What We Owe Each Other
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Years ago, a man I deeply respected sat with me and said something I have never forgotten.

He told me not to look backward once I had made a decision. To respect my choices and own my mistakes honestly when I made them. To think carefully before acting, in life and in everything that touches other people. And then he said something that has stayed with me longer than all the rest: make your feelings touch the other person's soul, and love more than you hate.

I have carried those words through every chapter of my life since. Not always perfectly. Not without difficulty. But I have carried them, because I understood, even in the moment he said them, that they were not simply advice. They were a way of living.

The subconscious mind, as I have come to know well, does not always cooperate with our better intentions. It retrieves what we would rather leave behind, returning to old wounds with a precision and a level of detail that the conscious mind never quite managed at the time. I have learned that the answer to this is not to fight it, but to make a deliberate choice: to take what is worth learning from the past, and to release everything else. To believe, actively and repeatedly, that the future holds something worth moving toward.

But this article is not really about the past. It is about what we choose to build in the present, and what kind of leaders, colleagues, parents, and human beings we are willing to become.

There are qualities that I believe sit at the foundation of any life, and any organisation, worth belonging to. Tolerance. Kindness. Genuine care. Love in the broadest and most honest sense of the word. Respect that does not depend on title or rank. Honesty that does not flinch. The willingness to be as clear and as open as possible in every relationship we are part of. These are not soft qualities. They are among the most demanding things a human being can practice, because they require not just understanding but genuine belief. You cannot apply them as a strategy. You have to live them as a conviction. And you have to be discerning enough to recognise when others are performing them rather than living them, because the performance, however convincing, eventually reveals itself.

In recent years, something has been shifting in the world around us, and not quietly. Communities across the globe have experienced levels of violence, division, and cruelty that many of us had hoped belonged to an earlier and less enlightened time. What strikes me most about this is not the scale of the dramatic acts, though those demand our full attention. It is the quieter violence, the kind that hides in plain sight, that concerns me most deeply.

It hides in the joke made at a wife's expense that is passed off as humour. It hides in the boys who bully girls in school corridors for the natural experiences of growing up. It hides in the parent who tells a child, even once, even in a moment of frustration, that they were born unlucky. It hides in the colleague who dismisses a woman's contribution with a word, or a tone, or a look that communicates her irrelevance more clearly than any sentence could.

We do not arrive in the world with these behaviours written into us. There is no gene for discrimination, no biological instruction to diminish another person on the basis of their race, their gender, their background, their faith, their financial circumstances, or their health. These are learned behaviours, acquired over a lifetime of exposure to environments that normalised them. And because they are learned, they can be unlearned. That is not optimism. It is simply the logical conclusion of understanding where they came from.

But unlearning requires something that leadership culture does not always celebrate: the willingness to ask honest and uncomfortable questions of ourselves.

What does a person actually gain by hurting someone in their care? What kind of influence is built on fear rather than trust? Who genuinely believes that violence, whether physical, verbal, or the subtle kind that operates through exclusion and contempt, creates the conditions for people to do their best work, to feel safe enough to contribute, to stay? Where does real connection between people actually begin, if not in the decision to treat each other with dignity? When does the pursuit of control finally give way to the pursuit of something worth building together?

These questions do not have a single answer. They have as many answers as there are people willing to sit with them honestly. But what I have found, across years of working with people in organisations of every kind, is that the answers almost always converge on the same place. On the recognition that we are more effective, more creative, more resilient, and more human when we lead with love rather than fear, with openness rather than dominance, with the genuine desire to see the people around us flourish.

The wise man who spoke to me all those years ago was not describing a leadership philosophy. He was describing a way of being in the world. And I have come to believe that the two are not as separate as we sometimes pretend.

The most powerful thing a leader can do is not to demonstrate their authority. It is to create, through the consistent practice of everything I have described, an environment in which other people feel genuinely valued. Where the cleaner and the director are treated with the same fundamental respect. Where a mistake is an opportunity for learning rather than an occasion for humiliation. Where love, in the fullest and most professional sense of that word, is not considered a weakness but the very foundation on which everything worth building must rest.

We are not yet where we need to be. More effort is required, from all of us, to close the gap between the values we claim and the way we actually show up for the people in our care.

But the gap can be closed. I have seen it happen. And it always begins with the same small, deliberate act.

The decision to love more than you hate.