Maren Deepwell

Category: leadership

  • Reframing Career, Success and Personal KPIs.

    Reframing Career, Success and Personal KPIs.

    A couple of things that have been percolating in my mind over the past couple of weeks have come together: the reflective post in which I shared a story of my career prompted me to think more about where I am heading and why; then I completed the review of my tech stack which made me focus on whether I have the right tools for the work I want to do and what that is… ; and thirdly I have been preparing for the next run of my hybrid working leadership course (incidentally, if you’d like to join us, register before 26 May), which includes a topic about how to find your own measures of success.

    My Directors Report

    I also should mention that I write my Directors Report for my business every 3-4 month, which is a good exercise in reflecting on and tracking progress, and also prompts me to articulate exactly what I have achieved and why that matters. Which is where the reframing idea comes in, because my report applies metrics of success at different levels.

    I started with the measures I was familiar with from my years as a CEO, with Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, related to financial goals, operational requirements and risk management. I set out a business plan that I review each year, and each year I review, update and refine short, medium and long term goals. This way of thinking gets me to focus on the performance of my micro business, which is useful but not everything I am interested in.

    There is also a question of how well I perform and develop in my business, including the feedback I get from coaching or consultancy clients, the impact my mentoring and outreach work has, the research and publications I produce and the professional development I undertake. Many of the things I spend time on, such as attending events or writing a new book were not initially covered in my reporting, and yet they are important elements of what I view as success.

    Partly why I track these elements is to have a record of how my career choices contribute to my personal KPIs, and how I can evolve year on year.

    Before we go further, I just want to emphasise that I’m thinking about my career or my work as in professional practice. Over the course of my working life that has included paid work, funded work, unpaid work and everything in between. I don’t really conceptualise my work in terms of a main (day) job and side hustles, paid and unpaid work. However you think about these things, the approach can still work, you just need to adjust your mental picture accordingly.

    Reframing with metaphor

    I found it difficult to articulate all of this in the graphs or tables my report initially contained, and so I used a metaphor to help me reframe how I think about the different levels of success I aim to achieve and what they mean to me. What I came up with is a menu of drinks: a glass of water, a cup of coffee and a cocktail.

    A glass of water (nourishing success)

    The glass of water, big, cool and refreshing, is the biggest element. It contains within it everything fundamental that my work has to provide to keep me financially, socially, physically and mentally healthy. Contained in my glass of water for example, is money to pay the bills, to have a purpose and to have a reasonable work/life balance. Other things that I might include here is having a safe place to work and to have adequate benefits.

    A cup of coffee (energising success)

    Next up is an aromatic cup of coffee (or your preferred equivalent) that represents everything that gives me energy. Activities like attending events or collaborating with colleagues that spark my creativity, or projects that allow me to increase my impact and make a difference. In my case, I would include things like recording my podcast, blogging and writing in my coffee category, as all of these are energising elements of my practice, without being essential. I also find joy in the degree of flexibility I have, giving me time for walking the dog or going for a run during the day and that in turns allows me to work with greater productivity and drive the rest of the day.

    A cocktail (sprinkling gold dust success)

    For the cocktail (or mocktail!), I am thinking of a beautiful glass garnished with an umbrella and colourful fruit, a drink perfect for a moment of celebration! The cocktail embodies those special moments in my working life that make everything worth it. For me, I would include things like publishing a book, giving an exciting keynote, travelling somewhere new for an event, or having the chance to work with people I love and connect with. It’s moments that are sprinkled like gold dust over the years, giving everything an extra shine.

    Success Reframed and Personal KPIs

    I find it super helpful to think about what success means to me and how I can quantify it in this way, as it reminds me why things are important and what role they play in my life. If I get the things that nourish me and keep my life going in a very practical sense, things like saving for my pension or finding time to exercise, then that enables me to have more capacity to enjoy activities that I find energising.

    Similarly, if the only things that feel good are big highlights that are few and far between, i.e. if my metaphorical work diet consists only of cocktails and the occasional cup of coffee, but the foundation is all wrong, then my work becomes unsustainable in the long term and doesn’t serve me no matter how glitzy the high points may be.

    This kind of reframing also enables me to set out more specific personal measures for how what I do contributes to what I want to achieve long term, and to find balance between things that are fundamentally nourishing, energising and sparkly.

    My personal KPIs are not about how well my business performs or how much I achieve, but how well what I do works FOR ME. How well does how I work, what I do and so forth contribute to my life in terms of nourishing me, energising me and bringing my sparkly moments of joy and inspiration?

  • Having a Career

    Having a Career

    When I came across Kin Lane’s post Having a Career I felt inspired. His post prompted me to think about whether it’s worth having a career, and what that means, and if it matters. These words in particular chimed with me:

    However, now I see having a career is about me. It is about owning my own professional narrative as much as I possibly can. I consider a career adjacent to entrepreneurship or running your own business, but it is something that will span multiple businesses, and give you much more control over the work you do and the money you make. A career is about me. It isn’t some category on a college aptitude test. My career isn’t chosen for me. 

    Thanks to this inspiration, I’ve been trying to create a story about my career, and tried to make a drawing, too. That proved trickier than I had anticipated, because I started to plot my journey along a rough timeline that started in the mid 90s with summer jobs and somehow portrayed the next three decades as a linear progression. Which it wasn’t.

    Similar to Kin’s younger self, 17 year old me wanted no career. 17 year old me wanted to live a life which was authentically mine. I felt the world deeply as a young person, and it poured out of me in writing poetry, plays, novels, art, music and a lot of difficult behaviour. That I was academically able and got good grades made early adolescence easier, but eventually I outgrew my ability to fit into a regular school system. It must have been very difficult for my family and friends to make sense of my behaviour. It was very difficult to for me. I had no idea how to navigate life. Thanks for leaving school at an unconventional time, without sitting the traditional exams at 16 or at 18, I never ended up having career’s advice and made up my own instead.

    From that point on, my list of jobs started in earnest: I had every bar, cafe and restaurant job London’s service industry would offer a young immigrant with broken English. I graduated to working in bookshops, cinemas, shops, and eventually in bilingual marketing and market research. I had a job once that only paid me in tips (which took me months to realise. Once I did, I left with the whole tip jar after one very good Saturday night never to return).

    From 17 to 32 I mostly worked at whatever job I could to fund my education. Having left secondary school I discovered that there was a whole world of learning out there, and London, and later Athens, and even later Oxford, offered me every opportunity. Looking back it now seems implausible that I worked 40 hours and studied full-time as an undergraduate and later as a Masters stundet, but I loved it! Studying first design, then art and then anthropology allowed me to explore my curiousity and challenge my mind, spending days in the libraries and museums. I was lucky that I always managed to get scholarships to fund my fees (this being an era of education in which that was still possible).

    In 2004 life changed for 3 glorious years, thanks to a full AHRC PhD scholarship that enabled me to give up work. I recall the moment I found out exactly. I was on my way to work in a cafe in West London and picked up my post in the student hall where I had rented a room in for the summer. Gower Street was hot, noisy and there was no lift between my single room on the top floor (shared bathrooms) and the laundry room in the basement. I opened the letter on my way to the bus stop and right there and then, life changed. I resigned my job that day and that September I started to be a proper full-time student for the first time, with spare time to go to seminars and lectures in the evenings, and student bars, too, of course.

    It was during those years that I started working with more intention, finding jobs as a archive admin, then as a teaching assistant and as a Moodle admin at my university. As my funded years came to an end, job hunting to fund the final year of my PhD began again, and I found an admin role in a nearby university in Oxford. The deciding factor that convinced me to take the job was that I could walk to the office. Writing up my PhD in the Radcliffe Camera library sounds romantic, and it was certainly a lovely environment to work in, but it also came with a problem: I didn’t want to be an academic. My interest in my research topic had been genuine, but had been satisfied. It offered no clues as to what might be next, and so my admin summer job gradually turned into a manager role, which turned into a more senior manager role. As a side hustle I started to work as a researcher and consultant on projects. I was hungry to learn and quick to figure things out, which made me a good contractor. A few years later I decided to apply to become the CEO of the organisation I was working for, and for the next 12 years that (mostly part-time) role and my continued work as a consultant turned into a very fulfilling career.

    In my early years being a CEO I often struggled to explain to people how I had ended up in the role with a PhD in cemeteries, a degree in art, a penchant for making stuff and evidently little leadership experience. A young immigrant and a women to boot. No one had ever heard of me and my story didn’t really make sense. Working hard and being good at what I did eventually helped establish my place.

    Being a CEO of a small not-for-profit that employed fewer than 10 staff and often just 5, and turned over around half a million pounds a year (and sometimes much less) offered me the opportunity to learn a bit of everything, from finance and HR to governance and operations. It also offered me lots of opportunities to get involved in activities and communities, and to work for something that aligned with my values and that made a difference. I developed a much greater appreciation for the ethical dimension of work, of having a career. It let me experience what it’s like to have a (small) platform, and helped me develop my voice.

    As my interest in leadership and mentoring developed and I started to train as a coach and write my first book, a new chapter in my career story started. I began to re-invigorate my freelance work, which during the pandemic had dried up, and started a period of transition, letting go of one role and building a new one. I started to plan out more books I want to write, and began to sketch out a new vision for better work life balance and more independence once again.

    To many people the move didn’t make sense. It wasn’t a step up, a move to running a bigger organisation, building on what I had achieved in a smaller organisation. My pension provision agreed with them. Depending on my own little venture at this stage was (and is) risky. But it felt and still feels right to me.

    Making sense of the story so far sounds something like this in my own head:

    I started out looking for things that interested me and would challenge me. I gained some knowledge and skills, and found a lot of interesting things. So I put those capabilities to use and see what else I could do. Then I found that I could make a positive difference to others, and poured my energy into making that happen. Eventually, when I felt I needed more balance, and to spread my energy across more areas of my life, new interests led to new goals and a wish to fulfil some bigger dreams; like writing books and getting a dog and living near the sea.

    And so, I started to put together the building blocks for a small, independent business venture that would help me fulfil these and other dreams, whilst doing work that makes a positive difference in the world and aligns with my values. It makes perfect sense to me, even if on a day to day basis it remains equal parts imagination and profitable job.

    This summer it’ll be 28 years since a young Maren climbed the steps from the tube station up into the streets of London, carrying a duffel bag, a pillow and a role of The Cure posters (and an open ticket to fly home anytime, because my parents thankfully had more sense than I did).

    At the time I felt the urgency of life deeply. I thought time to be my true self would run out when I reached the (what I then thought) calm and boring reaches of adulthood, of middle age. I think my younger self would be relieved (if disbelieving) to learn that existential dread and big questions still float around my head every day, even though I have become a lot better at managing daily life. I like to imagine that 17 year old me would LOVE my dog Posey, and would appreciate that I have managed to publish my first book, and being on my way to the second.

    I am not sure what I thought “success” would look like when I was 17. Money or status has never driven me, even though I have always safeguarded my financial independence. Ethics and values are important to me, as is making a difference. The best I way I have to explain it is a metaphor:

    For years and years I’ve kept sketchbooks filled with writing, drawing, sketches, pictures and small mementos. The process of keeping the sketchbook is much more important than individual pages, and often I might find a little gem flicking through the pages years later. I still have a lot of my sketchbooks, and I treasure them. They are the best metaphor for how I imagine my career, and what makes it successful in my mind. Having a career, for me, is like a sketchbook. I fill pages and pages, and over the years these amount to a substantive amount of work, of me. Looking back, there are gems and there are duds, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I follow my curiousity in order to create and contribute.

  • Re-inventing Mondays Revisited

    Re-inventing Mondays Revisited

    I set out to change my working life about 18 months ago, starting my own micro business, and it’s been a while since I checked in with progress. I’ve previously blogged about my efforts to re-invent Mondays, but time flies when you are having fun, so let’s jump into the update.

    A bit like in a romantic comedy, career change narratives often focus on making a decision or leading up to a big change. Then, when the new life or new job has been secured, what follows is more of a montage of what the new reality looks like, as our heroine happily cycles to work through a picturesque village, opening the little bakery she’s set up in the community she’s now part of. Or there’s a sunrise picture of a former workaholic CEO paddle boarding before undertaking meaningful work for a social enterprise. So far, so cliché.

    My own version of the story goes as follows: Eighteen months in, I am still running my small, yet perfectly formed, venture, and I am just about to close my second full financial year as Maren Deepwell Coaching & Consultancy. My work is also still split between executive coaching and consultancy, pretty evenly.

    Working in the not-for-profit sector for 15 years has indoctrinated me so far into transparent governance that I even write my own Director’s Report every 4 months, reporting (to an audience of 1 human and 2 dogs) on progress against KPIs, which include financial and operational figures together with logs of how much I have worked and impact measures.

    One of the biggest bonuses of having a lot of CEO experience is that now being in charge of my own business comes easily, and I love being my own boss even if it brings with it a lot of headaches and risks to manage.

    Daily, weekly and monthly routines have started to establish themselves, and I am finding myself happily anticipating a busy month or a quiet period because there is some joy in knowing what to expect and it is much easier now that it was in the first few months to anticipate what the week might bring.

    Recording the podcast, compiling the newsletter, blogging… these and other activities bring shape to my days, and I have a reliable system of reminders scheduled and repeating that remind me to do things like catch up with financial paperwork, schedule CPD sessions or document coaching hours.

    I’ve also managed to get my non-work routines established: a hart fought road back to running has seen me complete my first 10k of the year a few weeks ago, and I have a few more in the pipeline for April and June.

    Alongside running and the dog walks, yoga has made a return to my life over the past year, and I am now more able than before I keep a regular practice.

    Even a bike has been purchased second-hand, and one some mornings I cycle into town or to the library, merrily ding, ding, ringing my bell.

    It’s not all montage material, however, because of course running a business like this is precarious, particularly in these uncertain times, and there are days when nothing happens and no one responds to my emails. When there’s not enough work or I don’t do as much as I’d like to have done.

    I can’t imagine leaving my home working life any time soon. Maybe there’ll be a time when I will get itchy feet and look for something different, but at the moment, the working life I have built for myself is taking shape and the shape fits. Mondays are no longer dreaded days of stressful meetings. More often than not, my week now starts with no meetings and a dog walk instead, and I am very grateful indeed that I have found a way of working that satisfy my creative curiosity and also pays the bills. Long may it continue.

  • My #FemEdTech Years and what’s next

    My #FemEdTech Years and what’s next

    It’s International Women’s Day this week, and this has coincided with the closure of the original femedtech account on Twitter. Looking back at my engagement over a number of years made me pause and reflect on how I can now continue championing equality and how this shows up in my work.

    Leadership

    One of the things I gained during my years as a CEO was a bigger perspective, and a focus on the systems and structures that shape the way we work as individuals and organisations. I focused on promoting equity and equality not just in my own organisation, but in the sector I worked in, and used my voice to amplify issues such as the gender pay gap, lack of career progression opportunities and awareness of diversity, inclusion and equity in a wider context.

    All those things continue to inform my work, and if anything I am now more able to be part of grass roots activities that focus on positive change as social and political shifts increase pressure.

    I have hope, I have my voice and I continue to work away in my sphere of influence to affect the change I want to see. Although the world in general, and my small world specifically, have moved on a lot since the beginning of the #femedtech activities, the values that are at the heart of the project, for me at least, remain true. To me, it continues to be a powerful reminder, equality matters for everyone.

    Ethical and open practice

    One of the things I became very interested in over the past fifteen years is how to have an ethical, open approach to practice in leadership roles. I used this topic as a focus when I gained my Senior CMALT accreditation, and I continue to focus on this in my professional development as a coach.

    Working with leaders from across different sectors has helped me realise how much we all have in common when it comes to the struggles of being an open leader and as a coach I help my clients see those shifts in perspective that enable them to move forward with their work in an authentic and meaningful way.

    Pro bono work and volunteering

    Even though I now run my own micro business instead of having a more dependable “day job” I continue to do work on a pro bono basis, offering for example free coaching packages and places on my courses, and I continue to volunteer as for example a mentor for school students and emerging leaders at the start of their career.

    To celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8th, and I am busy writing letters to celebrate and thank all the inspirational women in my life! 

    This year’s theme is Accelerate Action, and I am offering three pro bono coaching packages to contribute something to this effort. So if you are looking to progress an action, take a decision or make change happen, then get in touch if you’d like to work with me. 

    As I am reading this I am wondering if such comparatively small actions can make a difference. I worry about whether I do enough and how I could do more. No, offering some free coaching to charity leaders or Higher Ed researchers won’t change the world, but it does make a difference. All of us do, in innumerable small ways. There’s hope in these small acts and for me that is the legacy of my femedtech years. Hope is a practice. And I am doing it.

    Looking back at my #FemEdTech Years

    For nearly a decade the #femedtech community has been a big part of my professional world. For many years I was one of the volunteers who curated the social media feed for a month a year, and helped with some of the work behind the scenes. It takes a lot of work to sustain a community and I deeply appreciate having had the opportunity to be an active part of this particular network, bringing together so many of my interests and value.

    Posts from my stints as a volunteer curator

    • 2023: Handing over lead curation
    • 2022 care and curation
    • 2021 still in pandemic times
    • 2020 during the early days of lockdown
    • 2019 my second time as a guest curator
    • 2018 when I first volunteered

    The connections I made during those years sustained much of the momentum during years of global crisis in 2020 and 2021, and all that has happened since then. In many ways this community was a frontrunner of the distributed, federated conversations we are now trying to sustain across networks. It showed just how much care it takes to weave together a (literal and figurative) quilt, to bring together voices that speak for equity and social justice and to amplify those values across the open web.

    I’d encourage to to explore (or revisit) what’s been published on the FemEdTech Open Space and be inspired by the thoughts shared there: reflecting on collective voices, claiming open education as a feminist space, a pedagogy of care and… the moment at which many of us were able to meet the FemEdTech Quilt in person for the first time. Head over to Flickr to see the photos from the event and read more about this wonderful project in the blog post.

    Thank you to each and every one who took part in all the inspiring and empowering #femedtech activities since 2016. It’s been a privilege to be part of the community.

    Listen to the podcast episode

  • Permission to be unproductive

    Permission to be unproductive

    Today is a slow day. I am feeling uninspired and un-motived. My energy levels are low. In my years as a CEO I had plenty of days like that, but very rarely gave myself permission to be unproductive. CEOs, and people in positions of power in general, like to think of themselves as too busy to pause, as indispensable. Being busy is a badge of honour for others to take note of. And so, as a young leader, finding my own path, I followed that example, pushing through days like this and becoming very, very good at coping and at looking capable no matter what the day, week or year brought.

    It’s a great skill to have, and one that I rely on often, but no longer all the time. Because if there’s anything I’ve learnt since I took on that first senior leadership position in 2012, it’s that being too good at coping doesn’t benefit anyone. It doesn’t benefit the organisation as in the long term it becomes unsustainable, it doesn’t benefit those around you because they don’t learn the skills or gain the confidence to succeed without you and most importantly it doesn’t serve you.

    Giving yourself permission to be unproductive, in whatever shape or form, is a skill I am actively seeking to acquire. Since starting my own business and decreasing my level of responsibility from generating enough turnover to pay salaries for 10 to having to generate only enough income to meet my own aims, I have worked very hard at giving myself permission to work less. To take days off. To step away from the screen, from emails, calls and the pressure to be successful, and to be seen to succeed.

    I became a CEO at 32, and I worked so hard at being taken seriously, to establish myself as an effective leader in my field, that I never even considered working less. I lived and breathed and loved my work. My physical, mental and social health did not love the choices I was making and as the years went on, my body made me listen.

    This week I am coaching a staff cohort at the University of Oxford in healthy habits for hybrid working, and one of the topics we spent most time on is how to manage feelings of guilt, of anxiety and of worry about being perceived as hard-working, and as productive, especially on days of working from home. Even when there was an explicit or general understanding that breaks were encouraged and taking exercise or stepping away was seen as desirable, the pressure to perform and meet (one’s own or others’) expectations remained strong. So the question we explored was: “What would it take to make it OK?” How can we build the habits needed to make high performing hybrid work sustainable?

    I thought that the answer lies in the job I have, which is partly why I started my own venture. What I learnt since is that the kind of practices I now adopt to find balance would have been perfectly possible in my CEO role. I just couldn’t see it, and I needed to step outside of the confines of the role for that shift of perspective to happen.

    Sure, there are days when things are truly urgent, and when you do have to show up, push through and get the job done. But even in these times of permanent crisis, this is not the case each and every day. More often than not, nothing at all would happen if we didn’t show up for a meeting or delayed a deadline by a day or a week or even a month. There is always more work to be done, new deadlines to meet and more demands on our time than we can meet.

    I don’t want to seek the solution to this in increasing my productivity. I am productive enough. Instead I want to find reward and joy in not being productive on days like this, when my body tells me to take it easy.

    Choosing to do less

    At times throughout my career I have had periods, at times long ones, where being as productive as I wanted to be simply wasn’t possible. Whether due to ill health, care responsibilities or simply life happening, I’ve been through months and years of having to rethink what’s achievable. It was the hardest thing for me to change my thinking from looking forward to new challenges and delighting in being able to solve complex problems and to throw all my energy and ingenuity into the fray; to suddenly having to manage my energy very carefully. My reserves were low, and I had to learn the art of appreciating the “good enough” and of thinking “that will do” instead of following my inner perfectionist.

    Being in a situation when choice is taken away is always hard. What I am writing about here isn’t really about what to do in those kinds of contexts, when ill health or circumstances or crisis strike. In my experience there is some overlap however, between trying to make a choice to do less and having to do less out of necessity, and I like to think that I would have coped better in times of having less choice if I had been better at giving myself permission to do less all together. Choosing to do less, to be less frantically busy all the time, is both a privilege and a radical choice.

    Is this the time?

    It feels a bit precious to be writing about rest in times like these, when so many truly urgent issues are arising. Rest is radical, as Lou Mycroft so eloquently put, and this feels especially true in the face of global political and social changes, and the funding cuts in the not for profit and education sectors I work in. And yet it feels relevant, and important, to learn how to differentiate between the demands of a busy work life and the work that really needs doing. Becoming ever more digitally productive in measurable ways is not the answer. Giving yourself permission to be unproductive feels important and I know the difference between being selfish and practising self care.

    The indigo girl’s sing that “darkness has a hunger that’s insatiable” and those words feel particularly relevant at this time in history. The harder the Broligarchy works to enforce digital measures of productivity and oversight as the path to (their) success, the more we need to keep in mind that being productive ≠ profits.

    I was inspired by a recent post Kin Lane published, which reflects on what happens when we see people as resources. It’s rare to have someone with that wealth of leadership experience utilise their story-telling skills to help us think through the pitfalls of digital productivity, and I am grateful indeed for Kin’s voice. Likewise, I’ve found much inspiration in the Permission Slip with which Bryan gave himself, and all of us, permission to create something, regardless of what others think. I was lucky enough to take part in one of Bryan’s zine making workshops recently, and found it (surprisingly) powerful. Although I draw and create much, Bryan’s way of guiding us into the process helped me pen a small adventure (the humble pencil “HB” in an epic struggle against the AI “Intelli-Pen”) in a different voice. A voice I rather liked.

    The concept of the permission slip, a powerful tool for all sorts of contexts, I first came across in Elizabeth Gilbert’s ode to creativity in her book Big Magic, and it’s been inspiring my recent work on walking as a reflective practice, and finding your own “critical cadence“.

    Strategies that work for me

    This post isn’t meant to be a “how to” post, and I am wary of the toxic visions of “having it all” lives, when time away from work just turns into more work of curating the perfect family, home, body and so on. I don’t want to add to that, but if you are trying to tune in to when you need to stop and are wondering how to actually do that, so that you focus on something other than your inbox or notifications of unread messages, below I have shared some strategies that work for me as I unlearn my decade long habit of over-working.

    • Tune in to your body: moving my body is a short-cut to getting out of my head. In my case what works best is walking, yoga, running.
    • Focus on joy in small things: Calm is key for me, and the easiest way to slow down during the day for me is to focus on small things, and their little rituals. Making fresh coffee, arranging some flowers from the garden, making simple food from scratch. I find a lot of joy in small things, and I delight in the quotidian.
    • Fun flow state: I am lucky in that I am good at concentrating and I find it easy to work in a flow state. My issue is more with loosing track of time and my physical needs because I am too focused on work. Trying to work less made me miss that feeling, that fun flow state. It took a good while, but I found an activity recently that enables me to dip into a flow state and relax completely, whilst working creatively with my hands. I build tiny book nooks and models of flower shops made of wood, paper and wire. I don’t particularly treasure the models once they are finished, but it’s a wonderful hobby.
    • Do something you don’t need to track or measure: anything I can track or measure comes with inbuilt expectations of progress, and even where that’s not the case, I usually find myself imposing some of my own volition. In order to stop myself from setting expectations, I focus on activity I don’t track. Reading physical books, walking my dogs, writing letters. I have no idea how many letters I have sent in the past year for example, and that’s just fine. I write one whenever I feel like it.
    • Be explicit about giving yourself permission: I find it difficult to relax whilst I feel I should be working. My solution to that problem is to write it down. I keep a record of how many hours or days I take off, whether it’s for being unwell or just not doing paid work, and I track it over time. This way, I can be very explicit with myself (and others) about when I am not doing things.

  • A thank you… for 2024

    A thank you… for 2024

    It’s been quite a year. My first full calendar year running my own micro business. My year of getting back into running. Of travelling more, and working a little less. My year of counting days spent on the beach and following the golden seam of creativity to wherever it may lead.

    Amidst all the ups and downs in my own life, my professional communities and the world at large, here I am at the end of the year, (nearly) ready to down tools and cosy up for Christmas by the sea.

    A big thank you to each and every one of you reading this, sharing a bit of my year, from blogging and book writing to coaching and consultancy.

    It’s been a real joy to collaborate and coach with you all these past twelve months, as my professional practice expanded to a new group coaching course and workshops as well as a conference on the airwaves!

    I have had the opportunity to do research and start writing on my next book as well as reports and articles, go to events and conferences.

    Snapshots from 2024, starting top left: Coaching moment, visit at Oxford University with Emma Procter-Legg, launching my leadership course, working with Physiospace in Cardiff, OER24 Conference catch ups in Cork, Ireland, more catch ups at OER24 with Leigh Wolff, and lunch with Anne-Marie Scott and Meredith Huffman, publicity shot with Lynne Taylerson, me in action giving a talk with Martin Weller.

    Looking back at the year, it’s certainly been a busy one! Here are some highlights:

    I am curious to see what the new year might bring… hopefully more opportunities to collaborate and work on projects with amazing people alongside time to develop my coaching and courses. There are a few things planned and in the works already, but certainly room for new things, too, so ping me if you have an idea 🙂

    Here’s to whatever 2025 may bring!

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