Estimated read time: 6 min

Hey there,

Happy Sunday ☀️

Last Sunday I wrote to you from Tenerife, where it did not look like autumn at all. This week I flew to the UK, and the season definitely caught up with us. 🍂

We were here for a day that means a great deal to me. On Thursday I was speaking at the UK Service Dogs Conference and Awards. It is hosted by Service Dogs UK, a charity that trains assistance dogs for veterans and emergency service personnel living with post-traumatic stress. If it rings a bell for some of you, it’s because it is one of the charities Lee and I rowed the Atlantic for in late 2024. Nadya and I are dog lovers through and through, so this is a charity that sits very close to our hearts.

I could not have picked a better week for it if I had tried:

Today is World Animal Day. It has been held on the 4th of October since 1931, because that is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals. Saint Francis (c. 1181 to 1226) was an Italian friar and the founder of the Franciscan order. He was born the son of a wealthy cloth merchant, gave up his inheritance in his early twenties, and spent the rest of his life in voluntary poverty.

He is the patron saint of animals because he treated every living thing as a brother or sister within the same Creation. The stories that made the reputation: he is said to have preached a sermon to a flock of birds, who stayed and listened; he is credited with taming a wolf that had been terrorising the town of Gubbio, striking a bargain that the townspeople would feed it if it stopped attacking them; and his "Canticle of the Creatures" addresses the sun as Brother Sun, the moon as Sister Moon, and praises God through water, fire, wind and earth. In 1979 Pope John Paul II also named him the patron saint of ecology.

Now, this isn’t a matter of being religious or not - what St Francis saw 800 years ago is many of the things I have spent 35 years teaching in different words. There is no separate you, separate me, separate dog, separate tree.
There is one consciousness, and every living thing in this world is a different expression of it, wearing a different body for a while.

Which is why I have always thought that what dogs truly are, is the purest expression of unconditional love there is. 🐕 ❤️ so it als makes sense that, at the Service Dogs Conference, the awards go to the dogs themselves, for acts that can only be described as heroic.

Actions Express Priorities 🧭

Last week I asked you a question: what do you value most, and would your calendar from last week agree? Today I want to pick it up from the other end, because for many people the honest answer is: "no, the calendar does not agree". And I want to show you why that gap exists, and what to do about it, because it is not where most people think it is.

Most people believe their life is shaped by the big decisions: who to marry, where to live, which career, which city. And they stress about those decisions because they want enough information to get them right. Here is the truth. You never have enough information to make the big decisions with certainty. You never will. You make them anyway, and then you make the best of how life turns out.

What shapes your life is the small decisions. The ones nobody is watching. Do I get up at 6.30 or press snooze? Do I make the risky call or put it on tomorrow's list? Do I open the laptop after dinner or sit with the person across the table? None of those looks like a life-changing decision on its own. But the small decisions, repeated, determine the trajectory of your life far more than the big ones ever will.

Think of a plane leaving London for New York ✈️ If it drifts off course by 1 per cent and nobody corrects it, it does not land in New York. It doesn’t even land in the United States. It ends up somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, full of passengers in winter coats complaining to the cabin crew about the heat. Which, if you think about it, is how most people spend their adult lives.

The big decision sets the destination 🗺️

The micro decisions, hour by hour, decide whether you ever arrive 🧭

And this is where your values come in. If you want to know what somebody values, do not ask them. Look at what they do. Actions express priorities. If you say you value your health and you have not moved your body in a fortnight, your calendar is telling you what your real priority has been. Not to make you feel bad about it. To show you where the correction is.

It links straight back to what I shared last week about your cells. Hold a new decision for three or four weeks and the wardrobe changes, and the thing that felt like effort starts to feel like you. But those three or four weeks are made of micro decisions, one at a time, most of them made when the mood you set the goal in has long gone. My mentor George Zalucki put it better than I ever have: true emotional mastery is doing the thing you said you would do long after the mood you set it in has left you.

So here is the work for this week, there. Take the one value you wrote down last week as your top value. Then pick one micro decision, something that takes less than ten minutes, that expresses it. Not a plan. Not a programme. One decision, made daily, for the next seven days:

Health. Ten minutes of walking before you look at your phone. The sugar you leave in the cupboard at 9pm. The glass of water before the coffee.

Wealth. Open the banking app once a day and look, rather than once a month and flinch. Cancel the one subscription you forgot about.

Relationships. Phone down for the first twenty minutes you are home. The text you have been meaning to send for a month. Asking the question and then actually listening to the answer.

None of them is dramatic. That is the point. The big decisions handle themselves, when you put your attention on the small ones.