Swart Donkey

A big part of life is who we partner with. I have gone through difficult break-ups and a number of years of losing myself in the process of ...

Cooking is a great example of “sources of joy” where some very simple processes are things people “can’t do”. Have you made mashed potatoes?...

Life is random, ambiguous, and complex. Sometimes things can be interpreted in multiple different ways. That’s okay.  We interpret the world...

The irony of growing up in Apartheid where a privileged minority received various advantages, is that that is not part of the deep soaked se...

We constantly unpack as we move, rebuilding our spoken and unspoken contracts of how we agree to work with each other. Negotiating complex r...

You can rage against the machine, or you can start from a point of deep understanding of where you, and others, are.  The way we communicate...

It is important to practice the ability to detach. Not all the time. We also  have to  relax into and accept the way we are, but then build ...

Broad Framing (see “Thinking Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman) is the practice of thinking of decisions in the context of other decisi...

I believe we all experience the world as a controlled hallucination. We take in information based on what we already know. Gradually buildin...

You have to choose  a  path . We are exposed to a number of lotteries that determine our starting point.  Th at  is something  we  have  no ...

We don’t choose our mother tongue or the country we are born in. Similarly, our relationship with money is path dependent. Money is not a th...

It is easy to get caught in the trap of “defending a narrative”. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The real world is vastly more ...

People will say “Don’t carry your history with you”, “let it go”, “live in the now”. I am not one of those people. I live in my history. I a...

In order to find calm within the chaos, you need to be able to process it. Narrative Therapy aims to help identify values and associated ski...

I enjoy the series Westworld. It fits with my sense of how we live in “controlled hallucinations” at different levels of awareness. How muc...

What you focus on isn’t all there is. Like most of us, I identify with the voice(s) in my head. That is “me”. The tricky narrator(s) with ...

Narrative Therapy helps identify the story we tell ourselves to make sense of the world. There are a bunch of shared facts that form the f...

Austin Kleon says all advice is autobiographical. Baz Luhrmann says it is a form of nostalgia. I worry that people see advice as risk tran...

I lived in London for 8 years before moving to the Shire. Most of it was spent with a normal job, until I decided that was overrated. Norm...