FRESH Official Podcast

If someone wrote you a letter from prison with some advice for how you should live, would you accept that advice? I guess that depends, but you’d be sceptical, right?

Most prisoners feel hard done by as they profess their innocence. Add to that the physical danger from other inmates, the bleak outlook as the months and years roll by, and all that must truly mess wit...

Have you ever done something so bad, so wrong, so hurtful to someone you love, that you can’t imagine ever coming back from that? You can’t imagine that this relationship would ever survive? And then … then that person forgives you.

When someone forgives you for something that you know is and should be unforgiveable, that feeling of release, of restoration, of freed...

Sometimes we’re faced with an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, you know what’s right and deep down you want to do the right thing. But the short-term rewards of doing the wrong thing are so great that you’re torn. Which way do you jump?

Back in the 1980’s, two former military colleagues and I formed an IT consulting firm. Graham was the Lieutenant Colonel, Mark the...

Have you ever noticed how, when life’s toddling along well, you seem to have plenty of people around you. But when all of a sudden things take a turn for the worse, how so many of them just disappear?

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, when the pressure’s on, it’s only natural for people to want to retreat into comfort and safety. Very few are prepared to...

When you’re trying to live your life well … with goodness, with integrity … and yet everyone around you is behaving badly, you begin to wonder, “Is it worth it?” Well, is it?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian best known for his staunch resistance to Hitler’s dictatorship and the abject evil – the genocide – that it was perpetrating. Whilst large...

The world’s powerbrokers – national leaders, billionaires, celebrities, social media ‘influencers’ – all have a couple of things in common. For the moment, they carry a lot of sway but one day they’ll be gone.

Have you ever thought about what shapes the way you think? What are the things that create the lens through which you perceive and react both to the social is...

The self-help sections of newspapers, or newsfeeds if you’ve gone digital, are bulging these days with worldly wisdom that ranges from the seductive through to the bizarre through to the positively dangerous.

Whether it’s mysticism and mindfulness, or the plethora of contradictory and mutually exclusive dietary advice, or how one woman’s side hustle as a prostitute ...

If you look around the world, there are more than a few despots ruling over nations, dictating how people should live and what they should believe. It’s not nice.

But that despotism can be much closer to home than you might imagine. Even if, like me, you happen to live in relative freedom, you’re more and more being told what you should be thinking and believing … a...

Do you know how sometimes you meet someone and they seem to have their act completely together – the perfect job, plenty of money and a family that you can only dream of?

I was chatting with a man recently whom I’ve known, I’m guessing, for around twenty years. Rather a long time. He’s a senior judge in what’s called the “family court”. He hears cases largely about ...

There can scarcely be anything more frightening than an earthquake. With the ground shaking beneath your feet, you’re just waiting for the building to collapse around you and crush you beneath its rubble.

According to livescience.com, the strongest earthquake ever recorded occurred on May 22^nd, 1960 in Valdivia, Chile. It registered a magnitude of 9.5 on ...

Whatever language you happen to speak at home, new words and phrases are being added to your dictionary much more frequently than you might expect. But that’s by no means a new thing.

According to a recent press article, William Shakespeare is credited with inventing more than 1,700 words, including “bedroom,” “courtship,” and “swagger.” Charles Dickens is said to h...

We’ve all had that experience when someone not only does something for you (as though that weren’t enough) but does it with a good intention, with a pure heart. Isn’t that just the most amazing feeling?

And no doubt you’ve had the complete opposite too, when someone does something for you, but begrudgingly. You may hear it in their words, or sense it in their attitu...

The world seems, by and large, to be fixated on wealth, wouldn’t you agree? Money, money, money. How can I make more of it? How can I have even just a bit more to afford some of the luxuries I’d love to have.

The press seems regularly to want to report on who the richest person in the world is. Is it Elon Musk of Tesla, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Ellison of Oracle,...

Have you been asked for advice and, as you were sharing your thoughts, wondered why this person came to you in the first place? They don’t seem to want to know. They’re not even listening.

One of my sons, now in his forties, came to me recently for some advice on a difficult issue that he was dealing with. First up, as a dad I felt incredibly privileged that he’d ev...