Winston here.

I want to tell you about a 30-minute Zoom call I had this week.

It started the way most calls start small talk, work, audience overlap, the polite dance you don't quite know the other person yet. His name is André Bright. He's an executive coach in London. He works with senior leaders in investment banking, private equity, law, and technology, the same kind of people who end up reading this email.

He built a framework called RELIEF for the kind of stuck I've been talking about in this newsletter for months. I built the Life Audit for the same problem on this side of the Atlantic. We didn't know that when we got on the call.

About halfway through, he said something about Freetown, Sierra Leone. I said, where?

He'd grown up there. His dad had gone to the same college I attended. We never crossed paths. But the connection was instant, the kind that doesn't need explaining, only honoring.

We spent the next ten minutes not talking about business. We were talking about Freetown, the streets, the families, the college, what it meant to leave and build a life somewhere else. Two Sierra Leonean men, two continents, doing the same work with the same kind of people.

Here's the part I want to share with you.

André's work sits inside a frame he calls "sustainable performance” and his clinical language for it is "high-performance depletion." The senior executives he works with aren't in crisis. They are what he calls "privately aware" they can feel the gap between who they are at their best and who they're currently showing up as, but the armor stays on. His job is to create the conditions where they drop it. He runs both group sessions and 1-on-1.

He runs The Sanctuary an application-only private community for senior leaders in the UK who've outgrown their first chapter. It's been open a little over a year now, the work is proven, and the members are doing the talking. London-based, by application. A new cohort is launching in September. If you know a UK-based leader earning £150k+ who's feeling the pull toward something else, send them his way. He's the real thing. Just like you are.

building many bridges, if it fits the email voice: "What I see again and again in the educators and professionals I write for is this: they keep building bridges. New project, new idea, new plan. Half-built bridges everywhere. None of them complete. André sees the same thing in his London clients — they have the vision, the experience, the resources. They just can't finish what they start."

I'm running a workshop inside the new Sanctuary group this fall on the side-to-main income transition. André and I are also doing monthly LinkedIn Lives together starting in August, on stress, burnout, and the career-to-business leap. If you want to follow along, the link is at the top of my profile.

If you're in the US, my door is open. The Life Audit is how I start every reinvention conversation — and you can grab the framework here:

​Life Audit Download​

More soon. And if you've got a 30-minute Zoom story of your own, the one that changed something hit reply. I read every one of them.

Winston