The Act of Returning
Life will pull you away from yourself. The practice is learning how to return before your reactions become your identity
There is one practice that has changed my life more than any framework, strategy, or decision I’ve ever made.
Returning.
Not returning to a place.
Returning to myself.
For years I thought progress meant never losing my way. Never getting overwhelmed. Never doubting a decision I’d already made.
I was wrong.
Life doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It pulls you away from yourself constantly, sometimes gently, sometimes all at once, in the space of a single phone call.
A conversation that goes sideways.
A decision that doesn’t land the way you hoped.
You leave yourself in a hundred different ways, every week, without noticing most of them.
So the question was never whether that would happen.
The question is: how quickly can you return?
Here’s what took me years to understand.
The problem was never that I judged myself. Judgement happens at the speed of thought, the critical voice, the comparison, the shame, and none of it waits for permission.
Awareness doesn’t stop the first thought.
It gives you a choice about the second.
For a long time I thought the work was eliminating judgement entirely. Getting good enough, evolved enough, that the first thought would simply stop showing up.
The work was never elimination.
The work is returning.
I remember my Dad’s home office, ‘The Study’. Small with creaking floorboards, overbearing even, books accumulated over years, spilling across the floor and the desk, no room left to stand in comfortably.
This was post-pandemic. He accused me of not showing up in person for three months, as if that meant I hadn’t been working at all.
The reality was different.
My wife was pregnant, classed as high-risk and vulnerable. My role was administrative, it could be done remotely, and it had to be. In that time the business didn’t just survive a global pandemic in a healthcare industry under extreme public safety conditions.
It became a seven-figure company.
I was managing more of it, more consistently, than anyone else on the team, including him.
None of that mattered in that room.
“I don’t trust you.”
The first time I’d ever heard him say something like that, in all the years before it.
That was the moment I understood something I’ve never forgotten since.
Success behind closed doors goes unnoticed.
Unappreciated.
Sometimes actively unrecognised as having happened at all.
I don’t tell this story to make him the villain of it. He saw an empty chair for three months and drew the conclusion an empty chair suggests.
That gap, between what was actually happening and what was visible from where he sat, was mine to close. I hadn’t closed it.
Doing the work isn’t the same as making the work seen.
I’ve had to learn that the hard way, more than once.
It wasn’t the last time. It became the shape of a pattern, dismissal and accusations that didn’t square with the facts, repeated until they started to feel less like moments and more like a verdict.
I didn’t return quickly, that time. It took months to find my way back to what I actually knew to be true, underneath what I’d just been told I was.
But the return doesn’t have to be immediate to be real.
It only has to happen.
Something changes once you actually come back to yourself. Not the circumstances. The business doesn’t un-collapse. The conversation doesn’t un-happen.
What changes is the place you’re responding from.
That’s why I no longer believe clarity comes from thinking harder.
Clarity comes from returning, back beneath the judgement, back beneath the performance, back beneath the responsibility you never consciously chose in the first place, to the one question that actually matters.
What is actually mine?
Only from there do better decisions become possible.
Not because you’ve become someone different.
Because you’ve finally stopped abandoning the person you already were.
People often ask what coaching actually changes, expecting an answer about strategy or clarity or better decisions.
Here’s my real one.
Life will still happen exactly as it was always going to. People will still disappoint you. Plans will still fail on schedules you didn’t choose.
The difference is you no longer stay away from yourself for as long.
You return sooner.
I sometimes think about the samurai and philosopher Miyamoto Musashi. People remember the sword, his unbeaten duelling streak. I wonder if they missed the stillness, not because he never felt fear, but because he knew how to return before he acted.
There’s nothing mystical in that. It’s not wisdom for life or death duels. It’s wisdom for ordinary Tuesdays, for the meeting you’re dreading, for the conversation you’ve been postponing since last month.
Notice.
Return.
Choose.
Not perfectly. Just sooner than yesterday. That’s all returning has ever asked of me.
After years of practising it, badly at first and then less badly, I’ve come to believe something simple.
The quality of a life isn’t determined by how often you lose yourself.
It’s determined by how quickly you find your way back.
If you’re standing in the middle of that exact question right now, on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of a decision you keep circling.
You know the answer and keep kicking it down the road, waiting for someone or something to take the burden off.
Signal Fire is where we begin.
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