What is your relationship to support?

Take a moment and notice your body. How are you positioned as you read this? Are you sitting, standing, curled up on the sofa? Are you allowing the chair or floor beneath you to fully support your weight—or are you bracing yourself without knowing it?

Now, bring your attention to your breath. Is it flowing freely? Is your body being nourished by it? When did you last eat or drink? Was it something that genuinely sustained you?

These are small but essential forms of support—often invisible, often overlooked. Yet without them, nothing else can happen.

Psychotherapist Dave Mann once defined support as “that which enables.” It’s such a simple phrase, yet it unlocks a vast perspective. Breath enables life. Food enables energy. Rest enables clarity. Support isn’t just about help in times of crisis—it’s the quiet, consistent foundation that allows anything to emerge, grow, or change.

Think of the person who walks your dog so you can work late, or the mentor who helped you see yourself differently. Think of the healthy soil and clean water that support entire ecosystems. Or the tiny micrograms of hormones that balance your mood and sleep. Support ranges from the cosmic to the microscopic, from the deeply personal to the profoundly collective.

Some forms of support are trivial luxuries—like the scented hand cream I carry on flights, offering me a moment of calm. Others are life-defining: my grandmother singing to my mother in an air raid shelter, offering love and safety amid chaos. Some are chosen, others given. Some are constant, others fleeting—but all of them enable something.

One thing is certain: if something is happening, it’s because it has been enabled. And if something isn’t happening—despite your will or effort—it may be because there’s not enough support.

I once stayed in a job I disliked for three years. I was stuck—deeply wanting to leave but unable to make the leap. A mentor gently offered, “Maybe you just don’t have enough support to resign—yet.” That idea cracked something open in me. Change is about conditions.

In my work with leaders, I see this all the time. Many operate within cultures—particularly in Northern Europe or the U.S.—that prize self-sufficiency and talent. Success is often framed as a personal trait rather than a supported outcome. But some leaders are waking up to a different truth. They’re learning to actively cultivate support—seeking it, welcoming it, and giving it to themselves.

So, I invite you to reflect:

• Who supports you, and how?
• In what ways does your environment—your food, your friends, your routines—enable your wellbeing?
• What societal structures do you benefit from, often without noticing?
• Do you tend to recognize support, or is it invisible to you?
• Are you more inclined to self-support, or do you allow support in from outside you?
• When you begin a project, do you consider what will enable it to succeed?

In my work, inspired by Gestalt theory, I’ve found it transformational to assume that change occurs when the ground is laid. Seeds don’t sprout because they try harder. A ballerina leaps higher when she knows her partner will catch her. A bold leader steps forward when she and her dog-walker and her access to free healthcare and her breath and her first primary school teacher and her hand cream and her colleagues and her Sunday swims (and the rest) make it possible.

What is your relationship to support?

Bibliography: Dave Mann, Gestalt Therapy, 2010. Routledge. Laura Perls, Living at the Boundary, 1992. Gestalt Journal Press. Erving and Miriam Polster, Gestalt Therapy Integrated, 1973. Random House.