Attunement: The Belt Path
The most useful skill you can train, taught the way martial arts are taught. For coaches, clinicians, leaders, and anyone at home who cares for others.
First, you learn to fall
When Allan started judo, his first teacher wouldn't let the beginners throw anyone. Week after week: slap the mat, tuck the chin, roll out, get up. The kindness in it only became clear later. When you finally do get thrown, you don't break.
This book takes the same approach to the skill underneath every effective coach, clinician, leader and parent: attunement: reading, matching and responding to another person's emotional and cognitive state, moment by moment.
The claim at the book's core is simple. Across almost every relationship that produces an outcome, whether a coaching session, a leadership team or a hard conversation at the kitchen table, the quality of the relationship is one of the most reliable predictors of how things turn out. And that relationship isn't fixed. It's built, moment by moment, out of attunement.
If that's true, and the book makes the evidence-based case that it is, then learning to attune isn't a nice extra. It's the most useful skill you can train.
A curriculum, not a lecture
Like a martial art, attunement is learned through graded practice. The book is organised as a belt path. Each belt is a stage of skill, and each has its own forms to drill.
White Belt: basic shapes and safety
The foundations: why attunement matters, the evidence behind it, and the basic stances: presence, safety, and learning to fall well.
Yellow Belt: going inward
Attunement starts with yourself: noticing your own state, settling your body, and managing what you bring into the room.
Green Belt: going deeper
Reading others with more precision: the signals under the words, and responding in ways that build trust rather than break it.
Brown Belt: enduring and building
Staying attuned when it's hard: conflict, rupture and repair, fatigue, and the long haul of real relationships.
Black Belt / Shodan: integration
Making it who you are, not what you do. Shodan means "first step". Mastery is the beginning of practice, not the end.
Register your interest
The book is in progress and due some time in 2026, with no firm date yet. Leave your email and you'll hear when there's news: early excerpts, the release date, and launch details. Nothing else, no spam.