I am delighted to hear that the publishers have, this year, translated Coherence into Arabic, helping us to reach a wider audience.
When my wife and I set up the company, Complete Coherence, in 2004 we had a vision, to see “enlightened leaders in all walks of life”. We work predominantly with large multinational corporations, but we also work with professional athletes and in schools. We are driven by our purpose to “reduce human suffering and accelerate development”.
The journey of the 12 books I’ve written, so far, has become quietly symbolic.
My books now exist in English, Chinese, Korean and Arabic. Different cultures. Different histories. Different political realities. Different religions. Different social pressures. Yet beneath all these differences lies something that unites all of humanity - and that is we all have a heart.
When we’re struggling our heart creates chaotic signals that inhibit the quality of our thinking, and we make poorer decisions.
But when we’re at our best, our heart creates coherence.
Coherence helps unlock our potential. Greater creativity. More insightfulness. And more compassion.
And that is why coherence still matters.
Not because it is fashionable. Not because it is a useful performance technique. But because the deeper I have dug into the issue of leadership, human behaviour and societal dysfunction, the clearer it has become that incoherence sits underneath much of the suffering we create individually and collectively.
At a time when the world feels increasingly fragmented, reactive and polarised, the idea of coherence is no longer simply interesting. It has become essential.
Particularly now that this work will reach Arabic-speaking readers, I find myself reflecting on something deeper than commercial success or intellectual reach.
I think about human beings living with chronic uncertainty, polarisation, intolerance, frustration, a fragmented siloed existence. Disconnected from compassion, kindness and a greater sense of unity. In such a world leaders are trying to navigate impossible levels of complexity. Families are carrying stress across generations. Entire societies struggling to hold competing truths without collapsing into division or violence.
The external circumstances differ. The underlying biology does not.
Human beings everywhere experience fear, overwhelm, anxiety, anger, confusion and emotional contagion in remarkably similar ways. We all suffer when our physiology becomes dysregulated. We all make poorer decisions when negative emotions overwhelm cognition. And we all lose access to wisdom when survival states dominate our nervous system.
This was the central insight behind my book Coherence from the beginning.
Most people think clearly when conditions are easy. Very few think clearly under pressure.
Yet leadership is pressure.
Parenting is pressure.
Running a country is pressure.
Managing uncertainty is pressure.
And the real question has never been whether we can avoid pressure. The question is can remain coherent even when we are under pressure.
Because coherence is not calmness.
Coherence is not passive, detached or emotionally flat. It’s not the absence of intensity. It is a natural state of flow, focused, dynamic stable energy.
A coherent person can experience fear without becoming fear. They can experience anger without being consumed by anger. They can experience complexity without collapsing into confusion.
A coherent person’s physiology, emotions, cognition and behaviour remain aligned even when conditions become turbulent.
That alignment changes everything.
Incoherent leaders create incoherent organisations.
Incoherent organisations create incoherent societies.
And incoherent societies eventually exhaust themselves through conflict, fragmentation and short-term thinking.
We can see this pattern everywhere now. Leaders react instead of respond. Institutions optimise efficiency whilst destroying human energy. Technology accelerates communication whilst degrading understanding. Social media amplifies emotional volatility faster than wisdom can regulate it.
We have become extraordinarily connected digitally whilst becoming increasingly disconnected physiologically and emotionally.
This matters far more than most people realise.
Because the quality of our physiology directly affects the quality of our thinking.
When our nervous system becomes dysregulated, perception narrows. We lose nuance. Complexity becomes threatening. Ambiguity becomes intolerable. People retreat into certainty, ideology and simplistic narratives because incoherent brains crave psychological safety.
This is not just psychological. It is biological.
Under chronic stress, human beings literally become less intelligent.
Their time horizons shrink.
Their empathy diminishes.
Their creativity reduces.
Their strategic capacity deteriorates.
And eventually even highly experienced executives revert to reactive behaviours that undermine both performance and relationships.
This is why coherence remains so relevant in leadership today.
Most leadership development still focuses almost entirely on knowledge acquisition and behavioural skills. But knowledge is not transformation. And behaviour without coherence is fragile. Under pressure, people do not rise to the level of their training. They fall to the level of their regulation.
That sentence alone explains why so many intelligent leaders fail precisely when complexity intensifies.
The future will not demand leaders who simply know more. AI already knows more than any individual human being ever will. The future will require leaders who can remain integrated whilst processing unprecedented complexity.
That is a coherence challenge.
The leaders who flourish over the next decade will not necessarily be the most charismatic or technically brilliant. They will be those capable of holding multiple perspectives simultaneously without collapsing into binary thinking. They will be able to regulate emotion without suppressing their humanity. They will sustain clarity under pressure whilst others become reactive and fragmented.
In other words, they will be coherent.
And coherence is developmental.
Coherence is not a fixed trait. It can be cultivated. The nervous system can be trained. Emotional regulation can deepen. Awareness can expand. Human beings can mature vertically, increasing their capacity to integrate complexity rather than defend against it.
I have spent decades measuring leaders’ physiology, emotions, values, belief and behaviours. The evidence is overwhelming. As people develop greater coherence, they become more resilient, more emotionally intelligent, more cognitively sophisticated and more capable of systemic thinking.
But something else happens too.
They suffer less.
Not because life becomes easier. But because they stop generating unnecessary suffering internally.
That distinction matters enormously.
Most human suffering doesn’t emerge from external events. It emerges from our interpretation of those events. That interpretation triggers anger, fear and anxiety. Dysregulated emotion leads to chaotic, incoherent physiology, and an inhibited brain, further increasing our misinterpretation.
Handling the complexity and uncertainty causes one leader to make poor choices and another to see more clearly.
The difference is coherence.
This is why the Arabic translation feels meaningful to me personally.
Books travel where people cannot. Ideas cross borders more easily than institutions. And coherence itself transcends politics, nationality and ideology because it speaks to something fundamentally human.
A regulated nervous system in London functions through the same biological principles as one in Riyadh, Dubai, Cairo or Beirut.
The human heart does not care what language we speak.
And perhaps that is the deeper hope underneath this work.
That coherence might help us rediscover forms of intelligence that modern life systematically disrupts. Not merely cognitive intelligence, but emotional intelligence, physiological intelligence, relational intelligence and ultimately collective intelligence.
Because no organisation can become coherent if its leaders are incoherent.
No society can become coherent if its people remain chronically dysregulated.
And no future worth building will emerge from exhausted nervous systems operating permanently in survival mode.
We cannot solve twenty-first century complexity with fragmented consciousness.
Which brings me back to why this book still matters years later.
When Coherence was first published, many people viewed coherence as an interesting wellbeing concept. Today it has become clear that it is a foundational leadership capability.
The ability to remain coherent under pressure now determines decision quality, relationship quality, strategic quality and increasingly societal quality.
The stakes are higher now.
The pace is faster.
The noise is louder.
The complexity is deeper.
And therefore, our inner development matters more than ever.
My hope is that this Arabic translation allows these ideas to reach readers who may never previously have encountered this work. Not because I believe the book contains all the answers, but because I believe coherence creates the conditions in which wiser answers become possible.
And perhaps that is enough.
If we can help human beings think more clearly, feel more deeply without becoming overwhelmed, lead more coherently and suffer less, then the work remains worthwhile.
In any language.