Most of us aren't held back by a lack of knowledge. We're held back by the stories we tell ourselves.
In Have At It, executive coach Steve Nicol shares the simple ideas that have transformed the lives of leaders, founders and everyday people over two decades of coaching. Through honest stories, humour and practical wisdom, he explores what happens when we stop pretending, start telling ourselves the truth and take responsibility for the life we want to create.
This isn't a book about becoming someone else. It's about rediscovering who you already are beneath the noise, fear and overthinking.
From difficult conversations and confidence to leadership, relationships and finding greater peace of mind, each chapter offers practical insights you can apply immediately.
Written like a conversation with a trusted friend rather than a lecture, Have At It will make you laugh, reflect and perhaps even shed a tear. More importantly, it will leave you with the confidence to take your next step, because a great life isn't found by waiting for the perfect moment.
It's created one truthful choice at a time.
Most of us aren't held back by a lack of knowledge. We're held back by the stories we tell ourselves.
In Have At It, executive coach Steve Nicol shares the simple ideas that have transformed the lives of leaders, founders and everyday people over two decades of coaching. Through honest stories, humour and practical wisdom, he explores what happens when we stop pretending, start telling ourselves the truth and take responsibility for the life we want to create.
This isn't a book about becoming someone else. It's about rediscovering who you already are beneath the noise, fear and overthinking.
From difficult conversations and confidence to leadership, relationships and finding greater peace of mind, each chapter offers practical insights you can apply immediately.
Written like a conversation with a trusted friend rather than a lecture, Have At It will make you laugh, reflect and perhaps even shed a tear. More importantly, it will leave you with the confidence to take your next step, because a great life isn't found by waiting for the perfect moment.
It's created one truthful choice at a time.
This is world-class inspiration
Most books written by business executives and leadership coaches have me surfing through the froth of heady theories and concepts that make me want to drop the book and ask AI or the internet for a brief summary.
Life in the business and coaching world can be complex enough without putting my brain through more intellectual strain and misery.
When Steve Nicol told me he had written a book, I was afraid I might get the same. After all, he was a leadership coach who taught bright systems and principles, so why wouldn’t his book be like one of those?
Yet I knew Steve to be a wise and witty world-class coach of business leaders, and a genuinely good and decent person. The many conversations I’d had with him over the years were always a delight on my end.
But that doesn’t always translate to the written page. In fact, come to think of it, does it ever?
Well, yes, it does here! In this superbly entertaining series of real-life stories Steve Nicol has abandoned all attempts to write a brain-draining tutorial on business and leadership in favour of just writing the real truth about his life.
(And, in the end, about your life and mine. But I’ll get to that.)
Halfway through reading this book, I realized that I was reading it like it was a can’t-put-down novel. Steve’s series of stories aren’t afraid to look straight into the eyes of fear. They aren’t afraid to reveal the frightened child inside this big, strong, accomplished man who came from solid farming stock and worked miracles in the cut-throat world of international oil and gas. This energetic man in love with the rough and tumble world of rugby.
Reading these sad and hilarious stories that fearlessly shared his fears (and their transcendence) I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as I was reading. (I ended up doing both.)
For entertainment alone, this book is worth the read.
But here’s the magic trick I most admired about this book. When the world-class storytelling was over, I realized I had also learned all the principles Steve Nicol teaches the leaders he coaches.
They all came through his great short stories… totally free of conceptual, intellectualizing proclamations. They just landed.
Plato said, “Those who tell the stories rule society.”
And the world-renowned author, teacher and screenwriting expert Robert McKee, who speaks to leadership teams on the subject, says “Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.”
That’s good news for the future of this fine book. And this book is good news for the world today. It’s what the world needs now. And I’m betting large on my prediction that you, the reader, will feel the same gratitude I do for the wisdom of this world-class storyteller, Steve Nicol, for sharing his life in such a fearless and humorous way.
I almost used the word “vulnerable” here (which this book certainly is) but in deference to my trusted friend Steve, I’m not going to use a word that has never been used before in the world of farming or rugby.
Steve Chandler
Scottsdale, Arizona
June, 2026
A Note Before We Begin
The Bus, the Squeaking Noise, and Why I Wrote This
I should tell you who is writing this book before we go any further.
I am a sixty-year-old Scotsman from Aberdeenshire who grew up on a farm, spent twenty years in the oil and gas industry, built and sold a company, fell apart fairly spectacularly, put himself back together, and now runs a coaching business with his wife from wherever in the world they happen to be that month.
Last month it was Barbados. Before that, Australia for six weeks. We have grandchildren in Japan, Australia and Scotland. We go on honeymoon every year. My wife Emma has written a few books. I decided it was time I wrote one too.
We live in Edinburgh now. I chose this deliberately. One of the reasons — and I am aware this will either make complete sense to you or none at all — is that I wanted to live in a Rugby city. Specifically, I wanted to be near Murrayfield.
I have been accused of swimming upstream for most of my life. When everyone around me in Oil and Gas supported football and Formula 1, I chose Rugby Union and MotoGP. I cannot fully explain this. It is just who I am. There is a community around Rugby that I have not found in any other sport — a level of respect between players, fans and opposition that still surprises me every time I encounter it.
Every time I walk into Murrayfield — 67,000 people, Scotland versus whoever — I get a little emotional. When Flower of Scotland starts I roar the acapella section at the top of my lungs and the hair on the back of my neck stands up. Every single time. I recently went with Emma, my oldest son Keith, his wife Zara and our five-month-old granddaughter. We lost the game. It would be wrong to say we did not care about the result, we did, but it was a great afternoon of Rugby.
Yesterday Emma and I went to Gleneagles for a swim and lunch and to talk business strategy. The Scottish Rugby captain said hello in the corridor. Rugby players do this. It is one of the things I love about the sport.
There is hardly a day goes past that Emma and I don’t say something about what a great city we live in. That is not an accident. It is a choice we made and keep making.
Emma says I am one of the funniest people she knows. She is probably right, although the humour is mostly observational with good timing and you genuinely had to be there. As evidence, I offer the following: we were waiting to cross a road recently after seeing a film, and I was talking at full speed as usual, standing far too close to the traffic. A bus went past at some velocity. I made a noise — a long, high, involuntary squeak, as though the side of the bus had run along my nose. Eeeeeeeeeeeek.
Emma laughed loudly. We still often do the noise when we cross a road. It is, I admit, better in person.
I am telling you this because when Emma read the early chapters of this book she said, with characteristic honesty, that it wasn’t what she expected. She thought it would be funnier. And she wasn’t entirely sure she recognised the person writing it.
She was right on both counts. When I write about what happened in my forties — the collapse, the hotel rooms, the morning after leaving the house — I go back there. The weight of it comes back too. That is honest writing, and I think it is necessary. But it is not the whole picture.
The whole picture is this: I live a genuinely great life. I know that sounds like the sort of thing people say, but I mean it in the most literal sense. I designed it. I keep choosing it. And it is, on any honest measure, a ten out of ten.
The heavy chapters exist because I want you to understand what the journey actually cost. But this book is not a book about suffering. It is a book about choice. About waking up. About the quiet, stubborn, occasionally ridiculous decision to get off the default highway of life and design something better.
It would be a bonus if, by the time you finish it, you laughed at least once. And realised that you have far more choices available to you than you thought.
That is the central idea. Not a theory. Not a framework. A lived reality. You have more choices than you think — in your work, your relationships, your health, your direction. The single most reliable tool for accessing those choices is also the simplest one available to you: tell the truth. About where you are. About what you want. About what is actually holding you back.
You will see this theme running through every story in this book. Sometimes it is obvious. Sometimes it is quiet. But it is always there.
That is all this is. Stories from a life. Some of them funny. Some of them hard. All of them true.
Now. Let’s cross the road.
Steve Nicol, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2026
Prologue
Enough
I built a life many people would have admired.
I ran companies. Raised capital. Grew teams. Made hard decisions and delivered results. I was the dependable one. The man you could trust to carry the load, step forward when something needed done, hold the line when others stepped back.
From the outside, it looked solid.
From the inside, something was off.
I couldn’t have named it at the time. If you’d asked how I was doing I would have said, “Great, busy, getting the job done.” I would have told you what we were building, what we were raising, what we were fixing. I would not have told you about the empty shadow.
The shadow didn’t shout. It whispered and lingered. It followed me from Houston to Aberdeen, from boardrooms to farm roofs, from fundraising meetings to hotel rooms.
Years earlier, we had moved to Houston on a two-year contract. I was going to run a production department and show what I could do. Turn a mediocre-performing team into something admired. I believed in it.
Two months in, my wife booked flights home for herself and our boys. “You do what you want,” she said.
I came back to Scotland with no job, no house, and something cracked inside me that I couldn’t quite name. I spent a few weeks working on a friend’s farm. Fixed gates. Welded hinges. Repaired long-neglected things. There was comfort in that — in fixing what was broken and seeing the results.
One afternoon I stopped to eat a sandwich on a rooftop mid-repair, looking out over the fields. Just for a moment the noise went quiet. I could have asked myself what I actually wanted. Instead, my old operating system kicked back in.
Get back into it. Get a bigger job. Provide. Deliver. Do what needs done.
So I did. I walked into a start-up, offered to work for free for a month to prove my worth, and helped build it from a small team of four founders into a company of ninety people. I raised millions of pounds. Helped develop exciting technology. Grew revenues. And eventually sold the business to Halliburton just before the oil price crash — timing that people often complimented me on. My honest answer was always the same: I didn’t know about the crash. I was too busy getting what needed done, done.
From the outside, it was success. Comfortably so.
Inside, the shadow was still there.
Just before signing the paperwork to complete the sale, my wife told me she’d had an affair.
I signed the deal anyway. Then I checked into a hotel and cried the whole night. Not just because of the betrayal — but because I was empty, done. Briefly a millionaire. A big beautiful house waiting. A well-paid role many people would have queued for.
And I felt completely alone.
I put a brave face on it. We bought the new house — large and beautiful. I played the part. For a few years I performed the role of happy husband while something quietly hollowed out inside me. I had a great relationship with my two sons, but they could not be part of my broken thoughts, it was my weight to bear and my puzzle to solve. My best friend through those years was Hamish, my Jack Russell. He knew more about how I really felt than any human did. He kept me sane. Mostly.
Then one evening I read a chapter of The Chimp Paradox for the third time. Something shifted. I walked through to the family room where my wife was sitting, and I heard myself say the words before I had fully decided to say them.
“Enough. I can’t do this. It’s not working. I’m leaving.”
I packed a few bags and walked out of the big beautiful house. Left behind the stable life. Left behind Hamish.
It wasn’t neat. It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t brave in the cinematic sense. It was a rumble of difficult weeks — telling people, trying to stay sane, finding a flat, figuring out what I had just done.
That night in a hotel room, staring at the ceiling, I didn’t feel powerful. I didn’t feel triumphant.
I felt honest. And a little free.
It was, I realised later, the first truly conscious choice I had made in years.
Not the bravest choice. Not the most elegant. But an honest one. And I have come to believe, through everything that followed, that honest choices — even the messy, inconvenient, middle-of-the-night ones — are almost always the most practical ones available to us.
This book begins with that choice.
A Note on the Pattern
Terror, Learning, Mastery, Joy. Repeat.
Something occurred to me while writing this book.
Every significant chapter of my life has followed the same rhythm. It starts with terror. Genuine, body-level, stomach-working-against-me terror. Then comes the learning — uncomfortable, unglamorous, frequently humiliating. Then something that I resist calling mastery because the word is too grand, but which is the feeling of starting to know what you’re doing. And then, finally, joy. Deep satisfaction. The thing becoming yours.
And then it starts again.
First day at primary school — I would not let go of my Mum’s hand. First day at the Academy — small fish, very large ocean, lunch stolen. First time calving a cow alone in the dark on a hillside — terrified as much of the dark as of getting it wrong. Driving the new JCB Fastrac — the second one in Scotland, and the financial weight of that sitting squarely on my shoulders. The move from farming to contracting. Starting a rival machinery ring and cold calling farmers, walking up to strange doors with my inner voice telling me they would say no — which they rarely did. First day in Oil and Gas, certain I would be found out as a Teuchter with no certificates. Every promotion. Every pitch. Every room I walked into wondering if someone would tap me on the shoulder and ask me to leave.
The terror is consistent. What changes is the relationship to it.
The worst of it came during the Business Leadership Development programme at Texas A&M. I was out of shape physically. The stress was eating me alive. I had convinced myself there was a pass or fail in each section, that I did not belong in the same room as these people, that the whole thing was about to expose me completely. My heart was beating in my temples. We were filmed, given feedback, asked to stand and speak constantly. Then required to pretend to acquire a company and present a full business case to a simulated board.
One evening in my hotel room in College Station I was going through the numbers with a good friend on the phone when I felt a pain in my chest. My head went light. I tried to stand up and fell in a fairly dramatic way. My inner voice, who I had not yet learned to manage, informed me immediately that this was a heart attack. That I had burned my years. That this was it.
I was in a t-shirt and boxer shorts. The thought that followed was not one I am especially proud of. They are going to find me like this. In my boxer shorts. In a hotel room in Texas. How humiliating.
Using what I was convinced were my final minutes on earth wisely, I performed a version of the worm across the hotel room floor, reached my jeans on the side of the bed, and managed to get one leg in. Then the other. Then I closed my eyes.
That’s better.
A wave of relief washed over me. I started to think about what people would say. Steve worked hard. Steve always gave everything. Steve… hang on. I don’t appear to be dead. Or this part takes longer than expected. Where is the white light? The tunnel?
I opened my eyes and looked at the ceiling.
There was a part of me genuinely annoyed to be coming back to reality.
The next morning I saw the university nurse before my final presentation. She was very concerned. Blood pressure at a frightening level. She recommended I quit the course and go home immediately. I asked if she could give me something. She said I should visit an emergency room and they would likely prescribe aspirin and a beta blocker.
I ignored her advice. The fear of letting my team down was greater than the fear of dying. I am not recommending this as a strategy. I am simply reporting what happened.
The final presentations went extraordinarily well. I was named team leader — as seemed to happen throughout my life and career, in circumstances where I had not sought the role. We won. I received an award as a top performer. And I went back to my hotel room, sat on the edge of the bed in my jeans, and thought: again.
Terror. Learning. Something approaching mastery. Joy.
I notice this same rhythm in almost everyone I coach. The terror of the new thing. The temptation to stop before the learning has properly started. The long middle section where you are neither terrified nor yet fluent. And then, if you stay with it, the thing becoming yours.
Most people bail somewhere between terror and learning. They mistake the fear for a signal to stop.
I have always mistaken it for a signal to keep going. Possibly while lying on a hotel room floor in Texas with one leg in my jeans.
You will notice this rhythm running through the stories that follow. I hope they help you recognise it in your own life. And I hope, when the terror arrives — as it will — you remember that it is not a stop sign.
It is just the beginning of the pattern.
A Good Boy
Outstanding Farmer
This story begins in the late 1990s, when I made the move from farming into Oil and Gas. I was new to the industry, bringing with me everything the farm had given me — and very few formal qualifications.
A few people were staring at me. Colin, my new boss of only a few days, was one of them.
“Okay, let me get this straight,” he said. “We don’t have a large enough jubilee clip for the hot bladder and gloop test. But you can make one?”
I was slightly unsettled by the question. Not because I doubted what I had said, but because the task was so straightforward that the level of surprise in the room was actually a little worrying. “It’s not that I’ll make one,” I said. “We just need to join shorter ones together to make a longer one. Let me show you.”
I emptied the box of shorter clips onto the workbench and began joining them until I had a length long enough to wrap around the six or seven inch housing being used in the test. I got it into a starting hexagonal lumpy shape, then beat it into something cleaner and more rounded until it looked fit for purpose. I stepped back and awaited inspection.
Colin inspected it closely. Stood back. Went in for another look. Smiled.
“Outstanding farmer,” he said. Then he looked around at the small team of sceptical test lab technicians. “And why did none of you lot think of this?”
Before the sentence had finished leaving his lips, a list of reasons was already being assembled. Not sure it’s safe. We should wait for a proper one. What if it breaks. Bloody farmers.
Colin looked at me with a warm expression I would get used to over the coming years. “Are you sure this will work, Steve?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I’ve done this many times — often in the middle of a field in the dark — and it’s always worked. So we’re good to go, Colin.”
Silence. Then laughter.
Over the coming months and years, as I adjusted to life in Oil and Gas, I was regularly asked to fix the broken thing, get projects done with not enough equipment, weld, cut, break, mend, paint, improvise. Do just about anything. As is typical of people who grew up on farms — in the land of make-do — I was resourceful in a way that surprised people who had come to the industry more directly. This is where that came from.
The Land of Make Do
I grew up on a farm of nearly a thousand acres in Aberdeenshire. My Dad was a Teuchter — a farmer, a hill man, a man of the land and the doric dialect. My Mum was a Toonser from Aberdeen. Between them they gave us the best of both worlds. The farm and the city. The land and the Saturday trips into town for fish and chips.
I could weld metal by the time I was twelve. Make gates by fourteen that we sold to neighbouring farmers. Mend anything made of metal or wood. Drive a Landrover, tractor, digger, combine harvester and motorbike long before the legal age of seventeen — which was entirely normal in farmer land. I was a decent shot with a pellet gun, shotgun and .22 rifle by a similar age, receiving my first double-barrelled shotgun as a Christmas present. I had started repairing car bodywork — including painting to a reasonable finish — for spending money by my late teens.
I was the youngest of three boys. Billy came first, then Garry with two r’s, then me. By the time I arrived my brothers had already done the difficult work of negotiating late nights, pushing the envelope, getting into trouble at school. This gave me a considerable amount of freedom. Which I used to push the envelope even further than they had. Some of my experiments were noticed. Thankfully some were not.
Primary school was a two mile bike ride from the farm in rain, wind or snow — occasionally a tractor ride if the weather was bad enough and the school was still open. Twenty-five pupils, two teachers, one building. We were a ragtag bunch with our wellies left at the door, being taught a curriculum that made limited sense to me. Jack and Jill went up a hill to fetch a pail of water. Our hill was three hundred acres. The farm nearly a thousand. Why would Jack not use the tractor? And instead of a pail, a water bowser? You can see how this went.
I was reasonably well behaved. Mostly. I wanted to do well and get home quickly to complete my list of farm tasks before some experimenting with gunpowder or other boy-style shenanigans. My inventiveness did get me into trouble on a fair few occasions.
The most notable involved a collaboration between myself, two Graemes, a Michael and several girls led by Julie. The project: a secret communication system between two bathroom cubicles. I was the lead designer. The walls were gyproc stud — easy work. I made dummy caps painted white to sit behind the toilet roll holders and created a tube as the communication shaft. The intended use, I was told, was to pass paper love notes between the cubicles.
I completed the installation early one morning, having let myself in through a back window. The design was, I felt, excellent. What I had not accounted for was that one of my loyal Graemes would use the love tunnel to whisper a poem to Mrs Bruce. Our Head teacher. This was not well received. No love was returned. My gang turned states evidence immediately and I had my Mum invited in to discuss why I should focus on more academic projects.
I received two of the strap on each hand the next morning in front of the whole school. I was proud of what became known in folklore as the Love Tunnel regardless. It entered local legend and I consider this a reasonable return on investment.
The Academy
Moving from primary school to Inverurie Academy was a shock of considerable proportions. I went from being the oldest boy in a school of twenty-five to being one of two hundred pupils in a single year group, twelve hundred in the school. There was no handover, no grace period, no sponsors, no help. I was released into the wild.
My brother Garry was supposed to look after me. He tried, in the way older brothers try, which is to say imperfectly and with plausible deniability.
The first week was a blur. I got my lunch taken most days in the canteen. I lost my pencil case. I was late to classes because I could not find the rooms. My pride and my world were imploding simultaneously and the Academy did not notice. It just churned forward, shaping young minds, utterly indifferent to mine.
The final straw was missing my bus home. I had been held up by boys who wanted to fight me for no apparent reason, who took my bag and threw it over a fence. By the time I had climbed the fence and retrieved it, the bus had gone. I did not know how to call home. I sat on a wall beside the Townhall and quietly cried while the small town went about its business. Nobody noticed. This was the late 1970s and school children were considerably less well looked after.
My Dad came to collect me later that evening. He told me off for messing about. I did not care. I was so glad to see him. To feel his protection. To feel safe. My brother Garry received a fairly stiff talking to from my Mum and, being a good brother, claimed none of it was his fault and that I had suffered too many blows to the head in early life to be reliable as a witness.
The early years at the Academy were not good. I got on the wrong side of the bullies. I was targeted for whatever reason could be invented and I always fought back, even when the odds were terrible. This was never a good plan. It made me an easy target. I was often sore, occasionally bleeding, and my schoolwork suffered accordingly.
My attendance was also, let us say, flexible. The farm needed work. My Dad wrote many sick notes covering a range of conditions — colds, upset stomachs, glandular fever, measles more than once. Anyone paying attention would have noticed something was up. I was cutting silage, making hay, harvesting. My Mum would occasionally say, with a mixture of guilt and hope, “Are you sure you want to do this, Steve? You could be so much more.” I could not hear this. I had ferrets to attend to.
By third year things were improving. The older bullies had left. I was getting smarter about when to fight and when to talk my way out. It was not entirely unlike a scene from Back to the Future — the Biffs and their crews in pursuit of the Marty McFly characters, of which I was definitely one.
The headmaster was Mr Hogg. He was judge and jury. Minor offences earned a good telling off and a note in his diary. Three strikes or one significant offence meant six of the belt. I had been belted many times and he was bored with me. At least half the time I was entirely innocent, but he had a process and he followed it.
He also drove a DAF. A DAF was a curious car of its time — ugly, belt drive, the kind only a headmaster would choose. An odd colour between dark red and mud. His time was coming.
One morning, while he was preparing to leave for the day, I applied a generous amount of grease to his drive belt. I had smuggled the grease cartridge from the farm workshop and had timed the operation with some precision. The resulting departure was spectacular. Blue smoke. Revving. The car moving with great reluctance in a perfectly straight line while half the school watched from nearby classroom windows. Mr Massie, my gym teacher, happened upon me hiding behind a portacabin mid-spectacle. He crouched beside me without a word. We watched together in silence. Then he started laughing. Heartfelt, booming, entirely unprotected laughter. He released my arm. Headed behind a hedgerow in a semi-commando style. And said nothing about it. Ever.
What I felt in that moment was not just satisfaction. It was something else. An adult had crouched beside me instead of standing over me. He had not asked the obvious question. He had just crouched. And laughed. And in that moment I felt completely seen and not so alone.
Trying to Be Good
My Mum and Dad came to a parents evening once. My Mum had been told by my English teacher, Mrs Khalil — who was fond of me and said I was a creative storyteller — that it might be worth attending. We were making our way through the assembly hall when Mr Hogg appeared at speed, black gown flapping, heading straight for us.
“Mr and Mrs Nicol!” he announced. “It’s great to see you here — although don’t you think it’s a little late?” Before they could recover from this opening, he continued. “Steven has the worst attendance record of any pupil who has attended Inverurie Academy, including those with serious health conditions.” He went on to describe my limited application and finished by apologising for how often he had been required to apply punishment.
Bill and Eileen absorbed this calmly, thanked him and went to find the teachers who liked me. There were a few. I guided them carefully.
The last months at school were among the best. No real exam pressure. I worked with the janitors, fixing things, which suited me perfectly. And I had become, without entirely meaning to, a protector of sorts. I volunteered most lunchtimes and breaks to make sure the new first years — the Nematodes, we called them — got their lunch and were not bothered. I had a loyal group of third and fourth years who helped keep things fairer. It was not a perfect system but it worked in its own small way.
When I left the Academy I was relieved. And I knew one thing clearly that I had not been able to name before. I was meant to be the good guy. This was often easier said than done. But it was the direction I was pointed in, and it always had been.
A few years after leaving I saw Ivor — one of the main Biffs — serving petrol at a filling station. This made no sense to me. Even though he had been a bully and a thug, I had always imagined him fighting a war in a jungle somewhere, putting his size and aggression to some useful purpose. Not scraping a living serving fuel. I felt something unexpected. Not satisfaction. Something closer to sadness.
The farm gave me more than I understood at the time. The resourcefulness. The ability to fix things in the dark in the middle of a field. The make do that became make it happen. The instinct to protect the smaller ones. The stubbornness to keep going when it would have been easier to stop.
Outstanding farmer, Colin had said.
He had no idea how right he was.
Chapter One
The Truth Zone
Penned by Scottish writer Steve Nicol, Have At It: Why Truth Is the Most Practical Choice is a self-help guide tailored towards current or aspirational business leaders looking to level up and/or rediscover themselves and their motivators for driving success, both in the office and in life.
Coming in at just shy of 170 pages, Have At It is comprised of eighteen chapters, with headings including "Be Easy to Do Business With", "Release the Handbrake", and my personal favourite, "What Have You Got Against Dogs?" As these chapter titles suggest, readers should come into this book expecting an informal experience, as Nicol talks through his career to get him to where he is today. It does not prescribe to readers a silver bullet for success, in the same way it does not tell readers what to think and how to behave.
Have At It has a nice, professional cover which feeds through into the formatting inside, with chapters the perfect length to allow the book to be picked up and put down at any point. There is no doubt that this title would sit neatly on any bookshelf or coffee table. The tiny niggle for me is that several of the chapters on the contents page are not numbered. Given the unnumbered chapters still hold the prestige of starting on a new page, with their own enlarged titles, it feels that lack of chapter numbering is by mistake rather than by design.
The tone of voice for this book is also very approachable in nature. Nicol's twenty years of experience in leadership coaching shines through in this book, to the point where Have At It feels more like a memoir, as opposed to a self-help guide. It reminds me somewhat of Stephen King's On Writing, that is to say the book is a fascinating memoir but the reader must put a degree of effort in if they want to truly get the best from this self-help guide. In truth, it is probably the only thing that could be critiqued about this title. Nicol speaks like a true business coach, making the reader think for themselves, however people who are looking for a self-help guide to spoon feed them may be left a little wanting.
Have At It is a strong title in its own merits, and one that is perfect for those wanting to take the next step in their personal development. Nicol has a real knack for writing in a way that will have readers fascinated by the author's own growth journey and from that, they too can learn a great deal. Have At It really does have it all.
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