What If Nature Is Maintenance, Not A Reward You Have to Earn?
You don't need a mountain to achieve success. In a conversation with Ian Boyd, Chief Executive of Mind Over Mountains, on the Writing with Purpose podcast, we talk a lot about the epic versions of getting outside, the summits, the ultramarathons, the big expeditions people train for months to complete. But most of us live somewhere closer to a local park or a canal path, and the question worth asking is whether that's enough. Ian thinks it is, if you treat it properly.
Ian has spent over two decades working in charity and community development, from frontline youth work through to leading Self Help UK, the Notts County Foundation, and Trekstock. He took on Mind Over Mountains, the charity restoring mental health naturally through walking in nature, mindfulness, and time with professional coaches and counsellors, in October 2025, and has since walked with the Princess of Wales in the Peak District and helped push green social prescribing further into the mainstream conversation. He's also an ultramarathon runner, a father, a husband, and someone who is, by his own account, hovering at the ninety per cent mark of completing his book. This conversation covers all of it, but underneath the specifics, the core is about one idea: nature works best as a daily habit, not an occasional rescue.
Everyday Mountains, Not Hollywood Moments
Ian runs an organisation called Mind Over Mountains, and yet the philosophy he kept returning to had nothing to do with mountains at all. He described a colleague running a mindfulness session on a patch of grass in the middle of a roundabout, on a dual carriageway, because it was the only green space available at the time. Ian's point wasn't that it was an ideal spot – far from it. The point is that mindfulness and grounding can be practised almost anywhere, and that the space matters far less than using it.
This is the thinking behind Mind Over Mountains' Everyday Mountains Challenge, and it's also why Ian keeps a well-thumbed copy of 52 Ways to Walk by Annabel Streets on his desk. The book gives a different style of walking for each week of the year, from walking barefoot to walking beneath a full moon, and Ian dips into it depending on where the year has got to. For a listener whose only wild space is a local park or a canal path, that's the invitation: not a bigger adventure, but a slightly different one, tried regularly enough that it becomes part of how you live rather than something you occasionally manage to fit in.
Walking Shoulder to Shoulder
A large part of what Mind Over Mountains offers goes beyond the walking to what walking makes possible in a conversation. Ian described the difference plainly: when you're sat across from someone, face to face, on a screen or in a room, there's a kind of pressure to it, a sense of being watched while you're trying to answer. Walking side by side removes that. You're not staring at someone waiting for a response. You're experiencing the same thing at the same time, supporting each other, and the conversation is free to move differently because of it.
Ian has used this in his own career too, saying he'd rather have a difficult conversation with a colleague or a manager outdoors than in an office, because people tend to feel more able and more receptive once the four walls are gone. This is also the basis of the coaching and counselling Mind Over Mountains delivers on its walks and retreats: professional support offered on the move, in a group, rather than one-to-one in a room.
The Word We Keep Getting Wrong
Ian spoke about being struck by the word 'practice'. Doctors practice, counsellors practice, and he thinks it’s a useful word for the rest of us too: the idea that you don't wake up one day able to run a marathon or suddenly be surrounded by nature. You put in place small, repeated things, keeping them going regularly. Only later, when you look back over a month or six months, do you see how far you've come.
Ian also shared a reframe he heard at a conference, from a researcher studying people's connection to nature. Take the questions you'd ask about your relationship with nature, is it a good connection, a regular one, a close one, and swap the word nature for family. Are you estranged from your family? Do you spend time together? The swap reframe is a useful one because it makes the effort visible. You must put time in with nature the same way you do with family, through the ordinary maintenance of showing up day after day and not through occasional grand gestures.
This is also why Ian is impatient with how slowly the language of policy is catching up. He talked about the NHS's ten-year plan using words like community and preventative, which he welcomes, but points out that charities like Mind Over Mountains are ready now, not in a decade. Around a third of his charity’s referrals already come through the Green Social Prescribing route, but the funding to match doesn't move at the same pace as the need.
Writing It Down, One Way Or Another
Journalling came up early in our conversation, as it does with most guests. Ian described a long-standing practice of getting his emotions down on paper, whether it’s with a pen or typing it out.
"I journal, I think in ink, I reflect, I write down my words, whether it's kind of physically writing with a pen or typing things out. And I've always been a fan of trying to get my emotions down onto paper."
He also described writing unsent letters or emails when he's angry with someone or frustrated by a situation. Ian takes a moment, writing his thoughts down, letting them sit as a draft for twenty-four hours before deciding whether to send or delete once the intensity of the feeling has passed. Running does a version of the same job for him. Ian is not convinced he even likes running, but he keeps doing it because of what it processes: the stomp of the trail working something out of his system before he comes home able to function again as a husband, a father, and a CEO.
Your Turn: An Unsent Letter to Nature
Ian's swap of the word family for the word nature gives you a different approach to thinking about your relationship with nature. Instead of writing about nature, try writing with it, the way you'd sit down with a relative you want to understand better.
Pick a prompt below and write for ten minutes or write a short dialogue between you and nature. Let it answer back in your own words.
- How often do we really see each other?
- What have I taken for granted about you?
- What would you want me to know about how you're doing right now?
- Where have I let the distance grow, and why?
- What would it take to be close again?
If the dialogue feels more natural, write it as two voices on the page. You speak first. Let nature reply as it would, patient, a little blunt, glad you came back.
There's no right length and no right tone to this. The point, as Ian said of his own writing, is what happens while you're writing – perhaps the realisation or message that surfaces.
You don't need the epic version of any of this. A patch of grass on a roundabout was enough for someone, once. Whatever your equivalent is, the invitation is just to keep showing up to or with nature.
Want to hear the full conversation with Ian Boyd? Listen to Episode 79 of the Writing with Purpose podcast.