Recent content on Dan Bartlett: coach, writer, engineer & founder
Please read me! 👇 Hi! I’m Dan, a 2x founder, engineering leader and mentor. I’ve been building businesses for the better part of a decade, which has taught me to value any opportunity to listen to the folks I’m serving. During our call I’ll be asking you some questions that you can find below (after selecting a date/time). If you’re feeling particularly proactive,…
I’ve published something new every day for the last 100 days . I originally started with the goal of publishing something every day in Q2 , but extended it to 100 days because that sounded cooler. I have a longer piece in the works on the lessons learned. But here are some off-the-top-of-my-headlines. Writing challenges are best thought of as a way of understanding your style. Not producing a…
Impatience is on my mind a lot since I came back from retreat . I’ve thought about it before, but it struggled for airtime against the more ominous-sounding problems of ignorance and delusion, where I focused my efforts. Is impatience really a problem? What’s a little rush? Can’t I see things clearly whilst sprinting past everyone? Unfortunately, the crux of it is that when you’re impatient,…
Meditation can be boiled down to two things: revelation and reverence. Revelation is not a divine intervention. It’s something much simpler: when we sit still, everything is freely revealed to us. If you shut your eyes now, sights, sounds, thoughts, suffering, peace and irritation all continue to arise. Revelation means to lay bare or unveil: reality is continually disclosing itself,…
We usually reserve the term objectification for the process of sexually objectifying a person. When we do this, we can only see them as an object of desire or aversion. But there is a wider meaning to the term. It includes any way of seeing ourselves or others as a tool—a means to an end. Relating to yourself in this way might be useful for ramping up your work performance or training for a race.…
Many diverse worldviews can be boiled down to variations of the following statement: “This is shit, but…” This is shit, but there’s a perfect heaven coming next (Religion) This is shit, but I can accumulate enough status or wealth to make it bearable (Materialism) This is shit, but if I tell myself it means something, I’ll be ok (Relativism) This is shit, but when I find the Perfect Partner,…
Another barrier to meaning is the idea that it only exists inside of human heads, and that we need to project it over the world. In trying to resuscitate meaning, it dooms the entire project before we even set off. But to discover meaning is not to engage in positive thinking or affirmation. We don’t have to pretend that loving relationships bring fulfilment or that sunsets and bonfires speak to…
One enemy of meaning is an over-reliance on one mode of knowing. John Vervaeke calls this propositional knowing: knowledge in the form of facts, beliefs and concepts. Iain McGilchrist would identify this approach as left-hemisphere dominant, focusing as it does on abstractions that we can grasp, over open-ended, lived realities. This propositional fixation is rampant throughout modern culture, no…
I’ve been thinking more about legacy after listening to an inspiring talk a couple of weeks back. I’m always trying to group the things I do together under one banner. This is doomed to fail on some level, but the term that kept coming up was meaning . I help people find purpose on a personal level through coaching, help them develop emotional coherence through bodywork, and offer meaning in the…
(Read Part 1 and Part 2 first.) One of the toughest parts of burnout was losing running, right when I needed it most. Burnout robbed my energy whilst depression cleaved away my motivation. Moving my body was a key aspect in getting through burnout. I walked every morning and spent long periods walking through nearby woods. I took up tai chi, lifted weights again and started rucking . I started…
We often find tension in the body. The jaw is held tight, the shoulders are bunched up, the chest constricted. In exploring ourselves through yoga or other healing modalities, we learn to approach the tension softly and gently, trying to create a sense of safety. In these conditions, we give the tension a chance to naturally uncoil. This is a sound approach. But there is another counter-intuitive…
(Read Part 1 first.) At some point in my teens, I started lifting smaller weights to gain some muscle. I have some vague memory of sprinting up a hill, too. But this must have been a one-off after reading something on Reddit; I never owned running shoes or any other kit. It was new to think of myself as fit. Those bottom-group PE vibes took a long time to fade. In this hippie phase, I started to…
My first memories of physical education involve a girl called Claire. Claire was taller than most girls. She had the wit of someone 10 years her senior and—most importantly—the handwriting to match it. Her sick notes saved me from several PE (physical education) lessons. But many were inescapable. Some days we were all crammed onto the sputtering carcass of a bus to be driven to a nearby field for…
A good day for me is built atop three pillars: meditation, movement, and writing. The meditation helps me reconnect to a sense of presence. It gives me a window into seeing how often I’m interfering with experience, and an opportunity to drop that. The movement starts each morning with a walk. Either without headphones or listening to an audiobook. I also train 5 or 6 times per week. I can’t…
I spend an enormous amount of time thinking about consciousness and wisdom, whilst engaging in practices that help me clarify my own experience. I also have a strong intellectual bent. I love ideas. Elegant ones, controversial ones, ones with big explanatory power. I like to put them next to each other to see where they overlap and diverge. These two interests don’t often go together. At least in…
In the far-reaching conversation between John Vervaeke, Iain McGilchrist and Daniel Schmachtenberger, Iain makes the following point, which I’ll paraphrase: We need to notice the things that draw us from the front, not just the things that push us from behind.… Values are an example of something that pulls us forward - towards something greater than ourselves. This comes up often in coaching too.…
One benefit of growing mental health awareness is our ability to communicate, to ourselves and others, what we’re feeling with less social inhibition. For someone who has rarely expressed these things, being able to say “I’m sad today” or “I’m feeling really anxious right now” is a leap forward. Suddenly, a bridge of understanding opens up, both for the individual and for those around them.…
3 years ago, I was in a bad place. I was depressed, I’d worked myself into the ground, and I thought I was leaving Tech for good. I started again from scratch—this time rebuilding from meaning, not metrics. That path led me to coaching. At first, I coached anyone who needed help, from yoga teachers to YouTubers. But over time, a pattern emerged: engineers, product people and founders kept showing…
I’ve run 6 ultramarathons and I often get questions about them. Ultras are defined by their distance—any race beyond marathon distance. But they’re different in a few fundamental ways. Nearly all ultras take place off-road, on trails, and frequently pass through AONBs (Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty) like the Mendips, Cotswolds, Snowdonia etc. This makes them very different to running on…
Yesterday, I ran my first ultra in nearly 5 years. Here are some visual highlights . I ran a hilly 50k along the South Downs, part of the Race to the King series, which included 3 races all starting and finishing at the same base camp. I started out well enough, walking the scorching climb of the first hill like everyone else, but managing to jog the second part. I found my flow after 40 minutes…
Many people come to coaching in search of impact. They have goals to achieve and situations to turn around. Inevitably, as we explore together, certain behavioural patterns begin to emerge. It could be a habit of avoiding difficult emotions, distrust of teammates or a long-standing fear of rejection. They realise that this pattern seems to have a life of its own, independent of particular…
Lots of people I support each week struggle, in one way or another, with difficult thoughts. They don’t often describe the problem that way. They call it perfectionism, self-judgement, spiralling anxiety or imposter syndrome. But each of those is built on a particular set of thoughts, a narrative around what should or shouldn’t be happening. We fuel these thoughts in two ways 1 : We obey. When we…
In my late 20s, I was struggling with anxiety. I’d started having panic attacks out of the blue. After trying to fix it myself, my partner sat me down on the bed and told me I needed some help. Before my first Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) session, my therapist gave me a questionnaire to complete. It covered things like how much I worried and whether I thought my thoughts were out of…
Yesterday’s post was free-written. That means I had a rough idea and then started typing quickly. It took a few twists that I didn’t expect and didn’t have a neat conclusion. But it was a rush to write like this. Even though I’ve been publishing every day , the content for many of these pieces was defined by existing notes. I have a note-taking problem and I already have notes on nearly any topic…
I was listening to James Low on the Waking Up app, as I walked to the shop today. He was talking about equanimity and something clicked in my mind. Oh yeah: I don’t have to react to this experience. I tuned into a background tussle that had been dragging on and let it drop. Relief. It’s an insight I’ve had thousands of times. Sometimes it’s very alive for me and I feel like teflon—everything comes…
As a coach, you hear the word purpose rather a lot. The narrative is that purpose is what many people lack, and that discovering it can bring us meaning and fulfilment. Purpose is important, but inadequate on its own. The idea that we have or don’t have a purpose is also too simplistic. John Vervaeke outlines 4 aspects that together grant meaning. I think they’re interesting to explore:…
Acceptance is often mistaken for resignation. As if by dropping our resistance, we’ve agreed to stay exactly where we are—frozen & passive. But this misses the point entirely. To accept something is not to endorse it. It’s to see it clearly. To stop, just for a moment, the exhausting war against things as they are—whether through denial, protest, or pretending. The truth is, we can’t move wisely…
Having published so much recently, I’ve been thinking about my voice. I have a tendency to go abstract when I start talking about ideas that I think are important. I’ve been reeling between “this is all intellectualising and useless” and trying to drag it forward with some more personal elements. It led me to write another introduction to the idea of Full-Contact Living : When I was…
Every now and then, something pops up on HackerNews that you did not expect to pop up on HackerNews. Recently , that was Merlin, an app that lets you ID birds from their songs. I’ve been using this app for a few years and have recommended it to many people. When I hear something I don’t recognise , I get Merlin out. You can see the sound signatures in real time, and pictures of birds will start…
People seek out spirituality and other esoteric disciplines to find the deepest truths about human nature. In doing so it’s easy to feel like a novice at the gate of the great unknown. And yet the material for a full understanding of the human condition is latent inside each human being—an open book for inquiry. Why would it be otherwise? Whatever profundity or mundanity is at play, we should…
Practices which cultivate wisdom often have a solemn air about them. They focus on the ascent towards what’s right and true. This feels good! Finally, some solid ground for me to stand on. Some answers. But it also creates a pomposity as you strain towards the right answer. Instead, think of practice as a way to reduce stupidity. Starting with stupidity means being honest about where we are—the…
Full-contact living is a contemplative, first-personal attitude that is centred around practice —the repeated return to what matters. You could call it introspective, a way of “going within”, but I hope to show that contemplation is something much bigger than this, a profound understanding of reality that comes about by turning towards the limited self perspective, and seeing its edges feather out…
When I was growing up, we used to poke fun at a moralising certainty that was the purview of stuffy conservatives on the Right. Matt Taibi wrote in 2020, “We laughed at the Republican busybody who couldn’t joke, declared war on dirty paintings, and peered through your bedroom window. Now that person has switched sides, and nobody’s laughing.” Taibi’s point was that much of that moralising…
When you want to grow a plant, you don’t crack the seed open and yank out its leaves. You place the seed in the soil, water it, and protect it from pests. This is cultivation. Good practice is about cultivation, not control. Control assumes you already know the outcome and how to get there. It’s another way of inflicting our personal will on reality. But if everything is controlled, we often…
In one of Oliver Burkeman’s talks on the Waking Up app, he discusses the idea of being best friends with yourself. 1 He explores why, for many people, this term is more powerful than self-compassion or self-love, which can evoke a certain kind of New Age narcissism or secular self-absorption. Burkeman makes some important points about why this phrasing is useful: Firstly, everyone has a model of…
Practice changes how we attend to the world and what we see. We learn to attune to subtlety, and in doing so we notice more of what is already happening inside and around us. Some things leap into relief and others fade into irrelevance. For example, one day you start meditating. You learn to pay attention to the changing nature of things, whilst recognising your tendency to conceptualise your…
“I am the same kind of moron as the rest of you, it’s the method that does the work, for me as well as for you.” —Alfred Korzybski I’ve read, achieved and learned a lot over the years. But it is my ongoing practices that have had by far the biggest impact on my life. We readily accept that mastery in music, sport & art comes from years of practice, but still balk at applying the same method to our…
Yesterday , I wrote that: I’d love to pretend I’m reporting from a place of enlightened awareness, but the truth is that 90% of whatever wisdom you might find here was stumbled upon through crisis and catastrophe. I’m always trying something, and after a few decades, you get a definitive sense of what does not work. When I was a teenager, I felt a pervasive sense of yearning for “something more.”…
Full-Contact Living is explicitly ambitious. It aims to foster meditative realisation, psychological well-being, creative energy, relational harmony and philosophical discernment. So why me? I’ve no academic background, I’ve been through my fair share of mental health crises, and I’m not part of any spiritual lineage. I’m just a guy who meditates, reads, and thinks a lot while possessing a…
I grew up discontent with much of the story I was told about human beings and the cosmos. It felt like a flattened caricature with little appreciation of the inner depths I spent most of my days exploring. At some point, I felt called to the depths. Through a mix of wonder and frustration, I began inhaling esoteric content and practising meditation. These practices changed me, but there were many…
I have spent my life constructing a big picture in my head. This picture was born in a struggle to understand myself and the world. Or perhaps, more candidly, to find a better way to engage with a world that felt overwhelming and intrusive (hello fellow 5s 👋). This picture was not just written in words or captured in ideas; it was shaped through experience and tended to through practice. It’s a…
Derek Sivers once wrote that if you’re a writer who’s not regularly releasing your writings, you’re actually journalling. Obviously, I’m feeling pretty smug in light of this, having published for the last 60 days straight. But it is an important reminder. When left to my own devices, I will happily ruminate ad infinitum: threading together connections, creating new narratives and learning,…
In his talk, Already Free , Adyashanti highlights the way we fixate through an amusing example. It’s like you got mesmerised by the movement of one of your hands in front of your face. And now you can’t stop following it wherever it goes. So you go to the doctor and say, “Doc, I’m confined to my hand! It’s hard to see anything else and I’m tired of having to follow it around.”
This morning I naturally woke up, excited, at about 4am. After letting my confused dog out, I made a flask of tea and took my pre-made breakfast out of the fridge. (Thank you, me.) I have no calls on the calendar today. I love coaching, but I equally enjoy the days I keep clear for deep work. I spend a couple of hours organising some notes in Obsidian on a new essay series about “Full-Contact…
Now that I have a presence on multiple internet platforms, I am continually trying to figure out where to say what I want to say. I have a lot of interests. My background is as a software engineer and leader, but I’m also fascinated by consciousness, meditation and awakening. The main way I earn money is as a coach and consultant to techie folks, but I also teach people how to shake to release…
The choice we make of how we dispose our consciousness is the ultimate creative act: it renders the world what it is. It is, therefore, a moral act: it has consequences. —Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things Attention is often described as a spotlight: a narrow beam you control to reveal different parts of the world. This metaphor makes some intuitive sense but it obscures more than it…
Words have always been important to me. I love to read and write. Learning to write in peculiar languages that only computers—and a select few humans—understand, has changed how I think and gifted me a successful career. As that career shifted, my love of writing returned to the fore and I saw the thread of language, running from early life to the present day, asking to be much more of who I am.
Eckhart Tolle offers an interesting pointer in one of his books. When you are struggling with some issue, the instruction is to ask: What problem do I have, in this moment? The initial response will likely be a thought: I’m stressed, I slept poorly, I ate the almond croissant etc. But the question is to ask what problem you have, right now, in this moment . Not just then or in a few minutes.
I’m standing on a frozen lake at 5,400 metres, halfway across the Cho La pass. My heart is hammering—not just from the altitude, but because each step sounds hollow and brittle, like something might give out. Ahead, Pasang turns and grins. “We’re good,” he says, casually, like we’re strolling to lunch, not traversing a sub-zero lake on a remote pass. 12 hours ago, my alarm went off at 4am. My…
The brain, as Lisa Feldman Barrett shows, is a prediction machine—forever forecasting and assembling from educated guesses. It’s narrative as survival. Large language models mirror this, stringing together probable words to simulate coherence. But meditation breaks the loop. It halts the brain’s automatic storytelling, interrupts the fiction of certainty, and calls us back to sensation—to…