here’s how:

Make the message explicit. If it feels like your self-worth is dependent on seeing or being something, try to put that imperative into words. An effective judge works in the shadows. You catch sight of a quick flash followed by a gnawing sense of deficiency.

Try to write out the assumed judgement or trace its outline with someone else. In my experience, doubling down on meditation is not effective when judgement has a strong toe-hold. You need to pause and articulate. Make it explicit and the folly of the judgement is revealed.

You might also recognise that, like most dictators, the judge started out with a vaguely sensible wish: wanting to alleviate your suffering. Instead of going to war with it, thank it. Directly opposing a judge can often fuel it, so recognising and thanking the judge for having your back can be a powerful response.

But the most powerful answer I know to judgement is a particular flavour of forgiveness, inspired by A Course in Miracles.

My early associations with forgiveness are of having to pardon someone I didn’t like for something they did which was definitely not ok. But true forgiveness is not a compromise and neither is it a means to an end.

It starts by giving up the fight. Both the fight to be right and the fight against judgement. You do this by forgiving, unconditionally. Forgive all ignorance, all obstacles, all judgements and mis-steps. Be like butter in a pan and feel the lack of opposition as you happily slide around, bubbling away into a clear oil.

You can say “I forgive myself” to lean into it. Forgiving softens all the hard boundaries that “your journey” exists within, revealing that nothing has been done to you, nothing was lost and nothing was missed. It opts out of the entire game of “getting it right.” This recognition is without end and without ground. You are giving up the war to get it right even whilst judgements are still flying around.

Forgiveness is a recognition of innocence. Of course, you want happiness, and of course, you get it wrong, but it can never possibly stain you in the way you imagine. This forgiveness is radical; different at the root. It is not an antidote that must be administered in certain amounts to counteract the poison of judgement. It is to inhabit a mode of being where judgement is nonsensical, along with any idea of fighting it. Its flavour is release from imagined dilemmas. Release from the burden of my journey, my progress and my understanding.

Forgiveness knows you are whole by virtue of being at all. It’s part of the package; no terms and conditions. There is plenty of life that is conditional and amenable to optimisation. But your participation in the totality of undivided reality is not one of those things.

The validity of forgiveness depends on one fact alone: that you are a flawed, fallible and finite human, but that you participate in something that stretches inconceivably beyond that. If that’s you; forgive.

I always find it doubly painful to return to sharing after dropping out of a self-imposed routine. The doubt seeps in, writing the next post feels gargantuan and the burden of justification for time away feels like summing up a complex legal case.

Another part of not writing to you sooner is that these two months have careened in all kinds of directions I didn’t expect and I don’t entirely know what’s next. (Note to self: this is living.)

After talking about the return of high anxiety and low mood in my last post, I did something different: I started telling people about it. (In addition to broadcasting it to the Internet…)

I went back to basics and re-centred my life around meeting anxiety. I went to the doctor—all good, no physical cause of fatigue. “Most of the time, this kind of fatigue comes about through chronically elevated cortisol.” In other words, it’s the anxiety, stoopid. I feel a sense of trembling awe when I remember what anxiety alone can inflict on a life.

I realised how much anxiety has been a common thread through all the internal turmoil I’ve experienced over the last 5 or so years: the burnout, the creative struggles, the low mood, the doubt. It was always there and perhaps it played a much bigger role than I realised. This makes sense: the anxiety preceded it all. It’s almost 10 years to the day that I had a panic attack out of the blue.

It might sound glum but confronting, again, the searing power of anxiety has been a relief. Before, I had 30 seemingly separate issues, all needing bespoke solutions. Now I have a singular, if uncomfortable realisation—I am struggling with anxiety. And by tackling the anxiety head-on, leaning into it and challenging it each day, all kinds of disparate dilemmas start evaporating.

I started considering full-time work again. This began in The Summer (RIP), but I initially felt guilty for “turning my back on my dreams” or a variety of other scathing judgements. I nervously told people I was considering going back to work, wondering how they’d react. Usually with a nod, a smile and encouragement. Ok then.

I realised that going out on your own—in my case, a mix of coaching, consultancy and writing—had been exhausting and perhaps a major catalyst for this new wave of anxiety. I consciously made this trade-off but I underestimated it.

You are living the dream: choosing what to work on, shaping your own routine, and living by your own standards. But you also have to choose what to work on, shape your own routine, and live subject to your own standards.

Some days it was exhilarating and others like swimming through brambles. More uncomfortable realisations: I missed the structure of a day job. Having priorities, a regular cadence, and daily feedback. I missed being a part of a team. I missed the camaraderie, the shared adventure, even if it included the shared suffering as part of the package.

Compare this to the open-endedness of finding people to coach on the Internet; writing about 1 of a million things you want to write about, in 1 of the 10 different formats you might share it, and on 1 of 100 different platforms you might broadcast it. And then finally offering it to a small, largely silent, audience. And doing it all alone with little feedback. I was not prepared for the loneliness. Throw in some perfectionism and you have all the ingredients for a self-imposed meltdown.

For years, I harboured the delusion that lack of free time was what was holding me back from becoming an author, solo creative and living the dream life. If only all this boring work was out of the way, I'd seamlessly segue into my best creative self. But, as millions learned through the paid furloughs of COVID-19, being released from one constraint is no guarantee of success in others. I didn't write a book. Or the shorter guides that were supposed to release me from the burden of writing a book. I didn't pen the series of writings I was so excited about. I didn't do a lot of things and it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was just really hard.

I’d prematurely consigned Dan the Tech Leader to the past on account of the burnout experienced in that line of work. But through consultancy and tinkering with personal projects, I found that everything that energises me about this work is still there, still alive, still a part of me.

Buying a house has also been on my mind for some time; a growing desire for stability and an increasing distaste for any kind of relationship with a landlord or estate agent. Getting a mortgage whilst being self-employed is possible, but it extends the runway by several years and even then there’s no guarantee.

I am lucky with my current rental, despite it requiring a second mortgage to heat, on account of its old, tall walls. But it’s not enough to offset the dream of having a place that I can make my own, out of the city, and not subject to random inspections by someone I barely know. Unlike Tom, I am lucky/depraved enough to have a job in computer coding, so there is some pathway to making this happen.

I still love coaching and I’m still working with people on a more limited, picky basis. I’m grateful I took the time to train while I could. Besides the joy of coaching others, it has also changed the way I relate to my own motivation. I'm not leaving it behind but I’m also not in a mad rush to suddenly turn everything around and drag myself kicking and weeping into my dream life.

It’s easier to see now how rigid my expectations were. It seems laughable that I would have nailed a totally new lifestyle on my first attempt, and that it would accommodate every part of my life from here on out. I have plenty of time. I probably won’t get it right the first time or the fourth. Rather than the immutable work you’re destined to do, maybe there are just different ways of working for different epochs of life. It seems to me that the energy required to switch between them is not much more than a click of the fingers.

The anxious flare-up and turn-around made me realise how often I return to perennial truths—whether in meditation (noticing change, recognising judgement) emotional wellbeing (noticing avoidance, meeting uncomfortable feelings) or writing (showing up, trusting the muse)—and how powerful it is to go back to basics.

It helped me see I saw what I’d been doing all my life with my note-taking and writing: leaving notes & reminders to myself, on what matters and how to engage it. That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. Return to these things, over and over, because they work magic, when you return to them, over and over.

All of this gave me a jolt of writing inspiration and I wondered how the burden of publishing might change if I were just sharing notes for myself. More on that soon.