Dan Storey

How many masks do you wear? I don’t mean physically, but more of a metaphor. Maybe you wear a particular mask to work and when you get home, you change it to be someone else. What mask do you wear in your relationship, with your family and friends, with your boss? We wear masks to hide what lies beneath, pretending to be something different to who we really are. We do this because we believe the people we encounter want to see something different than what we can offer, and so hiding behind a mask, we can play that part without risking the rejection of our own personal self. When I was younger, it seemed as though I had a different mask [...]

Aristotle once said “You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor”. We all know that we need courage to step up and make the most out of our lives, but what is courage? The dictionary defines courage as ‘the ability to do something that frightens one’, but surely there is more than one dimension of courage? Is the courage it takes to ride a roller coaster the same as it is to ask someone to dance? If you can jump out of an aircraft, can you also swim with sharks or speak in public? If you look at the different actions in life that require an element of bravery [...]

There are certain things I like about being a perfectionist. I like the way all of the writing in my diary is the same colour. I like the way everything on my desk is arranged at right angles. I like how my coffee is made because I make it exactly the same way each time. I used to think being a perfectionist was something to be admired, how I only did great work and how everything I touched turned to gold… or something like that. And yes, that was pretty accurate, most of my work was pretty good, and so I thought I was doing ok. However, the problem was I didn’t do very much work, and most of what I did [...]