Bodies Before Badges
Brighton wasn't doing its usual British thing. Twenty-nine degrees, concrete holding the heat long after the sun had given up on the day, the sea somewhere out there being politely ignored by an entire conference staring at lanyards in a narrow hotel lobby. Inside, the aircon fought back hard enough that walking between rooms felt like changing climate every twenty feet.
In one of those rooms, someone was ringing a singing bowl. In the corridor outside, the usual noise carried on exactly as loud as it always does — pitches, gossip, someone begging a charger off a stranger.
That's roughly the scene I stepped into this year, leading a mindful movement session at the Develop:Brighton Wellbeing Hub. Qigong wasn't the practice I have most trained in — yoga, yogic breathwork and meditation are more my thing — I could draw on years of practice to hold a session for a room that mostly needed permission to unclench, smile and move a little.
Most people I've worked alongside for years know me through strategy. Marketing. Sustainability. Games. Conference stages, chaired panels, the twenty-minute coffee that somehow becomes two hours because you keep bumping into people on the way to get one. What a lot of them don't know is that another practice has been running alongside all of that for even more years — movement, breath, stillness, the kind of thinking that starts in the body rather than the slide deck. Not an escape from the strategy work. Another way into the same questions.
So if that's new information — now you have it. And if you or your team could use it properly, this is the part where I just say it plainly: get in touch.
Here's the case for why, beyond the fact that it felt oddly right in a room fighting a heatwave with air conditioning.
The industry that filled the conference is, by its own admission, exhausted. Budgets tight, studios closing, people quietly wondering what next year looks like — and still, thousands of us travel across countries to spend a couple of days talking about what's still possible. To have hope, to show hope.
That says something. It also says something that an industry under this much pressure still made room, this year, for a Wellbeing Hub that wasn't competing with the pitches or the main events. It just offered something else — switching off, quiet conversation, an hour of movement — on the theory that not everyone needs the same thing, but everyone needs something.
If you want the version with headings: staff don't leave companies, they leave exhaustion nobody addressed, and retention is cheaper than rehiring every time. Leadership teams that can't regulate themselves under pressure tend to build cultures that can't either. And culture, whatever else it is, is downstream of how much room an organisation actually makes for the people in it to be human before they're productive.
We fill diaries and conference programmes with real care, we work on games with real passion and unwavering dedication, then expect people to absorb all of it on the train home. I don't think that's how people work. Sometimes I don't know what I think about a conversation until two days later. Sometimes my body tells me something my mind hasn't caught up with yet.
People don't arrive at a conference, or a Monday morning, with just a laptop and a lanyard. They arrive carrying nervous systems, grief, excitement, whatever they didn't have time to process on the way in. None of that shows up on a name badge. Worth remembering, on both sides of the table.
