WARN International Ltd

05/02/2026

For many I speak with, it feels like the world is coming apart. Floods, fires, political turmoil, wars.

There’s constant division, outrage and tragedy.

A question many of us are holding - Is everything actually getting worse, or does it just feel that way?

Some global risks are increasing. It’s undeniable.

But what’s also increased even more is our exposure to what is happening.

We were never meant to carry the emotional weight of the entire planet, in real time, every day.

Our brains evolved for localised threats.

Now we’re absorbing global suffering before breakfast.

To add to this, we have a brain wired to focus on danger, algorithms that reward fear, and 24/7 access to everything, everywhere.

It starts to feel like an onslaught. So how do we stay informed without losing ourselves?

Not by switching off, not by endlessly scrolling, but by being deliberate:
🧠 Choose when you consume the news
🧠 Let go of what you cannot influence
🧠 Anchor locally, control things close to home
🧠 Balance exposure with regulation of emotions through movement, nature, breath, and connection
🧠 Remember that history looks chaotic when you’re living it

Control doesn’t come from worrying or trying to stop the storms.

It comes from learning how to stay steady and choosing to show up and control what we can control.

We can 'work at worrying or work on what is worrying us', our brain is going to work regardless of which one we choose to do.

Let’s talk!

03/02/2026

Recalling how, as a 6-year-old, I had my photo taken for the first time at primary school, my teacher moved a pen from my left hand to my right so that all the school photos would look the same.

I am left-handed and thought that from that moment on, I would have to hold a pen in my right hand, forever.

This is my first recollection of fear, and I wanted to cry. I wanted to go home. I wanted my mum.

Saying nothing, I forced the emotion deep inside.

I have spent a lifetime wondering, apart from fear, was this also the first moment of learning to hide how I really felt.

Today, I ponder: can DEI ever truly work if we’re all hiding how we really feel?

Many often talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace.

Who is represented, who gets opportunities, who feels welcome.

However, the part we rarely acknowledge is the most human one.

We all experience emotions differently, and many of us have been taught to suppress our feelings.

When people suppress their emotions, they suppress their identity.

They shrink their personality to fit the norm. They nod along instead of speaking up, and stay quiet instead of challenging bias.

When that happens, DEI, I suggest, will have difficulty delivering what it promises because organisations might find it difficult to include someone who isn’t able to show up as themselves.

I humbly suggest that emotion is the piece avoided for too long, yet it’s the foundation on which everything else sits.

Without emotional honesty, equity becomes challenging, inclusion becomes performance, and diversity is not given what it rightly deserves - prominence.

If we allow room for real emotion, expressed respectfully, professionally and authentically, something changes.

People might just feel safer, teams could become more connected, and voices that once stayed quiet may finally speak up.

DEI stops being a programme; it starts becoming a culture.

Let's talk!

29/01/2026

The moment I realised the reason I was in the police 🚓👮

27/01/2026

Powering through, toughening up, putting on your professional mask, and pretending that you are fine.

How often do you spend time trying not to feel things?

The reality is that feeling and expressing emotion is one of our greatest strengths, and bottling emotions up inside is bad for us.

Every time we swallow a feeling, our body stores it somewhere - the chest, the gut, the shoulders.

Unfelt emotions accumulate. That’s where burnout, anxiety, and the 'I don’t feel like myself anymore' feelings can sneak in.

Letting emotions move is how our nervous system resets itself. It’s not weak.

Feeling our emotions actually makes us more creative, not less so.

Think about the last time your creative juices flowed. Were you freely able to be yourself, or were you holding an emotion back?

Creativity does not come from a blank mind; it comes from being connected to ourself, our experiences, our curiosity, and even our frustrations.

When we allow emotions to flow, ideas spark, and solutions appear.

If we want to innovate, we’ve got to feel.

So how do we start to express ourselves at work without oversharing?

It's easier than you might think. A simple, 'That was a tough meeting' or 'I was afraid of where that might lead us' can change the whole dynamic.

Here are a few examples:
✔️ Name what you feel (briefly) - “I’m feeling a bit stretched today", or “I’m excited about this.”
✔️ Pair the emotion with purpose - "I’m frustrated because I want us to get this right.”
✔️ Use inclusive language - "Did you feel, Did you notice, or Are you experiencing..."

Start small; these small moments of authenticity build trust over time.

We weren’t designed to be emotionless creatures; we were designed to be deeply feeling and deeply connected to each other.

When we allow ourselves to truly feel, we find clarity, creativity, connection, confidence, and maybe ironically, strength.

Not the brittle kind that cracks, the resilient kind that bends, adapts, and grows. Adaptable.

Be human again, it’s what we’re built for.

Let's talk!

27/01/2026

Mt Maunganui.

A place of beauty, meaning, and connection for so many.

Today, the maunga carries a scar, a visible reminder of the fragility of our whenua.

That scar also speaks to something deeper.

The fragility of life.

Most of us feel the pain and loss of the families involved.

We grieve with them. We hold space for them.

The response teams have worked, and continue to work, tirelessly - with care, professionalism and heart - to return those lost to their loved ones.

This afternoon, I spent time running workshops with leaders from Tauranga City Council.

They are hurting too. Hurting for the lives lost. Hurting for the families.

Hurting as they see the strain and exhaustion in their people.

And yes, hurting from the extreme rhetoric being directed at Council.

The reality is this: people who work in councils care deeply.

They have big hearts.

They show up every day to serve their communities.

When a small sector of the community redirects their pain and anger toward Council, it is unwanted, unnecessary, and it causes harm.

Before posting, please pause.

You might be hurting too.

And while it helps explain behaviour, we must remember, hurt people may hurt people. But that doesn’t make it right.

Let compassion lead.

The photo is a view of the mountain from the council meal room, a daily reminder of the pain felt by many.

25/01/2026

Why is it that we suppress our emotions, a question I often ponder when I reflect on my depression.

Was it what happened to me, or was it because I held back on expressing my emotions?

Research shows that when we try to push emotions down, two things happen:

🧠 The emotion intensifies - our brain treats suppressed emotions like unresolved danger.
🧠 It drains mental energy - it is the brain contributing to burnout and depressive symptoms

So why does it seem natural to want to suppress our emotions despite strongly feeling them?

Many people I speak with talk about Stoicism as meaning one thing: don’t feel. The original Stoics, Marcus Aurelius being my favourite, did not actually teach emotional suppression.

Rather, they taught emotional literacy. They believed emotions were natural, human and meaningful for us.

Their goal was never to hide them, it was to understand them to act with clarity.

Over time, Stoicism was reshaped by cultures that valued outward toughness over inner awareness.

In the Victorian era, it became fused with the stiff upper lip, a cultural rule that said 'true strength is silence.'

In military culture, it was repurposed to justify emotional restraint. The phrase 'Keep calm and carry on' originated in 1939 during World War II.

And in the modern self‑help world, it was reduced to a slogan - don’t let anything get to you.

Psychology Today notes that people often confuse true Stoicism with lower‑case stoicism, meaning emotional repression. This misunderstanding is explicitly referred to as 'one of the most common myths.'

Then, let's bring in conformity!

I never conformed to accepted behaviour in the classroom because of my learning difficulty. I was unable to express that I didn't understand what was being taught.

Conversely, I conformed to the norms of societal expectations when it came to showing emotions.

Don't cry, a teacher scorned at me when I thought I had to hold a pen in my right hand for the remainder of my life!

Humans survive by belonging, and belonging requires us to 'fit in'. Fitting in often means keeping parts of ourselves hidden.

We learn emotional rules long before we understand them - don't stand out, don't be different, hide your feelings, to be safe.

Our brain is pre-wired to look for anything that is different, unusual, or out of the ordinary. For that is where it sees danger. Different = danger!

So, we became wired to blend in so as not to stand out for being something out of the ordinary.

When emotion is viewed as a threat and suppressed, people don’t become stronger.

They become disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the very relationships and workplaces that depend on openness, trust and psychological safety.

Stoicism didn’t teach us to suppress emotion; conformity did.

It is not stoicism that is the problem with being who we truly are; it is conformity.

Now is the right time in history for us to be different - to feel emotion, to express emotion, to be who we were meant to be.

Let's talk!

25/01/2026

Excited and a little nervous to be accepted as a speaker for TEDx Wynyard.

Speaker bio and details for Lance Burdett

22/01/2026

Keep moving forward🚶

21/01/2026

Have you ever felt the need to cry and suppressed it? It hurts, doesn't it?

These days, I unashamedly well-up in public when I am moved to do so, to dissolve the pain and feel the moment.

I once thought it was a sign of weakness because that's what I was taught.

For most of human history, most people didn’t hide their emotions; they shared them. This included men!

One of the great myths of our modern world is that emotional expression is new and somehow 'woke'.

Looking back to the earliest records of human storytelling, something fascinating appears: many people cried openly, publicly, and without shame.

And not just ordinary people, the greatest leaders and heroes of the age openly wept.

In the ancient world, emotion wasn’t a liability. It was part of being fully human.

Legendary warriors shed tears freely. Achilles mourns Patroclus; Odysseus sobs for home and fallen friends.

These moments aren’t portrayed as weakness, but as the right response to love and loss.

Scholars of Greek literature confirm that this emotional openness was woven into the culture. Greek texts, from epic to drama, are filled with pity, grief, tenderness, and vulnerability.

Biblical leaders cried, too. King David and his soldiers wept until they had no strength left to weep. These were battle-hardened men in a warrior society, yet still, they broke down together in shared grief.

The ancient Egyptians wrote love poems filled with longing. New Kingdom Egyptian poetry reveals men and women expressing desire, heartbreak, and devotion with startling intimacy.

Communities grieved together. Across the Ancient Near East, whole cities participated in ritual laments. Structured, communal expressions of sorrow after catastrophe. Emotional expression wasn’t gendered, but collective, rather than gendered.

Even the stoic Vikings made room for tears. Although Norse culture valued toughness, medieval Icelandic literature still records men weeping. Especially so in moments of loyalty, loss, or the death of a beloved leader. Context mattered, but emotion had its place.

So, where did the idea come from that we shouldn’t show emotion?

Around 300 BCE, Stoic philosophy was misinterpreted as banning feelings altogether. Yet modern scholarship shows this was never the intention.

Stoicism aimed to guide emotion, not delete it. The stereotype of the emotionless human is a modern misunderstanding, not an ancient ideal.

Why does this matter today? When we pretend that emotional expression is unprofessional or unmanly, we are not being traditional.

Humans have always needed connection; most people felt deeply, and many leaders cried.

If anything, emotional honesty was once a sign of strength and integrity.

To be human is to feel, and acknowledging emotion is not a weakness. It is human.

Let's talk!

18/01/2026

Want to Live Longer? Do Hard Things.

Most of us think that living longer is about eating well, exercising regularly, and having good genes.

Those matter, but there’s something else we can do.

We recently published a post on the importance of getting out of bed when we don’t really want to. It’s those things we don’t want to do that are counterintuitively good for us.

I recently listened to Dr. Andrew Huberman from Stanford University, and what he shared made sense.

Doing hard things, especially things you don’t enjoy but that are good for you, rewires our brains for resilience and longevity.

How does that work? Here’s the neuroscience:
🧠 Deep inside our brain is the anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) – the “mental gym” for motivation and persistence.
🧠 Every time you push through something difficult, you strengthen this region.
🧠 Why does that matter? Because the aMCC is critical for maintaining cognitive function as we age.
🧠 The data also suggests this practice may even help us live longer.

Huberman’s advice: do one hard thing every day that benefits you, even if you don’t want to do it.

It could be a workout, making that tough phone call, or tackling a challenging project.

Each time you do, you’re not just building discipline; you are building a stronger, younger brain.

Here’s something else I found fascinating: neurosurgeons have physically stimulated the aMCC during brain surgery to better understand motivation.

When they apply a tiny electrical current, patients often feel a sudden surge of determination, an urge to act.

This shows the aMCC isn’t just theory, it acts as a ‘switch’ for drive and resilience.

In clinical settings, stimulating this area helps treat things like chronic pain and addiction.

So, when you choose to do something hard, you’re giving your brain the same kind of workout neurosurgeons use to boost motivation.

Think about that: every hard thing you do today is an investment in your future self.

What is one hard thing you’ll do today?

Let’s talk!

15/01/2026

You are not your thoughts 🧠

14/01/2026

As a child, fear was everywhere.

If you do something wrong, you’ll be punished, Santa won’t bring you a present, you’ll go to jail, or worst of all for me – you won’t go to heaven.

Back then, spirituality felt like a rulebook, a list of threats to keep us in line.

Prayer wasn’t comforting; it was compliance.

However, as I grew older and began to understand what spirituality truly meant, everything changed.

I discovered that spirituality has nothing to do with fear. It’s about connection, meaning, and peace.

Spirituality comes in many forms – prayer, nature, music, acts of kindness, even quiet moments where we simply breathe and feel alive.

Why is spirituality so important for us? Neuroscience gives us answers.

When we engage in spiritual practices – whether prayer, meditation, or a walk in nature – the default mode network in our brain slows down. The part that obsesses over me, my problems, my past.

In its place, regions linked to emotional regulation and empathy activate.

Spirituality calms the storm inside us and opens the door to compassion. It grounds us and reminds us that life isn’t just about survival.

Spirituality and empathy are inseparable. When we feel connected to something greater, we naturally care more for others.

What does spirituality mean to you?

Let’s talk!