It’s been a few years now since I started working in my own consultancy business full-time and being my own boss really suits me. Every Monday morning I am grateful to not have my week shaped by endless meetings or arbitrary schedules. Most Mondays, I start with blogging, reflecting, planning. Less pressure to be at my most productive and more scope to navigate uncertainty, develop my strengths and enjoy the variety of free-lance life.
Life has stopped feeling unmoored in the way it did when my CEO days were fresh in my mind, and the demands of running and representing an organisation and a wide community of members still rang in my ears. Instead, life has taken on a new rhythm and I have found it most rewarding to experience all the scary moments, the lulls and the joys in between.
Education + Technology. Still.
What I am very happy about is to have found ways to return to and to continue to work in education + technology in new ways. I’ve found I enjoy working in Open Education and technology in ways that I had no time for in my executive role, and now that I am able to get stuck in to course development, writing tech case study or organising events, I love it again. Not as an industry in which I need to influence policy makers, but in a space that is still rich with experimentation and full of warm communities that are making a positive difference for their users, be they learners, educators or volunteers.
I’ve also continued to be a peer assessor for CMALT, the professional accreditation scheme for Learning Technology professionals, and that in itself has been a rich and rewarding activity. It is always inspiring to see peer practice portfolio and it reminds me that I need to keep track of the technical skills I have and am developing. I often undersell my technical knowledge because I often work alongside the select few who have a lot more to offer in that department, which skewers my perspective.
Note to self: you know more than you think when it comes to open source technical skills.
Coaching Leader Superpower
It’s been a few years now since I started coaching and also mentoring, and I found the work deeply rewarding. It’s been a learning curve to identify my coaching niche, and the type of leaders I can offer the best support to, but I found it and I enjoy the practice of being a thinking partner and offering a safe space to reflect and strategise. I’ve also brought mentoring early career leaders into the mix, and that has kept my on my toes to say the least. I might have over a decade of executive level experience, but nothing brings me down to earth and thinking hard more than mentoring someone about to embark on the first chapter of their career.
Coaching and mentoring has also become a superpower for my own leadership approach. It’s been so very useful to learn more about how to lean back, stop solving problems and create space in which colleagues can develop and be supported if needed. What I found out since I stopped running an organisation is that I never really stopped running an organisation, I just switched allegiances and now run my own instead. The CEO in me is second nature, and it’s fun to flex those muscles every now and then.
Confidence in the face of Unknown Unknowns
Career transitions are a bit like magic. A slight of hand. On the one hand everyone around you expects you to know what you are doing and how to get there, whilst also taking a leap of faith into the unknown. Not many are comfortable with you not knowing what’s next. And there are usually a lot of personal and practical circumstances at play, that determine how much freedom and for how long you can grant yourself to experiment.
And you fail and get rejected countless times along the way. Everyone does. It’s a necessary part of the process.
The book I found most helpful in navigating my own Unknown Unknowns is called “Working Identities” and I have blogged about it before. What really stayed with me from the book was the idea that you can’t think your way out of a career transition, particularly a big one. You have to work through it. It’s a process, it’s a practice, not a thought experiment.
Just like everyone else my own winding path through this transition looked different from what I expected and continues to surprise me. Every time I think I have it figured out, I realise I don’t. Or that there is another bit that doesn’t quite fit. Eventually I realised that this is it. I am doing it, and the process is what I am meant to be engaging it. It’s not a fault or an error that I don’t know exactly what the next year looks like. It’s part of doing what I am doing, part of being my own boss (and being my own employee, too).
And so, every week I am grateful and inspired and empowered by the process, by being my own boss and discovering new and interesting things. I love that I get to keep learning and developing and discovering and I get to pay the bills, too. I get to live and work by my values, shaped by what’s important to me and I get to give something back, too.
Thanks to all my clients and collaborators, and everyone in my networks for making this such an enjoyable new chapter in the story of my career.
