With Father’s Day today, I’ve been thinking less about what fathers tell us and more about what they quietly stay around to see.

This is about my dad. But it’s also about the people ahead of us, the people coming behind, and how long it can take to understand what we’ve been given.

The night before I left for Malaysia on August 1, we had a barbecue at my place for George. I’d known him since he was around thirteen. He was nineteen now and leaving for Columbia University in New York, something he had been working towards for a long time. It was a small celebration with many of the boys from the program, people who had been around him at different points. It was his farewell from our group.

My dad was there too. He was staying with me for a couple of weeks because I was flying out the next morning to Malaysia to train and spend some time around the Yoshinkan Aikido Gasshuku with Joe Sensei. (That story coming soon). Dad was going to stay at my place and look after our pup.

Eventually, after a beautiful evening together where George cooked us some amazing steaks for dinner and sat down and watched a farewell video we had put together, everyone left, and Dad and I started cleaning up. I don’t remember exactly what he said. I remember the way he looked at me when he said it. Dad has this way sometimes. He’s always been a pretty tough man, but every now and then something changes in him. You can see it in his face before he says much. That night he looked at me and told me how much he admired what I was doing. What I had built over the years with these boys. What he’d seen while he’d been staying with me.

It got me.

This is a man who watched me play AFL football for twelve or thirteen years. He loved his footy, and was enormously proud that his son played at that level, and I knew it. He followed everything. There were plenty of moments during those years when I knew how proud he was. But this felt different.

I think it meant more, and I feel slightly uncomfortable writing that because it makes it sound as though one kind of pride should outrank another. That’s not really it. Maybe it was because I was older and heard it differently. Maybe because he was older too. I don’t know. But I know where it landed.

There was nothing much to show him that night with George and the boys who span across many age groups. No jumper, no crowd, no club around me. No games tally or contract or anything that could be held up as proof. Just the mess left after a barbecue, a nineteen-year-old about to leave for College in America, and a group of boys who had been coming through my door for years. Maybe that was the proof.

It made me think a lot about when we first start believing in ourselves. It’s an odd thing to tell a young person to do. We say it all the time, believe in yourself as though a fourteen-year-old should know exactly what that means. Believe in what? At that age you barely know yourself. I certainly didn’t.

I wonder if belief starts in a much less impressive way. Before football gave me much evidence about myself, martial arts probably did. There were classes every week, and you turned up on a hard wooden floor. Discipline, structure, form. There was a way you stood and a way you behaved. There were expectations around respect and control that didn’t need to be explained every five minutes. They were just part of the place. The dojo

And there were gradings. Something ahead of you. You practised, got things wrong, practised some more and, eventually, you could do something you hadn’t been able to do before. I reached teaching rank third degree in my late teens as football started to shine for me. Nobody outside that world particularly cared. There wasn’t a crowd watching, and it wasn’t going to get my name in the paper. But I knew what it had taken to reach that grade.

Maybe that was my first real experience of belief. Not standing in front of a mirror convincing myself I was good enough. Just having evidence that if I stuck with something and trained hard, I could change and become better.

Then football came along and gave me evidence that was impossible to miss. Getting drafted into the AFL is a pretty powerful thing to happen to a young man. Someone chooses you. Here’s your jumper, locker and a contract. You’re part of this now. Then you play a game, and hopefully another one, and your name starts appearing next to things. Games played, goals, clubs and years. The world is giving you receipts.

I’m not dismissing that. Football gave me an enormous amount, and the hard work I put in made me in ways I’m probably still discovering. But I’ve started wondering whether there is a difference between having reasons to believe in yourself and becoming someone you believe in.

I think there is.

Professional sport gives you an incredible amount of structure. You don’t really appreciate how much until you’re out of it. Someone tells you when to arrive. Someone plans training. Someone selects the team. There are coaches, doctors, physios, strength staff, teammates. There’s a fixture and a ladder and, every weekend, a scoreboard. It’s all there.

Then it stops.

One of the traps after elite sport is that the evidence doesn’t disappear. Former AFL footballer. It’s a very convenient identity because nobody can argue with it. I did that, and I can always look back and borrow legitimacy from it.

But how long do you want to do that? At some point it feels a bit strange for a man in his forties or fifties to keep asking something he did in his twenties and early thirties to explain who he is now. I don’t mean that disrespectfully towards my football career. I’m proud of it. I don’t want to leave it behind. I just don’t want the best evidence for my life to be behind me.

That thought has bothered me for a while. So what have I made since?

That question is harder because nobody gives you the structure. The years after football haven’t followed any neat plan. I’ve followed things because something in them pulled at me. The art of movement, Martial arts again, breath, strength. The nervous system, play and stillness. Human development, really. Why one person stiffens under pressure, and another somehow stays loose. Why some environments seem to settle people and others do the opposite. What happens to a boy when someone expects something real from him?

I’ve had some great teachers and friends. I’ve travelled, read, trained, copied things and later realised I didn’t properly understand them. I changed my mind, threw things out, and came back to them years later. There wasn’t a master plan. I wish I could say there was, as it would make the story easier to tell.

Eventually, though, I started developing a real practice within myself. Then there was a room, a Dojo. Then boys started coming into it, and many of them kept coming. Their parents were a big part of that room too.

I realised Dad even helped build that room. Literally. We’ve been there until midnight laying flooring, fixing things, trying to get things to fit. Mostly Dad getting things to fit. He is a lot better with a spanner in his hands than I am, which becomes fairly obvious about thirty seconds into any job we do together.

I love doing that stuff with him. There is something good about being a grown man and still having those moments with your dad. You can have your own business, your own house, your own ideas about the world, and then you’re holding a tool incorrectly, and Dad is looking at you like, give me the bloody thing. And for a minute you’re just his son again.

Dad had a tough upbringing. By Year 8 he had been through thirteen schools.

Thirteen!

I still have trouble getting my head around that. He and his brother had to find their own way through a fair bit as young boys. There was a hardness to Dad that, when you know something about where he came from, makes sense. It was probably useful. Necessary even.

I don’t want to take his childhood and turn it into some tidy explanation for mine. That’s the sort of thing we do when we already know how a story turned out. Life was messier than that. Still, there’s something I can’t quite get past.

My father was a boy who went through thirteen schools by Year 8. Decades later, he was on his hands and knees helping his son put down the floor of a place where young people could keep coming back. Maybe that means something. I think it does. I’m just not sure I need to tell you exactly what.

George kept coming back. He arrived at around thirteen and was still there at nineteen. Six years is a long time in a young person’s life. People talk about youth development as though development is something we do to young people. I don’t really see it that way anymore. You can guide and challenge and teach, of course, but mostly I think you create the conditions and stay around long enough for something to happen. They have to want to stay too.

We’ve become obsessed with telling young people what they should become. Resilient, confident, disciplined, leaders, emotionally intelligent and respectful. We have language for all of it. Programs for all of it and sometimes many posters on walls.

I think we probably talk too much.

A boy doesn’t need another forty-five-minute explanation of responsibility. Give him something to be responsible for. Let him cook for his parents or peers. Let him help a younger boy. Ask him to set the room up as host. Better still, don’t ask him one day and see if he notices it needs doing. Let somebody depend on him a little. That changes things I feel.

A big part of what I’ve come to believe about boys is that they need people ahead of them. A father is enormously important. I know what my relationship with Dad has given me, and I see the importance of fathers through the families I work with. But not every boy has a father present. And even a very good father can’t, and probably shouldn’t, be everything.

Other people need to be further up the road. A grandfather. An uncle. A coach. A teacher. A Sensei. A family friend. An older boy. Someone worth watching.

I think watching matters more than we give it credit for. Adults are forever talking at young people. Sometimes I wonder whether what they need is fewer speeches and more adults worth observing.

Then, at some point, the relationship shifts. You’re still looking towards the people ahead of you, but now someone younger has started looking towards you.

I’ve watched this happen with the older boys. A sixteen- or seventeen-year-old realises a thirteen-year-old is paying attention to him. You can lecture the older boy on leadership if you want, but I’d rather give him a younger boy who trusts him. Now, how he behaves matters. Whether he turns up matters, and whether he notices the kid standing by himself matters. Whether he helps without needing credit for it matters. Whether his word means anything matters. Someone is watching.

I think we’ve lost some of this by organising young people almost entirely by age. Thirteen-year-olds with thirteen-year-olds. Fifteen-year-olds with fifteen-year-olds. Then adults stand at the front and tell all of them what they need to know. I’m not convinced that’s the best way people grow.

There should be someone ahead of you and, eventually, someone behind you. Maybe that’s part of becoming a man. Not some grand ceremony where everyone announces that it has happened. Just the moment, probably unnoticed, when you realise your behaviour is no longer only yours because someone younger has started taking their cues from you.

The funny thing is, I think this happened to me without me noticing either. Most of my life, I’ve looked ahead to coaches, teachers, sensei, mentors. People who knew something I didn’t. I still do it.

The morning after George’s barbecue, I got on a plane and flew to Malaysia to do exactly that again. I hadn’t really noticed the timing until later. One night I’m in my own place, a young man I’ve worked with since he was thirteen is about to leave for Columbia. My father is telling me he admires what I’ve built. The next morning I’m getting on a plane to go and train, listen, get corrected over and over and learn.

There’s something in that I like.

I used to think mastery meant getting closer and closer to the front of the room. Knowing more. Becoming the expert. Having fewer gaps. I’m not sure anymore.

There are things I know now. There are things I’ve spent decades practising, studying and thinking about, getting wrong, and I probably need to own that more than I have. Humility is important, but I think you can hide inside humility too. At some point, refusing to stand behind what you practice isn’t humility. It’s avoidance.

I’m still learning to step into my work more fully now.

But even that doesn’t feel like the end of it. The older I get, the less interested I am in building some fixed idea of who I am and then spending the rest of my life defending it. Football taught me how easily that can happen. Footballer. Former footballer. Coach. Teacher. Whatever comes next. They can all become another thing to hold onto.

Maybe the point isn’t to become more and more certain about who you are. Maybe it’s to need that certainty less.

To know what you know without having to make too much of it. To stand behind your work without turning yourself into the work. To teach when you’re the one with something to offer, then walk into someone else’s dojo the next morning and be completely comfortable knowing very little. There’s something freeing in that.

At eighteen, I probably needed to believe I could become someone. I needed the evidence. Now I’m less interested in becoming someone. I want to be fully in what I’m doing.

Maybe that’s closer to what I’ve been calling mastery.

Because mastery can’t mean being finished. Surely it’s almost the opposite. You should still be able to walk into somebody else’s dojo, bow, get corrected and realise the thing you thought you understood has another ten layers underneath it.

Someone ahead. Someone behind. Both at once.

There was another moment with Dad years ago that I’ve never forgotten. He was sitting at a table reading something I’d written. I was standing nearby. When he finished, he looked up at me and said, “Jesus, sometimes I wonder whether you’re my son or not.”

I honestly didn’t know how to take it. Was that good? Was he impressed by what I’d written, or was he thinking, " What the hell is this bloke talking about? I never asked him. For years I’ve had that little moment sitting somewhere in my head without knowing exactly what he meant.

I think about it differently now. Maybe one of the better things that can happen between a parent and a child is that eventually the child becomes someone the parent couldn’t have completely imagined. They should contain something of us, obviously. But they shouldn’t end with us.

They find teachers we never knew. They become interested in things we don’t understand. They make mistakes we couldn’t have prevented anyway. They travel somewhere we haven’t been. And if things go well, they take some of what we gave them and do something with it that is theirs.

There is probably more of Dad in my dojo than I’ve realised. Not necessarily in what I teach. More in how I think a place should work. Turn up, help and do something useful. Look after people, don’t walk past something that needs doing and if something is broken and you can fix it, fix it.

I think parenting changes as children get older. At first you have to direct so much of their lives. Eventually you can’t. Or you shouldn’t. Maybe the job then becomes less about directing the path and more about remaining interested while they make one for themselves.

Maybe that’s something worth remembering about fathers too. We tend to think their job is most important when children are young. True, but also not. The job changes. The distance changes. Sons and daughters build lives their fathers couldn’t have planned for them. But there can still be enormous power in a father remaining interested, staying close enough to notice, and every now and then saying what he sees.

I’m forty-eight. Dad is in his seventies.

Apparently you don’t completely grow out of wanting your dad to be proud of you.

Dad couldn’t have planned what I’m doing now. I couldn’t have planned it either. He doesn’t need to understand every part of what I’m studying or why I’ve followed one thing into another. He’s remained interested in me. There’s a difference.

And I wonder if that’s part of what we owe the young people coming behind us too. Not to map the whole road for them. Not to keep shouting directions but to stay close enough to notice where they’re going.

That night Dad had been watching. Not just the barbecue. He’d been staying at my place and had seen boys coming and going. All of them stopped and talked to him. He’d seen the rhythm of the place. Then he watched George leave for his dream.

I think that’s why his words got to me. He wasn’t congratulating me for something I’d achieved. He was looking at something that had grown.

Football gave me some of the first serious evidence that I could do difficult things. Martial arts probably gave me some before that. I needed both. Maybe we all need that sort of proof when we’re young. A belt, a selection, a football jumper and someone choosing you.

But I think belief changes as you get older. When you’re young, you probably need some proof. Something that tells you: you can do this. Later, the work is different. You have to start choosing yourself. Stand behind what you’ve learned; take responsibility for what you can offer. Maybe even stop waiting for another institution to tell you that you’re allowed to do it.

For years I probably thought believing in yourself meant becoming more certain about who you were. Maybe I need to know myself well enough to stop thinking about myself quite so much.

There is work in front of me. People I care about. Things I can offer. Things I still don’t understand. And once someone starts coming behind you, some of that belief isn’t only about you anymore. Sometimes you have to hold a little for them until they’ve got enough evidence to hold it themselves.

Not by telling them how special they are. Give them something real to do. Expect something of them. Stay around and notice them. Let them get things wrong. And eventually, let them leave.

The morning after the barbecue, George was preparing for America. I went to Malaysia. Dad stayed at my house and looked after the pup. It’s all pretty ordinary when I write it down.

I think that’s why it means something to me.

Dad had helped me put down the floor. Boys had grown up on it. One of them was leaving. I was heading somewhere else to learn. Dad was still helping.

There is someone ahead. There is someone behind. I don’t think we ever graduate from either.

That night, after everyone had left, Dad and I cleaned up. He looked at me in that way he sometimes does and told me what he thought about what I was doing.

No crowd heard it. There was nothing to win. Just Dad and me, cleaning up after a boy’s farewell.

It was enough.

I recently read Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands. It is a book about racialised trauma, history, and the way the body can keep carrying things long after the event itself has passed, sometimes long after the people involved are gone. That idea has stayed with me, as has the title. Menakem writes about his grandmother’s hands and what those hands had lived through in work, care, suffering, things she had endured and probably never had the luxury of sitting down and properly processing. There was history in those hands.

There is one sentence in the book I keep coming back to: Settled bodies settle other bodies. Unsettled bodies unsettle them. I think every person and leader should understand that. Actually, more than understand it. At some point, you have to feel the truth of it, because I think we vastly overrate words. Leadership training is full of them: how to communicate, how to have difficult conversations, how to give feedback, how to present, how to negotiate, and how to bring people with you. All are useful, but after enough time around teams, boys, dads, executives and athletes, you realise pretty quickly that people are picking up a lot more than what you’re saying. They are reading you.

Someone walks into a room, and you can usually tell pretty quickly whether they are settled or not. You may not know exactly what is wrong, but you know something is there. The jaw is tight, the shoulders are sitting higher, the eyes are moving around too much. They are answering you, but they are not really with you. You feel it. Kids are probably better at this than adults. A boy knows when his dad walks through the door after a bad day. His father doesn't need to announce that he's had a stressful afternoon. He knows. The whole house knows, really.

And I have done it myself. I have walked into a room thinking I was fine, only to realise later that everyone around me had already adjusted to whatever I was carrying. That is uncomfortable to admit, but there it is. I see this in the dojo all the time. A boy comes through the door, and sometimes, before he has said much at all, I can tell something is off. It might be school, home, something that happened in the car, a game he played badly on the weekend. It could be anything. Sometimes I ask him. Sometimes I leave it alone.

I actually think we can be too quick now to make people explain everything. Tell me how you feel. What is going on? Let’s talk about it. Maybe. But not always. Sometimes a person doesn't need another conversation. Sometimes they need to move.

One Tuesday, a father came in after a meeting that had obviously gone badly. He had barely taken his shoes off, and I could see he was still in it. His shoulders were high, his breathing was short, and his eyes kept drifting away. He was standing in front of me, but he was somewhere else. I did not ask what had happened right away. We trained.

Nothing clever. We moved, shifted weight, got down towards the ground and came back up through some DNS (Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilisation) work. He had to pay attention to where his feet were, where I was, where his own centre was. A few minutes in, something started to change. Not some big breakthrough. His shoulders dropped a little, his breathing slowed, and his eyes came back and looked more upright. That was it. And yet it was not nothing.

The meeting was still bad. The problem had not disappeared. He still had to deal with whatever was waiting for him outside the dojo. But he was no longer completely caught inside it. That matters, because where was he going next? Probably home. Maybe another meeting. Maybe to pick up his son. And whatever he was carrying next, the people around him were going to feel some of it.

This is the part of leadership I think we have badly neglected. A leader walks into a meeting irritated, and everyone starts moving around it, usually without anyone saying a word. Someone says less, another rushes an answer, or maybe someone decides not to raise the thing they were going to raise. Someone else becomes just a little more careful. Then the leader walks out and says, “That meeting felt flat.” Maybe it was. Or maybe everyone was managing you.

At home it can be worse, because families know us too well. You can fake calm in a boardroom for half an hour. Your wife probably knows within thirty seconds. Your kids definitely do. A father can walk through the front door carrying the whole day in his body, and suddenly his family is dealing with something that happened at 11:15 that morning in an office they have never been inside.

I think men need to hear this. Not because men need to become endlessly calm, soft or measured. I do not believe that. Sometimes anger is right. Sometimes you should feel force, or something should upset you. If nothing ever gets under your skin, I am not sure that is maturity either. The question is what you do with it. Can you notice yourself tightening before everybody else has to? Can you feel your own anger without turning the whole room into an angry place? Can you be under pressure and not immediately hand that pressure to the person standing closest to you?

That is harder than it sounds, and it is different from control. Men are often very good at control. Keep it together. Get on with it. Do not show too much. I grew up around plenty of that. It has value, up to a point. But I think we confuse control with steadiness, and they are not the same thing. A man can look composed and still be completely unsettled. You can hear it in his voice sometimes. Nothing obviously wrong, just a little edge. It might be in the way he sits, or in the way everyone around him suddenly goes quiet.

That is why Menakem’s description of his grandmother’s hands keeps coming back to me. Those hands were not safe because they had somehow avoided hardship. They had not. They had worked, suffered, held people and lived through things. And still there was something in them that could settle another person.

I find that much more compelling than the version of resilience we often sell. The clean version. Adversity happened. I learnt from it, I became stronger and here are my five lessons. Life does not work like that. Sometimes suffering makes you wiser and sometimes makes you harder. You can think you have dealt with something and then ten years later it comes out of your mouth in a conversation with your son. That gets your attention.

Maturity, to me, is somewhere in there. Not becoming unaffected. I do not think that is possible. It is more about learning what to do with what affects you. Learning not to make every wound someone else’s problem. Learning how to be disappointed without becoming bitter, and how to carry pressure without spreading it everywhere. And sometimes failing at that, because you will.

Then noticing and coming back. Apologising when you need to and trying again. That is probably more of the work than we like to admit. It happens in marriages, fatherhood, teams, training, and in grief. It happens in those conversations where somebody tells you something about yourself and your first reaction is, no, that is not me. Then two days later you think about it again. Maybe it is.

Those moments have probably taught me more about leadership than most leadership material ever has. Because character is not really built while you are explaining your values. It is built when you are tired, embarrassed or angry. When nobody cares about your title. When you have to decide whether the thing you are carrying gets handed to the next person.

That is why I keep returning to Menakem’s sentence. Our state is not entirely private. We would probably like it to be. It is not. If people are around you a lot, they feel what’s going on with you. You can kid yourself that they don’t, but they do.

That is a responsibility. A fairly serious one.

Before you try to settle the room, steady yourself first.

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1. THE MOMENT

Marcus could not find the power in his swing. He was all arm, muscling the bat, shoulders first, and he would look at the bat like it had betrayed him.

So I took him away from the bat. Put the boxing pads on and had Marcus throw a cross. I saw the same problem straight away. All shoulder, chin up, leaning back whilst losing balance.

I stepped in beside him. I did not say anything about his arm. I set my feet, let my weight drop slightly, loaded into the back hip, and turned through the ground.

I repeated this a few times before deciding to ask him what he noticed.

“You went down first,” he said. Almost an accusation. Like I had found a shortcut.

“Everything that hits hard goes down first. The bat, too.”

He looked at his own feet for a long time. Then he picked the bat back up.

2. THE PATTERN

Boys think power is a thing you reach for. Up and out. Chest first, chin up, get bigger, take more space. So when you ask them to lower their centre, to load low before they move, it can feel like retreat or seen as weakness. Going down looks like giving up ground. Nobody told them the low place is where the power is kept.

You see it everywhere once you see it in the body. The boy who will not lower himself to ask a question. The one who cannot drop his guard long enough to actually learn the thing in front of him. Staying high all the time looks strong. It is just rigid.

I have stopped worrying about the loud ones, chest out, living up in the head and the neck, everything pulled high. It is the quiet one who can lower himself that I watch.

3. THE REFLECTION

There is a line I once read: "You should never trust a leader who cannot dance." I used to think it was about grace and confidence. It is not. It is about whether a man can let his centre move, lower and recover, give up his balance for a second and trust it will come back to him.

Every striking tradition I know quietly agrees on this. The old boxing coaches called it falling into the punch. The internal arts say the power rises from the ground and the waist commands it. A hitting coach would call it loading the back hip. In tai chi, they call it song: the relaxation and sinking that have to come before any force can leave the body. Different rooms, same instruction. A body that cannot relax and drop cannot issue force. A man who cannot let go of control cannot dance. Same mechanics, older root.

I keep asking myself whether I actually show the boys that lowering or whether I only show them the strike. The strike is the part that gets attention. The lowering happens beneath it, quieter, before anyone is watching. If I am honest, it is the part I am most tempted to skip in my own life.

I do not think I had answered that for myself before Marcus made me do it slowly enough for him to see. That is the strange gift of teaching it. Every time I show a boy where the power comes from, it returns me to it, too.

4. THE DRILL

Take your strike. A cross on the pads, a swing, your throw, whatever yours is. Throw it once the way you normally would, all arm, and notice whether your centre went up or down as you did it.

Then throw it again. This time lower first. Load the back hip, stay loose in the arm, breathe out, and let it fire up from the ground and turn through you. The arm is last, not first. Feel where the force is actually coming from.

Then carry it out of the room. The next hard conversation, the next thing you are avoiding, notice whether you brace up and lean back, or whether you can lower yourself and turn into it.

5. THE CONVERSATION

“So I have to get small to hit hard.” He said it like it was a trap.

“You have to get low. Small and low are not the same thing.”

“Feels like the same thing.”

“Watch a cat before it jumps. Watch a mantis before it strikes. It drops first. Nothing about that is small.”

He thought about it. Loaded the back hip this time, stayed loose, felt the bat come through differently.

“Still feels weird.”

“Good,” I said.

I found two lines in an old notebook, dated March 2014.

Afraid of my own rough edges. Admit I struggle and would struggle to do it on my own.

There was no paragraph around them. Just the confession written small at the bottom of an empty page. I remember the time I wrote it in as I was leaning towards becoming someone steadier than I was back in 2014, and the rough edges felt like evidence against me.

The parts of me that didn’t sit smoothly, that caught on people and on situations, I wanted to move through cleanly. I thought maturity meant erasing them out of my life, becoming someone with nothing left to hide.

I was wrong about the edges, as I liken it to walking into a living room that celebrates age. Your eye goes straight to the old table, the antique that has stood the test of time, the wear and the rough edge on it. That is where its beauty and character sits. Not in the thing that is purely clean, not a speck out of place. The roughness I was ashamed of was the same roughness that makes a piece worth keeping.

But it’s the second line I keep returning to. Would struggle to do it on my own. I remember I wrote it as an admission, the way you own up to something. We often teach boys that the stronger they become, the less they should need anyone, as if it were some badge of honour.

If you watch anyone learn something hard, a movement, a new skill, a craft, a time of grief, and you’ll see they don’t do it all alone. Usually there is someone a little further ahead showing them a way. Shortly after, someone just behind, learning from how they carry themselves. That is not weakness. That is how we pass things on.

So the man who wrote those two lines. I’d tell him now, if I could. You weren’t writing down what was wrong with you. You were writing down what you were afraid to admit. You had some rough edges, and you needed other people. Both were true and neither made you weak.

1. THE MOMENT

Thomas walks into the dojo while another boy is finishing his session. There is a crossover that happens often here: two boys overlapping briefly, one body of work giving way to another. Thomas does not interrupt. He sits down in seiza position near the mat and watches.

He does not announce himself. His body announces him.

When the other boy finishes, I step out of the room for something. When I come back in, Thomas is already practising his kata. Quietly. No fuss. The kind of focus you can feel in the room before you locate it in the body producing it.

From across the floor, my ridgeback pup, new to the boys, has settled into a calm without tension. She is watching him.

I say something to him about the way he is moving through the form. We stand and face each other. That is when he starts to tell me about his week.

He had been at school this week, in the library on a rainy day, in a conversation with two of his friends. The rain would ease, and the boys would be up and out the door. Then it would return and send them back in. Three times they went out. Three times the rain brought them back. His friends were restless, ants in their pants, wanting to move, wanting to be outside, anywhere but here. He told me he notices how easily we all get distracted, how quickly attention drops. If we had had our phones, he said, they would have been out.

He stayed.

He had wanted to stay in the conversation. He did not say it as defiance. He said it as a noticing. I just wanted to stay. I was enjoying the conversation.

2. THE PATTERN

A thirteen year old in a school library on a rainy day. Two friends who wanted to be anywhere but inside a conversation. The rain kept returning them to it.

His friends were not bad friends. They were just being pulled. The pull was there before any phone was. What Thomas had noticed was the pull, and his own ability to decline it.

The seiza Thomas sat in at the start of the session was not for his own work. It was for the other boys. The standard of his training requires that you pay attention to someone else’s work as it is happening. That is what Thomas had been practising in the library, with friends he could not control and a door he chose not to run for.

3. THE REFLECTION

It was not only what Thomas said. It was the way he stood as he said it. Upright. The look in his eye. He was demonstrating the thing he was describing.

I keep thinking about a different morning, weeks back. We were standing waist-deep in the bay on a calm, crisp autumn day. The water was utterly still. The sun was on our backs. We had been in easy conversation, the way you do when you are standing in water together. Then he had said, I am interested in knowing what is more out there in the world. He had not been asking me a question to answer. He had been sharing a question to sit inside. I smiled and said almost nothing. His question was the moment.

There was another group session weeks before. I had asked the group a question. Thomas had a reflection on the tip of his tongue. He held it. The other boys said what he would have said. He told me afterwards, with a kind of quiet frustration, that he should have spoken up quicker.

A couple of months before, overseas with his family, he had sat in rooms with boys he barely knew, family friends he had been pulled into without choosing. He had found it daunting at first. He had found a way into getting to know them. He told me afterwards how much he had enjoyed it, that it had not been as bad as he expected once he was in it.

He is learning to stay in conversations. He is also learning to step into them.

These are the small things that pile up. We magnify them on purpose. Most boys’ weeks happen faster than they can be noticed.

4. THE DRILL

This week, stay in one conversation longer than the pull wants you to.

Notice the moment it arrives. The small reach for the device, the impulse to move on, to go outside, to be elsewhere. You do not have to fight it. Just notice it.

Then stay.

Five minutes more than you would have. The conversation does not have to be deep. The staying is the practice.

5. THE CONVERSATION

“What do you think let you stay?”

“I think the practice. The kata. The seiza. I do it at home now. It helps me focus in conversations. I have better conversations. I am actually more present.”

The pup watched him from the floor. I did not say anything more. The practice was already saying enough.

Arki arrives on a Thursday afternoon. Quiet, like always. The bow, the formality of the dojo entrance, falls away as he steps into the room beside the mats. Two chairs beside each other. He sits, and his body releases something immediately.

Over months of working together, he’s learned to notice what’s happening inside himself. That attention is already there. We’re not here to train. We’re here to notice.

He’s just come back from seven days on a school camp. Hiking with a weight on his back, setting up tents each night, a group of thirteen and fourteen-year-old boys finding out what their bodies can actually carry.

He describes the hike and the hill where the group collapsed. Where complaint became contagion. Where the weight felt heavier than the packs they carried.

But then something else. He found a rhythm in his breath, in the next step. Ten minutes became twenty. The struggle didn’t disappear. It just stopped being the whole story. The pack got lighter. Not because it weighed less. Because something in him shifted.

I ask him where he’s felt that before. In training, when the body wants to quit, something else keeps moving. On a football field, after a missed kick, the next moment could be shame or presence. At home, when something stings, he could let it become the whole conversation, or he could stay underneath the reaction and see what’s actually there.

He sits back. His face is quiet. He’s not performing this understanding for me. He’s recognising it in himself.

We sit in the silence. Then we stand, cross into the dojo, and train.

The Pattern

Boys are often taught two responses to difficulty. Push through it or collapse under it. Neither teaches them the third option: stay with it. Let the feeling arrive without becoming the feeling. That hill in camp was not the test. The test was whether a boy could feel overwhelmed and not let that overwhelm run his next decision.

Most boys never get shown what that looks like. So they grow into men who either white knuckle everything or check out the moment discomfort shows up. Both are survival strategies. Neither is awareness.

The Reflection

I nearly overcomplicated this session. I had language ready. Flow states. Emotional regulation. Defusion. All accurate. None of it is necessary.

He already had the experience. He didn’t need me to name it. He needed space to recognise what had already happened inside him. The useful thing I did was ask one question: Where have you felt this before? That connected the trail to the dojo to the football field to his kitchen table. One thread through four rooms.

I keep learning the same lesson. The best sessions are the ones where I do the least.

The Drill

Next time something difficult arrives, notice the moment between feeling it and becoming it.

You feel the frustration. You feel the sting. You feel the weight. Now pause. That feeling is information. It is not an instruction. You do not have to obey it. You do not have to fight it either.

Just notice. That’s all. The noticing is the training.

The Conversation

“It got lighter.”

“The pack?”

“Yeah. Like, it didn’t actually get lighter. But it felt like it did.”

“What changed?”

“I stopped thinking about how far we had to go. I just walked.”

“And the complaining around you?”

“I could hear it. I just wasn’t in it anymore. I was in a flow.”

“Where else does that happen?”

Long pause.

“At home. When a family argument kicks off. Sometimes I get pulled into it. Sometimes I just... watch it. And it doesn’t hit the same.”

“What’s different from those times?”

“I don’t know. I think I just noticed it’s happening. Instead of being in it.”

“You think that’s something you can practise?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s already thinking about it.

Most of what we call training happens after the session ends.

He was the coach who gave me my start in the game. Neale Daniher. For a few weeks now, I have been listening to him, not for the first time, but differently since he died in May, the way you start to listen to a man once he can no longer answer back. He never gave me many words. One day in the 2000 season, he walked over at training, that country husk in his voice, and said, Big fella, you’re going well. That was most of it. Written down, it looks like nothing. But it was the line that let me believe I could be a senior regular ruckman, and I have carried it for most of my adult life.

In the 2000 Grand Final, I was carried from the ground on a stretcher, in front of a hundred thousand people and a television audience past counting. The body has its own way of reminding you that nothing at that height lasts. I went on to Fremantle for three years, then Richmond for six. I never knew Daniher the way others did, never played under him for as long. It was a spark though. A spark from the right man at the right moment can light a whole decade.

Long after football, he had become something far larger than a coach: the face of a fight against motor neurone disease that raised more than a hundred million dollars, the man who sent a whole country sliding into the ice, the one who took his own long dying and turned it into something close to a gift. He grew to the size of the country.

They held his funeral at the MCG last week, a state service on the same ground where he had once coached me. More than a thousand people came. I sat among men I had played beside, old Melbourne teammates, faces gone grey, all of us there for the one man. And in the middle of it, with no logic to it at all, my mother arrived in my thoughts. Her anniversary had fallen only days before, the seventh of June. She came the way our dead do when another death cracks the door.

She died in 2020. Pancreatic cancer. It gave us six months. The last of them went to the fade and the morphine, so that she was gone from the conversation a while before she was gone. She was the one who believed in the thing before there was any evidence for it. A boy says he wants to play football at the highest level, and most of the world, gently or not, files it under unlikely. She did not. She drove, she waited, she stayed. The dream came true, completely, twelve years of it, and she was there for it. She was in the stands that Grand Final day, and she watched her son being carried from the field on a stretcher, close enough to see it and too far to do anything but watch. Belief and helplessness in one afternoon.

Sitting there, I noticed what happens in me when I hold these two at once. Daniher’s magnitude. My mother’s belief. I feel small. Not worthless. Small. As though my own life, the work I actually do, barely registers next to a man who moved a nation and a woman who gave me everything she had. The work is real. It is also, by most measures, out there but not mainstream. I am not on the big stage. I am in a studio and a dojo, mentoring boys and men through movement and conversation, week after week, doing the slow work that does not announce itself.

The word itself did not come from me. A few days had passed, enough for a little perspective, and I was still in the middle of all of it. Daniher's death and my mother's life folding into one another. I was talking with a friend, a woman who teaches me things, a conversation that went a layer deeper than either of us planned. The word honour came through. Not as advice. More like something she noticed and set down between us. And the moment she did, I knew exactly where I had felt it most.

One of the young men I worked with met my mother once, near the start, when the diagnosis was still new. He was eighteen at the time. After that single meeting, he wrote her a letter that I still keep today. He told her he had been honoured to meet her, and that he would go on to become the best he could be. Near the end, in the palliative ward, I read it to her aloud whilst she was still responsive. I hadn’t been moved to tears like that since sitting beside her in pallative care.

Over the past week I have been turning the word over since. What does it actually mean to honour oneself? We treat the phrase with suspicion. It sounds soft, or vain, or like something you buy. Most of us were taught that attending to your own worth is the first step toward selfishness, so we skip it, and then we call the skipping humility. I am no longer sure that is what humility is.

Here is what I am beginning to see. Honouring yourself is not the opposite of feeling small. It is what lets you stand next to something enormous without disappearing. Daniher never needed me to become large. My mother did not love a future version of me. They honoured the life that was actually there, the ordinary one, the one still working itself out. And if they could do that for me, the real question is whether I can learn to do it for myself.

Because honour moves in an order. You receive it before you can give it. Someone honours you before you have done anything to deserve it: a parent, a coach, a teacher who sees something and decides to back it. That is what my mother did, and what Daniher did in his way. Then, if you are fortunate, you spend years giving it forward. I do this now without always naming it. A boy walks into the studioor dojo still wearing the week on his shoulders, the jaw set, the eyes somewhere else, and before he has shown me anything, before he has earned a single thing, I treat him as though he is worth the full weight of my attention. In the dojo the bow comes first, to someone who has done nothing yet to earn it. I honour him first. That is the whole method, if there is one.

What I am slow to learn is the last movement. After you have received it, and after you have spent years giving it away, you are meant to turn it back on yourself. To honour the one doing the giving. I watch it in the men I work with, and I know it in myself. We were backed once. We back everyone now, the teams, the children, the people who lean on us. And we struggle to turn the same regard on our own lives without flinching, as though it were an indulgence we had not earned.

It does not help that we now live inside machines built to confuse the matter. Social media has taken the word honour and swapped it for the word seen. We are told that to value a life is to display it, to gather an audience for the living rather than to do the living. So honouring the self curdles into performing the self, and because performance never fills the hole it promises to fill, men can arrive in front of me exhausted by a visibility that has nothing to do with worth. The remedy is not more of it. It is the opposite. It is the willingness to value a life that almost no one is watching.

This is why I have made a kind of peace with the work staying out of the spotlight. Not mainstream. For a long time, I read that as a verdict on its value. I am starting to read it differently. The room of boys and men is not a smaller version of the big stage. It is a different thing entirely, and it asks a different kind of honour: the sort you give and receive when no one is keeping score.

Daniher spent his last years dying in full public view and somehow made even that an act of generosity. My mother gave in to one boy in private, and the world never noticed. Both of them honoured a life. Neither needed that life to be large.

That, I think, is what I am still learning to live. To honour my own life at the scale it actually is. Not in remembrance, one day. In attention, now. To stand near the giants without vanishing, and near the quiet ones without apologising.

Honour the life you are actually living. It is the one they backed.

On a Thursday evening in February 2025, in the kitchen of a simple house, a young man I have known for six years lay out cutting boards, fresh vegetables, and meat for the barbecue. It was not a special occasion. He had not been told to do it. Jack is twenty-four. He arrived in the program at eighteen with more questions than answers, and grew up inside it.

This evening, he had invited seven boys, from eleven to fifteen, from both the foundation and growth groups, to share a meal.

They arrived carefully. Some brought gifts for the host. Some dressed boldly, others safely.

From the start, Jack gave them jobs. One cut the salad, another prepared the barbecue, and others set the table or served the food. What began in awkward silence slowly became a rhythm. The scrape of knives, the heat of the grill, the shuffle of chairs around the table.

When they sat down, the distance between them was greater than the years between them. It was the untested bridge between boys becoming men and a man still learning what that means. Conversation began with the usual stiffness. One of the older boys, Ben, fifteen, quietly took the lead, showing the younger boys how to offer a few words of gratitude before the meal began.

Then, as the sound of knives worked the plates, Jack asked two simple questions.

What has been hard for you this year? What has inspired you to do well this year?

The air shifted.

What followed was not a lesson. They spoke about personal pressures, about school tensions, about the speed at which bodies and identities were changing faster than they could understand. They were clumsy and candid, and sometimes painfully honest.

Sometimes it's hard to talk to mum and dad. Having someone older, or the group, makes it easier to actually say it.

It was not a complaint about the home. Some things just need a different room to be said in. What they say here, they carry home eventually.

From my chair, I did not need to speak. Jack had built the space. The boys were stepping into it themselves.

That night, Jack remembered his own years of struggle and chose to create a table for others. A fifteen-year-old took the risk of speaking first. A twelve-year-old discovered that being a boy can include tenderness.

A seat at a table tells you that you belong. That you count. It is the oldest thing one person can give another.

One table. Seven boys. One young man is carrying the values forward.

George arrived just after finishing soccer training.

The dojo sits in one part of the space. The room opposite is simple and intentional. Two chairs where I often sit in conversation with the boys. The lighting low.

It’s a place that sits slightly apart from the noise of school and home.

I have known George since he was thirteen. He is nineteen now, training as a goalkeeper with Melbourne Victory and about to leave for Columbia University in New York to begin college. Some sessions are around his movement, some are recovery, and sometimes we simply sit and talk.

This afternoon, we were talking about one of the younger boys in the program, whom George happens to tutor in maths. Somehow, we got onto mathematics itself, and George, who studies more advanced maths, started describing a certain type of word. A word, he said, for something you approach but never reach.

He began with something simple.

Finding the area of a square is straightforward, he said. Length multiplied by width. Exact. Final.

But circles are different.

To calculate the area of a circle, you use π, a number that never truly ends. An infinite sequence of digits that never completely resolves.

Mathematicians approximate the area of a circle by filling it with smaller and smaller rectangles. As those rectangles shrink, the estimate gets closer and closer to the true area. But it never becomes perfect. There is always another decimal place. Another smaller gap.

George paused.

“Maybe people are more like circles than squares.”

2. THE PATTERN

He kept going. The way he does when something has caught hold of him.

In sport, he said, the difference is in the small things. The habits people don’t see. The extra effort. The accountability you hold yourself to when no one’s watching.

“Some people see two squares in a circle and call it close enough. But some people keep finding as many squares as they can.”

He talked about how far you’re willing to take something. It depends on how many doors you’re willing to open. At school, he said, you stop early. You learn the formula. You get the mark. But you never really learn the why or the how or why that thing is there in the first place.

And then he found the word.

An asymptote. A line that a graph approaches forever but never quite touches.

Your journey toward it isn’t linear, he said. It goes up and down. It depends on what it is. But the theory holds. As you approach infinity, your value approaches that line.

Most boys his age are handed clean edges. You’re talented, or you’re not. You made the team, or you didn’t. The world draws squares around them and calls it clarity.

George was describing something harder to hold. That you keep getting closer, and you never fully arrive, and that this isn’t failure.

3. THE REFLECTION

These kinds of conversations only happen over time. Over the years, George and I have trained, talked, struggled, laughed, reflected, and slowly watched things change.

I did not teach George this. He arrived at it himself. Which is the thing I keep learning to trust. That my job is often not to deliver the insight but to hold open the kind of room where a nineteen-year-old feels safe enough to follow his own thinking somewhere he didn’t expect to go.

4. THE DRILL

This week, find a moment with a young person where you don’t correct, redirect or teach.

Just listen as they think out loud.

Let them reach for something they haven’t fully formed yet. Sit in the imprecision with them. Resist the urge to tidy it up.

5. THE CONVERSATION

“So, the area of a circle, you can never get the exact answer?”

“No. You get close. Very close. But there’s always another gap. You can round it, you can cut it off, but it’s not exact.”

“And there’s a word for that? The line you can’t reach?”

“An asymptote. It’s the line you draw when something is approaching, but it will never reach it.”

“So it’s like... mastery isn’t done.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, you keep working at it. You keep finding smaller areas inside you that you can work at. But there’s always space. There’s always another door. And behind that door there’s other doors.”

“Does that bother you?”

“It used to. At school I think I stopped early. I stopped at like the first door. You get the answer, move on. You don’t really look at why it’s there.”

He went quiet for a moment.

“But I think that’s what keeps it going, isn’t it. Someone else might have a tiny little square that you don’t have. And you might have one they don’t. And you take from each other and it builds you a wider circle.”

“So what changes?”

“How far you want to take it. How much you want to look into it.”