Over the holiday break, while most people were switching off, I found myself mixing cement.

Not metaphorically.
Actually mixing it. Barrow. Cement. Rocks. Water. Shovel. Repeat.

I’ve been concreting the labyrinth on my property - creating cement stencil pavers one by one. It’s slow, physical, repetitive work. The kind of work that doesn’t care about your thoughts, your titles, or your ideas. It just asks:Are you present or not?

At some point, whilst smoothing and levelling a paver I realised...

This isWax on. Wax off.

If you’ve seen The Karate Kid, you know the scene. The student thinks he’s being given meaningless, menial tasks. He wants the technique, the mastery, the shortcut. Instead, he’s told to repeat simple movements - over and over - until the learning lands in the body, not the intellect.

That’s what concreting the labyrinth became.

Mix. Pour. Level. Tap. Wipe.
Mix. Pour. Level. Tap. Wipe.

There’s a quiet humbleness in this kind of work if you’re used to thinking your way through things. No performance. No recognition. Just attention.

And that’s the point.

Somewhere in the repetition, my nervous system settled. I wasn’t planning, fixing, or anticipating. I washere. Hands in cement. Knees on the earth.

Meditation disguised as manual labour.

It reminded me how much modern leadership - and modern work - has drifted from this kind of embodied knowing. We live in our heads. We talk about strategy, capability, transformation. We move fast. We stack meetings. We measure outputs.

But the real shifts - the ones that last - don’t come from thinking harder.

They come frompractice.
From repetition.
From presence.
From doing the simple things well, again and again, until they change how you move in the world.

Leadership is no different.

You don’t build trust with a single conversation.
You don’t build culture with a workshop.
You don’t build resilience with a policy.

It’s the small, often unglamorous behaviours - repeated consistently - that shape people, teams and systems.

Concreting a labyrinth doesn’t look like leadership development. But it reminded me of something essential: before we rush to do more, fix more, lead more - we might need to slow down enough tofeelwhat we’re doing.

Wax on.
Wax off.

Sometimes the work is the work.

PS if you're wondering I think the labyrinth is going to be a year long journey 🙄