The idea and the name Just One Step came to me on a sandstone tower in Czech Republic. These cliffs have a long tradition of bold, hard to protect climbing. Just the rock and whoever you are that day. I was somewhere on the route, frozen. Not physically. The kind of frozen where you can't imagine the next metre, let alone the top. The whole route was suddenly impossible.
So I stopped looking at the route. I asked myself a much smaller question: can I do just the next step? Just one. I looked for it, found it, and took it. Then I asked again. And again. Step by step, without ever thinking about the top, I finished the route.
Years later I was guiding a ski touring day and suggested a small summit on our traverse. From a distance, the client said yes easily. As we got closer, he saw it properly and froze. Completely. So I asked him: can you do just one step, right here where you are? He said yes. I told him that when the very next step becomes impossible, we stop and reassess. We didn't stop. We did the summit.
One step is genuinely all that is ever needed.
My relationship with the mind started earlier, and less deliberately. At fourteen I joined a karate club. Part of our training was sitting meditation at the beginning and the end of every session. Something about the attention it required stayed with me. At eighteen, curious, I visited a Tibetan Buddhist hermitage in France for what I thought would be one month. Every day continued to make sense. I stayed nine years, including a traditional three-year retreat.
Then I left. Leaving the hermitage was not the hardest part. The hardest part was what I found when I did.
Nine years in a protected, manicured environment had given me an illusion. I believed I integrated the methods and was stable in face of emotions, the speed of ordinary life, the world as it actually is. What I discovered, almost immediately, was that I did not. My mind was as wild and unruly as it had ever been. The desires, the judgements, the opinions, the reactions — they were all there, unchanged, simply waiting for conditions that would call them forward. The inner landscape I found was not the one I'd imagined I was building.
That was the moment something shifted. Not a pleasant shift — more like the ground dropping slightly beneath your feet. If nine years of training hadn't built the stability I thought they had, then what would? I began to understand that stability is not acquired. It is practiced day in day out. Slowly, with the right intention and attention.
Eudaemonia, as the Greeks called it, happiness that doesn't depend on conditions — is trainable. Not through positivity. Through practice. Honest observation. And you build something that holds regardless of what's happening outside.
That was when I actually began to use what I had learned.
What I observed over time is that change doesn't arrive with a big event. Not a summit, not a retreat, not a crisis — though all of those can be useful. Change is incremental. It is daily, quiet, often invisible work that slowly reshapes the mind. This understanding did something important: it gave me patience. With myself, and with others. It removed the demand that transformation be sudden, or dramatic, or complete.
Realising you have a blind spot doesn't remove it. Realisation is just the first step — real work starts afterwards.
Everything we experience, we experience through the mind. Not just thoughts and feelings — every perception, every judgment, every moment of fear or clarity or love arrives through the mind first. And yet most of us have almost no direct acquaintance with it. We have theories about it. Psychology, philosophy, opinions. But to actually experience a thought as a thought, to feel an emotion and know it as an emotion — not be swept by it, just know it — is something most people have never attempted.
We spend enormous care on where we live. We choose houses, furnish them, tend them. And yet we don't actually live in our houses. We live in our minds. Wherever we go — Chamonix, Kathmandu, London — we bring our minds with us. We can never leave them behind. They are the only home we actually inhabit.
— Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo
The mountains are useful here precisely because they are neutral and don't allow pretence. In a tent at 6,000 metres, waiting for a weather window that may not come, pinned by wind and exhaustion and uncertainty, you discover what your emotional toolkit is actually made of. Anger arrives before any decision about anger. Fear arrives before any strategy for fear. The gap between what you know you should do and what you actually do becomes very visible, very fast.
This is not a metaphor. It is the same gap that appears in a difficult meeting, a tense classroom, a conversation that matters. The environment is different. The mechanism is identical.
Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) programme, developed by Paul Ekman and B. Alan Wallace — a framework that
integrates emotion science with contemplative practice. The moment between impulse and action. Not to suppress
what arises, but to have enough space to choose.
Theory U, developed at MIT, works with a different but related problem: the assumptions we've accumulated over
years that drive our decisions without our awareness. The picture of reality we're leading from, teaching from,
relating from — which may have been built a long time ago and never updated.
I'm not offering a technique that makes things easier. I'm offering the practice that makes things workable. There's a difference. For those who want to understand why it works, not just that it does — this is the place.
Open Mind, Open Heart, Open Will - what can they offer to you, your team, your family?
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