Bruce Stanley

You are the world’s leading expert on being you – but only partially. Unfortunately, you are also standing in the worst possible place from which to see yourself entirely clearly. Self-understanding, to know yourself, is an inward focused activity. Maybe you reflect, journal, take personality tests and do the work of inward processing. Most of this is genuinely effective, but (aside from our internal biases, positive and negative) there is a problem. In her book Insight, organisational...

A practical, research-grounded alternative to personality typing If you work one-to-one with others sooner or later you might reach for a map. Spiritual directors, counsellors, and coaches often find themselves wondering – who is this person? What is shaping their choices? What are they avoiding? What gives them life? What might help them grow? For years, personality typing systems such as MBTI, the Enneagram and similar tools have been used to open up those questions. MBTI was a core element...

The Fractal Dimension of Stress Reduction Imagine you have an hour to recover after a stressful week. Which of these four places would you choose? Vote below. Please choose before reading on. There is no correct answer, although there are some interesting reasons why one landscape might appeal more than another. Nature is not one kind of place I doubt we think of nature as if it were a single type of environment – of course it's not. It might mean sitting beside a river, walking through a...