DARE is the mental model for high performance and change.

You write your story through your DECISIONS, ACTIONS and RESULTS and a thorough EVALUATION of how you did.

A new Result requires new Decisions and Actions

Thought Of The Week

“Indifference is what kills. The illusion of distance and the hope that the crocodile will eat you last.”

Volodymyr Zelensky 

(So many people helped to make this trip possible and showed me great kindess. Apologies to those I have not mentioned, please do not think that any detail of your kindness was not noticed)

My grandmother would mimic the noise of the doodlebugs, Hitler’s deadly drones that fell on her town, her eyes wide, re-living her terror before me, trying to make me understand. I was six years old and it worked. I’ve never forgotten.

Years pass but the tactic of the coward remains the same. Scare, disrupt, wear down the children, the mothers and the fathers as you seek to bolster your ego through violence.

I visited Ukraine, the cities of Lviv and Kyiv from 3 – 8 October. It was so profound that I cannot write about anything else this week and my newsletter will only share stories from this visit.

Taming Tigers is popular in Ukraine. Currently it is outselling the Hunger Games. My daughter almost thinks I am cool.

My Ukrainian royalties are shared between Unbroken and Gen.Ukrainian.

I went to Lviv and Kyiv to show friendship and to bring Ukrainians’ daily reality to a wider audience – to share their stories outside of Ukraine and with you. That was all.

On the night of 4^th October, Russia sent more than 50 Ballistic missiles and over 500 drones into Ukraine. In Lviv, we spent the night in a shelter, the floor vibrating. Four civilians in the city did not survive the night, the youngest murdered was 15.

Unbroken

Unbroken kindly invited me to visit them and spend time with the patients who are undergoing rehabilitation.

It is a hard visit. The tears cannot come whilst you are there. The patients deserve better. But come they will, later, behind your hotel door.

I was shown world class facilities for helping people to begin walking with prosthetics, make a bed and cook with one arm, manage their terror and trauma. The attention to every detail was inspiring. I was not taken to the building where those who have been tortured by Russians are cared for.

Roman was blunt: “I was never afraid of being killed. I was afraid of being a ‘missing person’. I saw friends die and we could not rescue their bodies. This means they are ‘missing’ and their families receive no money. I did not want my wife and my children to have no money’.

The terrors of fatherhood are universal; but few of us must consider them whilst being bombed in a forest trench.

Roman is not some fictional figure. He had a career and the ability to walk. The scars that map across his shaven skull evidence further brutalities that I did not ask about for fear of hurting him further.

The Lviv BookForum And The Night Of 4th October 2025

That Ukraine can host a magnificent Book Festival – Lviv BookForum – in the midst of a full-scale invasion and nightly air raids, tells you everything about the character of the nation. And the crowds were huge!

On the night of the 4^th, after a wonderful day celebrating literature, philosophy, language and humanity at the Lviv BookForum, the thugs sent their cultural contribution.

I wrote the following words in the shelter as a post for Instagram and I will share them with you here:

The Lviv Air Raids: 4-5 October 2025

There are children sleeping beside me on our row of hard chairs. Their heads on their mother’s laps.

The mothers are not asleep. The ground is vibrating hard and even in the basement the explosions are intimidatingly loud. They stare into the distance. In our narrow basement corridor, ‘the distance’ is less than a meter away.

The Russians are very brave, hurling explosives at mothers and children. They work at night, as thieves do.

Women who had no time to dress cover their night clothes with blankets distributed by the bright eyed, smiling night porter who is serving his guests a full cup of reassurance and cheer.

They started their brave bombing at 3.50. It is now 7.00.

They are targeting Lviv hard on a Saturday night whilst it hosts many extra visitors at its annual BookForum.

Books scare bullies.

It is very easy to be a guest here. Ukrainians are very hospitable and extremely kind.

Yuliya, my volunteer Lviv BookForum host, left Lviv at 5pm on Friday night, crossing into Poland at 9pm to meet me at Przemysl, on the station platform. She queued for 2 hours to exit Ukraine. She queued another 2 hours with me at the Polish border to re-enter. We got to our beds in Lviv at 3am on Saturday morning.

The last text I received from her was 5 mins ago. She has spent the night on her bathroom floor (safest room in her house) with her tiny daughter.

She’s been in constant touch with me since the sirens began to ensure that I am safe and to share updates from the insiders’ Telegram channels. ChatGPT translates the screenshots for me down here. I am deep in a basement and she is in a bathroom with her child, but she’s concerned for my safety?

The woman to my left in the shelter looks to be in her early thirties. We’ve all been sitting in silence for hours. Suddenly she gets up, calls the lift and leaves. She just leaves!

Perhaps she’s had enough of the airless basement. Perhaps she’s going to go outside and breath the air and scream at the missiles in the sky. Perhaps she is just going back to her bed for warmth and sleep and to hell with the risk?

She returns after five minutes with a coffee, and one for me too. Her kindness embarrasses me. I am cross with myself for not even thinking that I could have gone to get her a coffee. And so I receive yet more Ukrainian kindness and I make another Ukrainian friend. Tetyana.

But it’s easy to be a guest. It is less easy to be a citizen.

It is not my city being bombed above our heads by another rogue nation of expansionist, colonialist thugs. Although at least these thugs are not permitted to play football with civilised people.

It is not my husband at the front line or in the rehab centre learning how to walk on two prosthetic legs or prepare dinner with one arm.

It is not my child asleep in a corridor with their head on my lap. My child is sleeping safely in the UK.

She is safe, for as long as Ukrainians defend Europe’s borders.

Kyiv

Ukrainian Railways have earned their global reputation for resilience the hard way. As the 12.48 to Kyiv leaves Lviv station, at 12.48 precisely, you understand why. Aged Soviet rolling stock runs on lines that are being bombed: on time and with smiling service from the guards.

We disembark into a station that could serve as a ballroom. Kyiv-Pasazhyrskyi is an art deco wonder with painted ceiling panels and a huge 2025 artwork by Lesia Khomenko dominating the wall above the exit. 

I have a day of media appointments arranged through my Ukrainian publisher Bookchef and their quite wonderful press officer, the journalist Irina Milichenko.

The book signing that evening is at Knyharnya Ye. I have a 40-minute session with the audience being interviewed by Channel 24 News Anchor, Nataly Lutsenko.

Nataly is a wonderful interviewer. Then came the questions from the audience, which are just beautiful. From people running businesses to people wanting to get fit, learn a new skill and write a book. The questions are as they always are all around the world.

People want to grow and develop, test themselves and have adventures, care for their businesses, teams and families.

And Ukrainians are no different!

So I will always remember, when my Tiger is roaring at me to pull back on my dreams, it is not roaring on 3 hours’ sleep and the risk of an air raid in my place of work. It is not roaring with no electricity – again – or with the water turned off.

Thank you to all the people of Ukraine for your kindness and your courage and for holding the borders of Europe safe. Thank you.

As Olha Mukha, Lviv Book Forum organiser, my interviewer onstage and now my friend said:

“In Ukraine, the comfort zone has left the chat.’

 Write YOUR story 🖋️

 Jim.