Tartan Vitalis
For high achievers who have built impressive lives they can't quite live in
It starts with seeing clearly what your life is actually built on. Then it asks what you are building with that — and what you are honest enough to put down. Finally, it asks what it means to hold a weave that others are living inside too.
Three books. One argument. A radius of responsibility that widens with each one.
Start With the Loom DiagnosticFree · PDF · No obligation
Does this sound familiar
The career trajectory. The reputation. The responsibilities and relationships and material position. The life that, measured against any reasonable external standard, represents success.
And underneath all of that — quiet, persistent, difficult to name precisely — the sense that it doesn't quite fit. That something accumulated while you were busy achieving. That the life being lived and the life being built are not quite the same thing.
This is not a failure of gratitude. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you. It is a structural condition — and it has a structural explanation, one that takes more than a single book to fully address.
You are always weaving, whether you mean to or not. The question is whether you are doing it deliberately.
The gap between the impressive life and the life that fits is not a gap in achievement. It is a gap in attention — to your own foundations, to the pattern you are building, and to the wider weave your pattern is part of. The Stewardship Series addresses that gap in full: structurally, honestly, across three books, without softening what closing it requires.
About the Author
I didn't build the Tartan Vitalis framework from a distance. I built it from inside the problem — from three decades of running things at senior level, watching high achievers build impressive structures that quietly contradicted the lives they were trying to live. And recognising the pattern in myself.
The framework is structural because that is how I have always thought. Not about feelings or transformation, but about the conditions that allow a system to hold under real load. What is load-bearing and what is not. What was chosen and what accumulated. What compounds toward something worth building and what quietly works against it.
That thinking produced three books. It also produced the diagnostic instruments that precede them — because understanding where your foundations are under strain is the work that has to come before anything else.
"You are always weaving, whether you mean to or not. The question is whether you are doing it deliberately."
30
Years in leadership
10+
Years at Director level
I
Setting the Loom
Available now
II
Weaving Deliberately
Available now
III
Holding the Weave
Coming soon
The Stewardship Series
I
Setting the Loom
Why High Achievers Build Impressive Lives They Can't Quite Live In
The structural conditions that allow a life to hold. Five conditions. What happens when each one is under strain. The diagnostic work that makes everything else possible.
Available now
Read the Book →II
Weaving Deliberately
Building Forward, Releasing Honestly
What you build within those conditions — and what you are honest enough to put down. Both directions simultaneously. Neither softened.
Available now
Read the Book →III
Holding the Weave
Coming later this year
What it means to be responsible not only for your own pattern but for the wider weave others are living inside. The steward's hardest question.
Coming September 2026
The radius of responsibility expands with each book. The steward's question gets harder. The work gets more honest.
Where to begin
Every book in this series builds on the same foundation: five structural conditions that determine whether a life can hold under real pressure. Coherence. Regulation. Capacity. Commitment. Judgement.
The Loom Diagnostic surfaces where each of those conditions currently stands for you. It will not give you a score or a personality type. It will give you a clearer view of the ground you are building on — which is where the work of the whole series begins.
The Loom Diagnostic
An Introduction to Setting the Loom
Free · PDF download · No obligation
Download the Loom DiagnosticWhat readers say
"I have read a lot of books about building a better life. Most of them describe what the destination looks like. This one was the first to make me look honestly at what I was actually building — and why the gap between the two was so persistent. The inventory chapter alone changed how I think about what I am carrying."
David R · Managing Director, Professional Services
"What struck me most was the honesty about what release actually costs. Every other book I have read on this subject describes letting go as though it were straightforward. This one names the real weight of it — to you and to the people who have been depending on what you put down. That honesty is rare and it is exactly what this territory requires."
James M · Senior Partner, Financial Services
"Cool, precise, and completely without the self-help bravado that makes most books in this space unreadable for people like me. The distinction between a direction and a destination reframed something I had been thinking about wrongly for years. I finished it and immediately went back to Setting the Loom."
Sarah K · Director, Technology Sector
Are you placing it honestly and deliberately?
Start With the Loom DiagnosticAlready know which book you need?
Setting the Loom ·
Weaving Deliberately