For most of my working life, I have tried to understand what helps people live and work well. Eventually I realised that many of the problems I was being asked to solve — stress, burnout, disengagement — were symptoms of something much bigger: we have become disconnected from what makes life meaningful.

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I have spent more than thirty five years working across organisational psychology, leadership, mental health, resilience, coaching, academia and business.  Over those years I have worked with thousands of people, from senior executives and entrepreneurs to employees struggling with stress, motivation and mental health. I have worked inside organisations, taught at university, built businesses, written books and spent countless hours listening to people talk about their lives and ambitions.

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I began to notice a recurring pattern. People were often trying very hard to build successful lives, yet many were exhausted, distracted, anxious or disconnected from the things they cared about most. They didn’t simply need better techniques for managing stress. Something deeper was wrong. The question that came to occupy me was: what?

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That question first led me to Groundhog Day, the film that inspired my book The Wisdom of Groundhog Day. What fascinated me was not the comedy but the transformation of Phil Connors. He begins the film trapped in a repetitive life, disconnected from other people and completely self absorbed. Slowly, he learns to pay attention, become curious, care about others, appreciate the ordinary and use his life in service of something beyond himself.

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​I came to see Groundhog Day as more than a story about personal transformation. It was a metaphor for modern life. We can become trapped in our own versions of Groundhog Day: repeating the same patterns, pursuing more and more, consuming more, rushing from one thing to another, while becoming increasingly disconnected from nature, community, meaning and wonder.

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​Then my thinking changed again. I saw that we cannot understand human wellbeing separately from the world in which people live. And that world is entering a period of extraordinary uncertainty: climate and ecological disruption, social fragmentation, loneliness, economic insecurity, technological acceleration, and a growing sense that the systems we depend on are becoming less stable.

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We usually treat these as separate problems — mental health here, climate there, community somewhere else. I have come to believe they are deeply connected, and that they share the same root.

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We have lost touch with what matters.

 

For much of my career, my focus was on helping individuals and organisations function better. Return to What Matters takes that work a step further. The question is no longer simply: how can we help people become more resilient? It is: how can we create communities and ways of living that make flourishing, connection and resilience possible in the first place?

 

So I have been developing  The Community Resilience Blueprint to show what that looks like in practice: communities that are more connected, participatory, locally rooted, psychologically healthy and ready for an uncertain future. It is not about turning back the clock. It is about asking: what should we keep, what should we change, and what have we forgotten?

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