The reality is that no-one can control how things unfold. And certainly, it seems that the entire world is getting a lesson in this right now.

Things going wrong is another way of saying “I don’t like this”. And because we feel what we think, that is the start of how stress and misery is caused. But, while we can’t control how the world unfolds, we can control our response to it.

I’m lucky in that I’m a fan and practitioner of acting, a love I inherited from my mother. One of my earliest memories as a child is sitting in a theatre hall in Kilkenny, watching her and her fellow actors rehearse their upcoming shows.

6 years ago my mother, Mary, asked myself and my siblings to come to the family home in Kilkenny, without our families.

My father had been ill and had recently endured several operations, so we feared the worst.

When we arrived, they told us that Dad (Jim), had been told to get his affairs in order because he only had a few weeks to live. As you can imagine, that was a very emotional weekend. And the following weeks were challenging as we waited.

I’ve had so many conversations over the last few months with smart people who have created serious and unnecessary suffering for themselves.

Unnecessary because it came down to a lack of understanding how we all work from the inside out.

In the past, I’ve created problems for myself that just weren’t real because I never stopped to explore if what I was thinking was reality…

And I’ve seen the same with clients over the years.

My wife was telling me she’d heard a renowned psychologist, Dr.Edith Eger, talking on the radio last week.

She was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp during the holocaust and had endured severe traumas over her life.

But she had built a successful career as a therapist, speaker and writer in the US, around helping others overcome trauma and making the most of their lives.

Over the last week, I found myself doing some painting outside and for one section I had to clear away some cobwebs before beginning the work.

I didn’t give it any thought until the next day when I was walking by the same section and noticed that the beginnings of a small cobweb was in the very place I’d cleaned.

It made me reflect that nature truly is adaptive.

I took a week off at the start of July and for the first 3 days I couldn’t get over how much I slept. And it didn’t seem like I had a choice in the matter.

My body just needed rest.

And since then, most of the leaders I’ve spoken with have shared with me that their energy levels have been quite erratic and many of them have been more tired than normal.

I think it’s very understandable.

One of the more heartening things I’ve seen over recent days was the report around the knighting of Captain Tom Moore in England.

The 100-year old was recognised by the Queen for walking more than 100 laps of his garden in Bedfordshire.

For this, he started a crowd-funding campaign looking to raise several hundred pounds for NHS charities and ended up raising over £32 Million!

It can be difficult to talk about gratitude in a business context.

I think it’s because it’s seen as a soft skill but also business is usually a lot about solving and preventing problems.

And when you’re consumed with problems it’s easy to be consumed with everything that’s ‘wrong’, which kind of makes the whole gratitude thing more difficult…

Last Thursday something happened that brought a lot of joy to some of my friends and clients.

Liverpool became the champions of England’s Premier League soccer competition for the first time in 30 years.

For them it has been the longest of waits.

Twenty years ago I was a young executive working with a large multi-national and I was keen to make an impression. At one point I was given responsibility to bring new robotic technology into an aspect of the business. It was exciting but also challenging as there were multiple challenges to making a success of the project.