Morning friend ☕️

Last week, I promised a personal, reflective post. This doesn’t come out of nowhere. June 2026 has been the toughest month of my life.

I was forced to confront my mortality.

I know it sounds a bit heavy, but I've always tried to write this blog honestly. Sometimes that means talking about leadership. Sometimes it means talking about life.

This week is one of those weeks.

What happened?

What went through my mind?

What next?

Grab your coffee.

Let’s chat!

I was almost relieved when the moment of truth finally arrived. The fluorescent lights overhead passed by slowly as I was wheeled into the operating theatre. Warm smiles and introductions greeted me as I scooted over from the ward bed to the operating table.

The bright lights switched on.

This is it. Months of waiting, tests, and follow-ups after a heart murmur was detected were finally over. The anticipation had been worse than the thing itself.

Oddly, I wasn't afraid.

From here, things were out of my circle of control or influence. As the anaesthetic began to take effect and my eyes slowly closed, I took one last conscious breath and surrendered to whatever came next…

I woke up before I opened my eyes.

I smiled.

It felt good to be alive.

The TV above my bed was on a radio channel.

11:39am.

05 June 2026.

I made it.

For a few moments, nothing else mattered. Nothing in my career. Nothing on my to-do list. Nothing I'd been worrying about for months.

Just gratitude.

Gratitude for another chance.

There were people I wasn't ready to say goodbye to. Dreams I hadn't finished chasing. Stories I still wanted to tell.

Ordinary things I still wanted to experience.

Coffee at home.

Laughing with my wife.

Watching my son grow up.

Walking outside in the sun.

Feeling normal again.

You don’t wake up thinking about status or deadlines or the things that irritated you last week.

You wake up grateful for breath.

For people.

For time.

For another chance.

Looking back, it's remarkable how much has changed in just one year since moving to Cape Town.

A new city, a new role, a new team, surgery, and now, a new way of seeing things.

For most of my life, I have been the person solving problems. Building teams. Delivering projects. Creating plans. Always looking towards the next milestone.

Then suddenly...

none of that felt particularly important.

A health scare has a way of reorganising your priorities. Recovery gives you time to think. And I've been doing a lot of thinking lately.

Not just about health, but about work, leadership, family, time, the future, and what it means to be grateful and uncertain at the same time.

One thought kept returning.

Life is more fragile than we like to believe.

Not in a depressing way.

More like a reminder.

A clear one.

We spend so much of our lives assuming tomorrow will look a lot like today. That next year will resemble this year. That our careers will continue climbing. That our health will hold. That the people we love will always be there.

That there will always be more time.

Most of the time, we're lucky enough for those assumptions to be true.

Sometimes they aren't.

And when that certainty disappears, even briefly, it changes how you see everything.

The noise gets quieter.

The important things get louder.

Health. Family. Purpose. Time. The people you love.

The work still worth doing.

The world feels less predictable than it did a few years ago.

Technology is moving faster. Careers are changing. The assumptions many of us built our lives on are starting to shift.

The science fiction I grew up reading is becoming reality in front of my eyes.

The strange thing is that after everything that happened this month, I don’t feel afraid of that uncertainty anymore.

I feel more willing to face it.

Maybe because the operating table reminded me that control was always partly an illusion.

Maybe because waking up reminded me that gratitude is stronger than fear.

Maybe because once you’ve been given another chance, you don’t want to spend it hiding from the future.

You want to live.
You want to build.
You want to love your people properly.

You want to become useful for whatever comes next.

When I started Scary Management almost three years ago, I thought I was writing about management and leadership.

Managing people is scary.

I still believe that.

But lately, I’ve been wondering if management was only the first place I learned to study uncertainty.

Because that is what made it scary, wasn’t it?

The unpredictable human being on the other side of the conversation. The team dynamic you could not fully control. The stakeholder pressure you could not simply wish away. The decision where every option carried a cost.

The moment where the model helped, but did not remove the fear.

Management was never scary because there was no knowledge available.

It was scary because knowledge still had to meet reality.

And reality is uncertain

So maybe that’s the question I’m carrying now.

What does it mean to be ready?

Not perfectly prepared. Not certain. Not invincible.

Ready.

Ready to adapt.
Ready to learn.
Ready to recover.
Ready to lead.
Ready to keep going when the map changes.

I don’t have all the answers.

But I do feel clearer about this:

We can handle more than we think.

We might not be fearless, but we can grow.
We can learn.
We can help each other.

Facing uncertain things one step, one conversation, one decision, one breath at a time.

This month reminded me that being alive is not a small thing.

It is the thing.

The foundation underneath every plan, every goal, every ambition, every story.

And before I rush into what all of this means for Scary Management, I just want to sit with that.

I made it.

I am grateful.

And I am ready to keep going.

We can’t slow the pace of change.
We can’t make life completely safe.
We can’t control every outcome.

But we can become the kind of people who keep showing up.

With gratitude.
With curiosity.
With courage.
And with hope.

Thanks for coming along on the journey so far.

I have a feeling the most interesting chapters are still ahead of us.

Until next week, friend.

Vaugan