Here’s a confession: I have been sharing thoughts, insights, and the occasional half-formed epiphany almost every single day for as long as I can remember.
Just not with you.
For years, my version of a blog has been a barrage of WhatsApp voice notes and dictations sent to an unsuspecting group of friends. Long ones. The kind where someone opens their phone during a quiet lunch and suddenly has seven minutes of me spiralling excitedly about some new insight, a business pivot, or a way of seeing something that arrived at two in the morning and absolutely could not wait until a reasonable hour. Bless them – they’re still in the group chat.
The truth is, I have never stopped writing. I have stopped publishing. And that gap, between having something to say and actually putting it somewhere the world can read it, is exactly what this site is here to close.
So Why Now?
Partly, it is the website itself. Moving from Guided Healing to a site that carries my full name – martinpavion.com – is not a cosmetic change. It is a statement. It is me deciding, quite deliberately, to stop hiding my voice behind a brand and start letting people hear the actual person.
That is a bigger deal than it probably sounds. For a long time, the safer option felt like keeping everything professional and polished and appropriately distant. But I have come to understand – through a lot of coaching, reflection, and honestly some fairly uncomfortable self-examination – that my most useful quality is not my qualifications or my frameworks. It is that I think and feel and observe things in a way that other people sometimes find helpful. And you cannot share that from behind a curtain.
So here I am, curtain firmly open. Try not to stare.
What Coaching Has to Do With It
The other catalyst is my International Coaching Federation coach training. I am mid-programme at the moment, and one of the gifts it has given me – aside from a slightly alarming tendency to ask powerful questions at dinner parties – is the experience of receiving coaching myself.
The structure of the training includes reciprocal peer sessions: you coach someone, and then you sit in the client chair and bring a real problem of your own. I was a little sceptical about this part at first, if I am honest. I have done a lot of personal development work. I have sat in a lot of rooms. I did not expect peer sessions with fellow trainees to knock me sideways.
I was wrong about that.
Practically every session I have brought something I thought I understood, and walked away seeing it completely differently. The insights that come out of those chairs – even from people who are early in their coaching journey – are the kind that warrant a long walk, a quiet sit, and frankly, a blog post. Possibly several.
Those sessions are a big part of why I have a near-infinite list of things I want to write about. The human mind, relationships, identity, the stories we tell ourselves that quietly run the whole show – these are not dry academic subjects to me. They are the things I think about on my morning run, at three in the afternoon when the energy dips, and apparently at two in the morning when I really should be asleep.
What You Will Actually Find Here
Let me be straightforward about what this space is and what it is not, because I think that context matters.
This is not where I will publish research. If I have something evidence-based or academically grounded to share, that belongs in the Articles section of this site – structured, sourced, and designed to stand up to scrutiny. That is a different kind of writing, and an important one, but it is not what you are signing up for here.
What you will get here are my reflections. My observations. My current best understanding of something, shared as honestly as I can manage. These are personal posts – which means they carry my perspective, my experience, and my inevitable blind spots. What I write here today might be something I revisit in six months with a completely different view, and I am perfectly fine with that. I am not here to be right. I am here to be honest.
The things I expect to write about include, in no particular order: personal growth (the messy, non-linear kind), the insights that keep surfacing in coaching, the experience of building a business while also trying to be a fully-functioning human being, what it is actually like to change the way you think rather than just what you think, and probably a few things I have not worked out yet but will by the time I get to the end of the post. That last category tends to produce the best writing.
One Thing I Am Not Going to Promise
Regular updates.
I know that is not what you are supposed to say on a blog. You are supposed to say something like “every Tuesday” or “monthly insights” or “join me on this journey.” But I have been here before – the enthusiastic commitment followed by the quiet fade – and I would rather be honest with you upfront than performatively consistent for three weeks.
What I will say is that there are already a dozen topics circling in my head, each one deserving its own post. This is very much a beginning. Consider this post the opening of a door rather than the main event – the main event is coming, it is just that I wanted to introduce myself properly first.
So: stay posted. More soon.
One More Thing
If you read something here that you disagree with – push back. Leave a comment, send me a message, tell me I am completely wrong. I mean that. I do not debate to win; I debate because the process of defending or updating a position is one of the best ways I know to actually understand something. I am proud to be the kind of person who can change their mind, and I have the WhatsApp voice notes to prove it.
So if you have something to say, I am listening.
Martin Pavion is a coach, entrepreneur, and former guided healing practitioner. He writes about personal growth, the mind, and the messy business of being human. To connect or continue any conversation this post started, visit the contact page.
