What the mind forgets the body Remembers. It was a cold morning, the kind that sharpens the air and slows everything down just enough to make you pay attention. The ice caught the pale winter light, and Hampton Court Palace stood in the background – solid, unhurried, unconcerned with who had skated here before or who was about to try again.
I hadn’t ice skated since I was 24. Stepping onto the rink, there was no urge to prove anything. Just curiosity. A question posed to the body rather than the mind: What do you remember?
The first movements were careful. Arms extended, balance negotiated in small increments. It felt less like returning to a skill and more like recalibrating – as if my body were quietly running old equations and adjusting them for the present moment. Then, almost imperceptibly, something clicked.
My feet remembered.
Not with the confidence of youth, but with the assurance of experience. Muscle memory took over where hesitation might have stalled me, recalculating balance and rhythm in real time. Each glide was a correction, not a performance. A reminder that what we once learned doesn’t disappear – it adapts.
That’s what recalibration looks like in practice – the same sequence I use with clients: Reveal → Rebalance → Realign → Release inside the Recalibration Framework™.
Around me, the rink moved in gentle disorder. Children discovering momentum. Adults laughing at near-misses. Everyone negotiating gravity in their own way. Bare trees traced the sky, and the palace remained, a steady counterpoint to the temporary ice beneath our blades.
Later, still at Hampton Court Palace, the festive fayre offered a different kind of balance. In the bandstand, three singers stood poised beneath winter light, their harmonies carrying across the grounds. People paused. Some smiled without realising it. Others stopped altogether.
It was a reminder that recalibration doesn’t always come through effort. Sometimes it arrives through sound, through rhythm, through being momentarily held by something light and shared. Where the ice had asked for focus and trust, the music asked only for attention.
Lunch came later, and with it another quiet contrast. A bowl of Korean fiery chilli chicken, crisp and glossy with heat, eaten in the winter air. Steam rising, fingers warming, senses fully awake. Delicious. Immediate. Very much of now.
Not quite the food of Henry VIII.
Inside the palace, Tudor Christmas cookery told a different story – beef roasting in vast kitchens, court favourites prepared over open fires, tradition sustained through repetition and ritual. Festive music echoed through the Great Hall and the King’s Guard Chamber, guided by lively Masters of Ceremonies who stitched history and celebration together with ease.
The Christmas Talks, led by Palace Hosts, made the duality explicit. Stories of festive foods, decorations, Charles Dickens, and royal residents unfolded as something more than history lessons. They were invitations to hold two things at once. The past was not sealed behind glass, and the present was not diminished by reverence. Both coexisted, richly, comfortable, in the same moment.
This ability to hold past and present together, without forcing one to cancel out the other, is what I call Duality Intelligence™ – a core concept inside my Leadership Recalibration Practice™, where leaders learn to navigate complexity by holding multiple truths without collapse.
The joy of youth didn’t need to be reclaimed. It simply needed space to meet the wisdom of maturity. And in that meeting, on ice, in harmony, over lunch, recalibration was possible.
Not just at Hampton Court Palace.
But as an essential part of self.
Duality Intelligence™ sits within my broader Architecture of Influence™, which connects directly to my Four Pillars of Maverick Leadership™ – Strategic Influence, Liberated Leadership, Culture by Design, and Executional Leadership.
