Patrick McAndrew

Patrick McAndrew's arc of his work has changed a great deal over the past ten years. His twenties were shaped by the ideal of self-sufficiency, of becoming as capable and productive on his own as he could be, and helping others do the same. His thirties have been teaching him something different: that we can do far more together than we ever can alone, and that life is simply better this way. 

What follows is a little about how he has come to see this, and what he sees now: Our tools have never been more capable, and they are taking on more of our work. But the more capable they become, the more consequential the human part becomes. Powerful tools don’t choose a direction. They amplify whatever we bring to them, and what we bring comes down to distinctly human capacities: judgment, self-awareness, trust, attention, and the ability to have an honest conversation with each other.

That last part matters more than we tend to admit, because being with people is hard. There is tension and friction in it, and it has never been easier to avoid. At work, we retreat into our own tasks, connected to the team in name but not in practice. In our lives, we retreat into our own screens and schedules, surrounded by people and yet increasingly separate from them. And what we lose in that retreat is what we most want: to feel connected, to be part of something, to know the particular joy of building together what we could never build alone.

For years, Andrew's job was making people more productive. He worked with CEOs and senior leaders on sharpening their attention, reducing distractions, and building routines for better performance. But he has come to see that a leader’s inner state shapes what they accomplish far more than their productivity does. So many of the leaders he works with were carrying a heavy load of stress and responsibility, and it made them reactive and volatile. So his work moved toward mentorship: helping leaders find their center and lead from inner authority rather than fear and insecurity.

That opened his eyes to something larger: most of the challenges inside organizations were never about systems and processes. They were about how people work with each other. Today, his work lives in both places. With leaders, it’s mentorship: finding your center and leading from it. With teams, it’s building the skills to communicate with confidence and conviction, and aligning the group to the mission it’s there to serve. And in all of it, the way we work is practice. Real change rarely comes through concepts or frameworks. It comes through trying things in low-stakes moments, failing, learning about ourselves, so that when the pressure arrives, the new patterns are already in us.

It’s how Andrew has done all of his own learning, which has been experiential all the way down: Improv, Somatic Experiencing, the work of Moshe Feldenkrais, years of training in movement with teachers like Ido Portal and Jozef Fruček. Different as these worlds may seem, they share one conviction: we learn things by doing them, in our bodies, with other people. He believe that’s where the development of human skills is heading.

 Patrick McAndrew is originally from Ireland, and these days lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and two dogs.