For years I included communication activities in leadership development programs. We talked about the difference between hearing someone and actually listening to them. And how easy it is to spend the time someone else is talking preparing what we’re going to say next.
I tried to imagine it. Not metaphorically. I mean I actually tried—the jarrah tree, the pub next door with cars left from the night before, the sound of a bin being wheeled out somewhere—and overlaid onto it the footage I’ve been watching.
The first time I sat through a Welcome to Country, I cried. I’d just landed a role with a regional health organisation deep in the Western Australian wheatbelt. As part of my induction there was a truth-telling. An elder sharing the story of the country I was about to work in and walk on. Nobody had ever told me this story before. Not at school. Not anywhere.
Words do not live in dictionaries.
They live in societies—shaped by history and experience. In Australia today, certain phrases have become deeply contested.
For some, they express solidarity with people enduring immense suffering—an appeal to conscience. For others, they carry echoes of threat, conflict, and harm.
Here’s my contribution to the zeitgeist—what if the most radical form of self-optimisation was also the simplest? The internet has given us a new word—or rather, a new suffix. Maxxing. It started in the darker corners of the manosphere. But that’s the thing about language. It changes.