Gary Coulton is looking for advance copy reviewers for Wisdomize, his new book, and here’s how it works:
If you’re interested, direct message Gary at The Positive Echo on Substack and send him your email. In about three to four weeks, when the final version is ready, he’ll send it to you. Read it. And if you like it, only if you like it, write a short review.
Then, three days before the book launches on Amazon, you’ll get access to the e-book at no cost. Wonderfully, Amazon still counts that as a purchase. So you “purchase” for free, leave your verified review, and suddenly an independent author has what he needs to stand toe-to-toe with Random House and the rest.
Gary sends his thanks to Fleur Hull, who runs the Substack bookstore; he calls her a genius of the independent publishing world, and everything he does goes through her.
If you fancy it, just DM him on Substack.
Biography of Gary Coulton
Gary Coulton is an author, former university academic, entrepreneur, executive coach, and self-described “proud neurodivergent” memoirist.
Career & Background
· Academia & Business: Gary spent three decades working in university academia as a scientist and inventor. Following his academic career, he spent a decade as a business owner and executive coach.
· Writing & Substack: He writes and podcasts on Substack at The Positive Echo, where he explores themes around mindfulness, self-compassion, non-judgmental awareness, creative reflection, and neurodiversity.
· Author: He authored the memoir Demons to Champions: How I fell in love with my neurodivergent maverick mind, an Amazon bestselling debut exploring his journey navigating an intense inner world, perfectionism, and late-life self-acceptance.
Neurodivergence & Personal Life
· Late-in-Life Diagnosis: At age 65, while writing his memoir and reflecting on his family history and lifelong experiences as a “different thinker,” Gary recognized his neurodivergence and identified as AuDHD (both autistic and ADHD). He views this “Autistic Awakening” as a transformative turning point that reframed his life and ignited his creative work.
· Personal & Hobbies: He lives a quiet coastal life with his wife, Mel. Outside of writing, he is an avid marathon kayaker, a passion he has maintained for over two decades, and advocates for mental and physical well-being through mindfulness.
Talking Points: What Do You Stand For?
A stand is not a slogan. It is the line you hold when holding it costs you something.
How to Use These Points
These points build one argument: knowing what you stand for is not a branding exercise; it is load-bearing infrastructure for a leader, measurable in the research and visible in conduct under pressure. Citations follow APA 7th. Primary empirical sources are unmarked; practitioner sources and contested claims are flagged in brackets. Opening question for any room: “Everyone here can recite their organization’s values. How many of you can name your own and name the last time one of them cost you something?”
Opening question for any room: “Everyone here can recite their organization’s values. How many of you can name your own and name the last time one of them cost you something?”
Section 1: Why a Stand Is Load-Bearing
• The stand and the standard are the same word. A “standard” was originally the battle flag, the banner the standard-bearer planted on the field, which the army rallied to, held ground by, and measured its line against; the likely root means “stand hard” (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.). Only later did it come to mean the bar you measure against because the flag was the fixed point everyone aligned to. What you stand for is the flag you plant. Your standard is how you enforce it daily. “I stand for honesty” is the banner; “I report the real number” is the standard the troops can see. Every leader is her own standard-bearer.
• Values are not decoration; they are decision architecture. Cross-cultural research identifies a stable structure of basic human values: achievement, benevolence, security, self-direction, and others that reliably shape what we notice, choose, and defend (Schwartz, 1992). You are running on values right now. The only question is whether you chose them consciously or inherited them unexamined.
• A named value steadies you under threat. Self-affirmation studies show that people who articulate their core values before facing threats, criticism, high-stakes evaluations, and identity challenges respond with less defensiveness and better performance (Steele, 1988; Cohen & Sherman, 2014). The woman who knows what she stands for is measurably harder to rattle.
• People follow the stand, not the smile. Decades of research on leader credibility converge on the same finding: followers commit to leaders whose behavior visibly matches their stated beliefs (Kouzes & Posner, 2011). [Practitioner-adjacent source.] The stand only counts when conduct pays its bills.
You already stand for something; your calendar, your budget, and your silences are the affidavit. The question is whether you would sign what they say.
Section 2: The Cost of Not Knowing
• Unnamed values get spent by other people. A leader who has not defined her stand defaults to the room’s: the loudest stakeholder, the oldest habit, the safest silence. Dissonance research shows how quickly behavior drags belief along. Act against yourself often enough, and the self quietly renegotiates (Festinger, 1957).
• Silence is rarely about fear of being wrong. Studies of employee voice find people withhold even valuable, non-controversial input because they doubt it will matter or fear subtle costs, and they self-censor most with the audiences that matter most (Detert & Edmondson, 2011; Morrison, 2014).
• Acting against your own moral identity has a price. People for whom moral traits are central to identity experience real distress when circumstances force them to violate those traits (Aquino & Reed, 2002). The exhaustion many leaders call burnout is sometimes this: a long-running war between conduct and conviction.
Not choosing is a choice; it just hands the pen to whoever is nearest. If you don’t define what you stand for, the room will be happy to fill in the blank.
Section 3: Standing Up Out Loud
• A stand becomes real at its first cost. Values held in private are preferences. They become stands the first time they are enforced in public against pressure: the no that holds, the credit correctly assigned, the number reported honestly when a softer one was available. Respect research is blunt: observers update their behavior based on what happened the last time a line was tested.
• The stand must survive your own side. The hardest test is rarely the opponent; it is the ally who asks you to bend “just this once, for the team.” Hold the standard evenly, or it reads as positioning rather than principle.
• “Authenticity” is not a license. Authentic leadership programs urge leaders to lead from their true selves, but scholars note the construct is fuzzy and can excuse unfiltered behavior as honesty (Avolio & Gardner, 2005; Alvesson & Einola, 2019). [Construct contested.] The workable version: not “say everything you feel,” but “never say what you don’t believe.”
• The audience is already watching for it. Employees now rank their own employer among their most trusted institutions, which means they are watching leadership conduct rather than mission statements to determine what the organization actually stands for (Edelman, 2026). [Practitioner source.]
Your people cannot read your heart. They can only read your record. A stand nobody has ever seen you pay for is a rumor.
Section 4: The Philosophers’ Anchors
• Socrates: the stand as examination. The unexamined life claim is really a leadership claim: he would rather die than outsource his judgment, and said so at trial (Plato, trans. 2002). First discipline: examine what you actually believe before defending it.
• Epictetus: the stand as jurisdiction. The Stoic dichotomy of control: your judgments, choices, and conduct are yours; outcomes and opinions are not (Epictetus, trans. 1995). A stand built on what others decide will fall. A stand built on your own conduct cannot be taken only surrendered.
• Arendt: the stand as thinking. Studying how ordinary functionaries enabled atrocity, Arendt located the failure not in monstrousness but in thoughtlessness: the refusal to examine what one was participating in (Arendt, 1963). The opposite of standing for something is not opposition; it is drift.
• King: the stand as timing. From a jail cell, King responded to the clergy who agreed with his goals but not with his timing: justice delayed by the comfortable is justice denied (King, 1963). A stand that always waits for a convenient season is a preference wearing a cause’s clothing.
Every tradition that examined this question landed in the same place: a stand is not what you believe. It is what you keep doing about it when the price shows up.
Naming Yours: A Working Method
• Audit the affidavit. Pull your last month of calendar, spending, and hard conversations. Write down what a stranger would conclude you stand for from the evidence alone. Compare it to what you would have said. The gap is the work.
• Find the flinch. List the three moments this year you stayed silent, and it followed you home. Under each, name the value that got violated. Your stand is usually hiding inside your regrets.
• Reduce it to portable form. One sentence per value, phrased as conduct, not aspiration: not “I value integrity” but “I report the real number.” If it cannot be enforced in a meeting, it is not yet a stand.
• Schedule its first test. Choose one live situation where the stand costs something small, and hold it there in front of witnesses. Stands, like respect, compound on tested evidence.
Start smaller than your convictions and larger than your comfort. One held the line this week in public.
References
Alvesson, M., & Einola, K. (2019). Warning for excessive positivity: Authentic leadership and other traps in leadership studies. The Leadership Quarterly, 30(4), 383–395.
Aquino, K., & Reed, A., II. (2002). The self-importance of moral identity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1423–1440.
Arendt, H. (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the banality of evil. Viking Press.
Avolio, B. J., & Gardner, W. L. (2005). Authentic leadership development: Getting to the root of positive forms of leadership. The Leadership Quarterly, 16(3), 315–338.
Cohen, G. L., & Sherman, D. K. (2014). The psychology of change: Self-affirmation and social psychological intervention. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 333–371.
Detert, J. R., & Edmondson, A. C. (2011). Implicit voice theories: Taken-for-granted rules of self-censorship at work. Academy of Management Journal, 54(3), 461–488.
Edelman. (2026). 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer [Practitioner source.]
Epictetus. (1995). The discourses, the handbook, fragments (C. Gill, Ed.; R. Hard, Trans.). Everyman. (Original work ca. 108 CE)
Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.
King, M. L., Jr. (1963). Letter from Birmingham Jail.
Kouzes, J. M., & Posner, B. Z. (2011). Credibility: How leaders gain and lose it, why people demand it (2nd ed.). Jossey-Bass. [Practitioner-adjacent source.]
Morrison, E. W. (2014). Employee voice and silence. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 1, 173–197.
Plato. (2002). Five dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo (G. M. A. Grube, Trans.; 2nd ed.). Hackett. (Original work ca. 399 BCE)
Schwartz, S. H. (1992). Universals in the content and structure of values: Theoretical advances and empirical tests in 20 countries. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 25, 1–65.
Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustaining the integrity of the self. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 261–302.
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