‘Digital Skills for Emerging Leaders’ is a new micro-credential course from the Digital Learning Institute that I am working on together with the amazing Lynne Taylerson. It’s a super project to be involved in, and it’s extra special for me as I get a change to collaborate with Lynne outside of our other favourite project: AmplifyFE.
Usually we work on this kind of project at a distance, using the kind of digital skills we talk about in the course to collaborate and communicate. That said, there are also some precious hours of working together in person in the mix and so Lynne and I recently spent a day together recording videos and fine-tuning the course:
It was so fun to be able to do this together, a rarity for this kind of project, at least in my experience, and I am sure that will be reflected in the quality of the final product as well.
Today feels like a milestone day. The clock’s have changed here in the UK, it’s the last day of the first quarter of the year… spring is underway (if still a lot wetter than I’d like) and I am freshly returned from an inspiring week in Cork at the OER24 Conference. It’s also been six months now since I started working in my new ventures, over a year since my departure from ALT was announced… and I feel like I have landed in a new place.
From now on, I will still share updates on how I am doing, but maybe not as frequently. Things will continue to evolve no doubt, and that is both exciting and expected as I build this chapter of my life. I have a sense of having begun, to have arrived, here, in the new place. Tomorrow is Monday, and my plan for the day is to spend a lot of time thinking, planning and plotting, fitting in a run and a dog walk, as well as some much needed tidying of my domains, both domestic and digital.
So to wrap up this season’s podcasting and to celebrate this milestone, I have recorded a special episode, sharing some of the highlights of the past six months and also some things I am especially looking forward to. Happy listening 🙂
I am still in Cork, Ireland, as I write this post, feeling both tired and elated after a wonderful week at the OER24 Conference. My first time attending the conference as a delegate was a great experience, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!
The Co-Chairs, Dr Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin and Dr Tom Farrelly from the host institution Munster Technological University (MTU). led a fantastic effort together with ALT’s team headed up by Kerry Pinny, and the Conference Committee and MTU teams did everything to make the event such as success. Big kudos to all involved!
In the best tradition of the conference, you can explore:
as well as a host of slides, resources and images posted with the hashtag #OER24.
My OER24 highlights
Together with my colleague Meredith (Fierro) Huffman from Reclaim Hosting I did a short talk on Reclaiming #Edtech4life in Open Education. I blogged a preview of this a few weeks before the event, and Meredith blogged our talk complete with slides and a link to the full video version we recorded together with Jim Groom on her blog.
We had the best fun with this talk and it prompted los of questions and inspiring conversations, which is always the best bit of being able to hang out at conferences in person.
During Open Education Week earlier this month and in the run up to OER24 I got to take part in a number of virtual conversations (blog summary) and one of the best parts of this week that I was able to connect (and hug!) with so many colleagues in person, many for the first time since before 2020. That weeks like this are once more possible made my heart swell.
There were also many absent friends, who weren’t able to join the gathering, and this is where being in a conference full of people not afraid to jump onto the airwaves or the interweb and start an impromptu live broadcast of hallway chats really helps! One of the voices we missed amongst the chorus at OER24 was Jim Groom, who still managed to permeate many conversations and moments of people shouting “4life” from the back seats.
Jim published a wonderful blog post celebrating our visual anthology of Reclaim’s first decade with a tribute to That Mathers Aesthetic! … Needless to say that that aesthetic shone through the whole event, not least in the funny and stunning artwork Bryan created for it.
I hope my first time taking part as a delegate won’t be my last, as this year’s OER Conference has confirmed for me what I long knew to be true: this is my favourite conference, and it has been for a decade.
It’s small enough to allow for a sense of community and conversations, it’s big enough to always attract new voices and viewpoints, it’s special enough to inspire each year’s hosts to go yet another extra mile… and it’s important enough for an Association like ALT to put it’s weight behind it, year after year.
Most importantly, it’s loved enough to bring out the very best in everyone who takes part.
P.P.S. (A personal post script)
I leave Cork with much inspiration, a bag filled with small tokens of joy and friendship (thank you!) and a whole collection of stickers, as well as references, resources, ideas and a phone full of photos of smiling, hugging people.
In these (post) pandemic times I feel that opportunities for saying thank you, for recognising contributions and for celebrating big milestones are all too fleeting, few and far between. We are quick to move on to the next thing, to focus on the biggest challenges ahead. All the keynotes at OER24 reminded us of the bigger picture, the power of open to help us meet the moment, as Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz expressed this so beautifully.
So in the spirit of taking a moment to celebrate, I also leave with the memory of Rajiv Jhangiani helping us mark Martin Weller’s 30 years in edtech and his long service in both the conference and the wider community and it was a privilege to be able to experience that together with so many with whom Martin has worked and shared friendships with. Thank you OER24.
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It’s been 18 months since I first launched my podcast, and this academic year I have stepped up the pace with a new episode every week. 65 episodes later… I still enjoy the process of making the podcast and it’s been very, very useful for my professional practice. It’s also a (for me still relatively) new way to sharing my work and I have tried to find the right tone in this medium, tried to find my podcast voice.
In this post, I bring together things I have learnt along the way, and also ideas for what I’d like to try out next:
Getting started: Looking back at the first year on the podcast, the pattern of putting out episodes is erratic. Sometimes I published 5 episodes a month, other times it was only one. They all come out on different days, and the format and duration vary, from below 10 minutes to above 40. Season 1, which doesn’t have episode numbers, has 10 episodes. Season 2 has 21 and currently Season 3 is at 30+. It’s a bit of a mess… However, what matters to me is that I did it. I continued to record and release episodes, trying out different topics and formats, with guests and without. I now feel that I have a podcast, and I have made it part of my professional practice.
Choosing what to talk about: Just looking at the titles of various episodes gives you a clear indication that there are a whole range of topics I talk about. Here are some examples from across the three seasons:
25 hacks to make hybrid work 1% more comfortable
A party without a cake is just a meeting…
Career transition reflection – 3 months in
Some episodes are focused on coaching, and include more factual/how-to content whilst others are about leadership in hybrid workplaces and others again are updates on my work, celebrating milestones, reflective practice, radio… . The list goes on. What’s useful for me is that the podcast has become a reflection of my practice and leadership. That’s what I am interested in exploring, and it’s been helpful to acknowledge that as I find my voice.
Listening to other people’s podcasts provided all sorts of inspiration and I tried out different things with various episodes to feel out what might work for me. Importantly, it needs to be a topic I am interested in, and it needs to be useful to me. My podcast is a passion project, not something I get paid to do. It’s an element of my open practice and as such it’s useful to others (I hope) but it’s primary user is me.
An audience of one? In the early days of the podcast, it certainly was (an audience of one). I remember how excited I got when someone who could not be family & friends listened! It still makes me happy to hear that someone found an episode interesting or useful and yet I haven’t put a lot of effort into promoting the podcast. The platforms on which the podcast is registered offer all sorts of tools and resources to help you build your marketing campaign and expand your audience, which I must admit I have largely ignored up to now.
It’s an intentional choice on my part to keep the podcast a space to play and experiment with. Just like my blog, I want the podcast to be part of my domain, a page in my sketchbook if you like. I don’t want to monetise it even if I could. I am not interested in it becoming the next big podcast on hybrid working even if that opportunity arose. I want it to sit in the margins. A working, thinking space instead of a polished production.
With an organically growing audience, episodes now attract 30-50 listens on average.
Experiments in podcasting: Since I started the podcast, I have experimented with various projects: I used the podcast to record audio versions of key sections of my book Leading Virtual Teams; I have run two CPD courses using my podcast as the main platform to deliver course content and I have used the podcast to share career transition updates as I started my free-lance venture. It’s certainly been a bit of a mixed bag of approaches and that has resulted in me learning a lot along the way.
I appreciate that it may be frustrating to folks who are looking for regular episodes week in week out on a similar range of topics, and with a similar take on the format and I am sorry if experimenting with various aspects of the show makes it less enjoyable or less useful at times. For me, these experiments have been incredibly useful and rewarding, giving me space to try out ideas and new approaches on the journey to finding my podcast voice.
Things I learnt along the way:
Getting comfortable with recording conversations and structuring content
Recording intros and outros
Writing show notes and providing links to resources
Transcripts and automatic transcription
Registering a podcast on different platforms
The power of replay: Whilst many people dislike listening to their own voice, and I am not a huge fan of mine either, I do listen back to my own podcast episodes. I find it incredibly useful to replay my thoughts to help me refine my reflections and also to review how my thinking has changed. Just as listening back to a recording of me coaching with my coach trainer helps me identify ways in which I can improve as a coach and also identify what I am doing well and why it works; listening back to podcast episodes is extremely helpful for my professional development.
It’s also a bit nostalgic, particularly in the more personal/reflective episodes. Here I am, celebrating milestones and sharing tips for this and that whilst around me domestic chaos or work problems reign. There are episodes when I clearly had a cold and episodes when I can hear my dog Posey in the background wagging her tail or chewing on something noisy.
A note on the technology: I don’t have much know-how to share when it comes to podcasting tools and platforms. I have a wonderful mic that I can’t connect to my current computer, I use a browser-based, free tool to record my episodes which is just about to go out of service… and I live in a noisy environment where proper recording quality is harder to achieve than I’d like. In short, my set up is makeshift. When I sit down at my desk in the morning between meetings to record an episode, I am afraid there are no ambitions to have a recording set up beyond headphones.
I am fortunate to know many people in the Open Education community with brilliant podcasts and radio shows, many of whom have professional experience in this industry, much better placed to advise on anything technical and I salute them. I learn much from their example, even if that is not always evident in the audio quality of what I produce… .
Where next? I am very excited about continuing my podcasting adventures and I have ideas I want to try out come summer, and a break in my ‘regular’ schedule. I also need to learn how to record my episodes on a new platform, and I am definitely working on getting the good mic connected. Most of all, and regardless of any practical considerations, I am determined not to loose this space for open practice that I have opened up for myself. It’s another experiment in open leadership that has become important to me, and that in itself is a huge reward.
It’s not all about podcasting… there’s a newsletter you can subscribe to as well… (that’s another blog post).
Here is a snap-shot of today, 5 months into re-inventing Mondays:
This morning, a Monday morning, I woke up around half six. I got up, we had tea and the dogs had their breakfast. Around 8am I headed out with the dogs and for a change it wasn’t raining. We did a 5km route, down the river and back again. Not many people were out, but we said hello to the runners and cyclists we passed. Got back at quarter past nine, and shortly afterwards I was on the treadmill, for my first full 30 min run in a long time.
I got to my desk with coffee around half ten, after a shower and some household bits. Posey lay next to me, napping happily after her walk. We had some admin to tackle for a few hours, and got a lot of things sorted.
After lunch and a break, I spent the afternoon working on a project and reports, then I had an hour’s session with a fellow coach in the US, some more emails and… that was the end of my very peaceful Monday.
Not everyday is like today, and I am glad that there is both more excitement and more interaction with colleagues on a regular basis. Despite enjoying a slower day and the opportunity to spend more time outside or exercising, I wouldn’t like this level of quietude on its own. As part of a mix of days however, it is just what I was hoping for when I started this new phase of my career.
At the end of this month I’ll be hitting the six months milestone and there are a whole host of things that I have learnt along the way. Bills have been paid, projects have been completed, certificates have been gained and time has passed. I needed time to move on, to help me change my mindset from where I was last summer, and as we move into a new season I notice how much things have shifted for me. I have processed and reflected on how I got to where I am, and now I am on the cusp of writing a new chapter.
With spring and summer on the horizon, the new path I am taking is starting to feel a little less unfamiliar and there are some things that I am beginning to have longer term hopes for. Projects and people I am getting attached to, and organisations I particularly enjoy working with.
I am also discovering a less lonely way of working in a number of contexts. In my role as a CEO I often felt isolated and lonely. At the start when I first became a CEO, I found being everyone’s boss hard to get comfortable with and being in charge of decisions meant that plenty of people wanted my ear to convince me of their perspective. Representing a membership body was a huge privilege, and yet for me it also brought with it a lot of scrutiny from a range of stakeholders. It sometimes felt a bit like having lots of Line Managers and never being able to please them all.
Even when you have a lot of great people to collaborate with (and I often did!), there are plenty of worries and tasks that ultimately stay with you when you run an organisation and the buck stops with you. This is particularly true of a small one, in which you don’t have a big senior team or many directors to delegate to or consult with.
Moving to my current role, I no longer have that sense of being isolated. At the moment, I have a few projects where collaboration is happening, where partnerships are starting to form, and I am enjoying it immensely. Writing things together, figuring out solutions to problems, creating or organising activities and events… it’s refreshing for me not to always be in charge and instead have opportunities to collaborate on an equal footing, or indeed report to a client. It’s nice not to feel solely responsible for everything all of the time. It’s more than nice. It’s a huge relief.
Unsurprisingly, in the last few months, I have also found that when I need to step up and take responsibility, I have relished it. In my executive role I developed skills and capabilities that come in very useful indeed when a decision has to be taken or a crisis managed. I wasn’t quite sure whether dipping back into that aspect of leadership would feel like a burden, but it hasn’t. It’s felt interesting to see possibilities for taking on leadership responsibilities in a new way, different from how I would have operated in my previous organisation.
This is a really good example of why I wanted to have a change. This opportunity to reinvent myself a bit, to learn about myself and what I enjoy doing in new contexts, with new people and new organisations, feels so valuable. Fifteen years in one organisation meant that I grew up as a professional in only one context and I couldn’t think myself out of that perspective. Now that I have a change of scene, things look different indeed.
In these posts I have written frequently about uncertainty, and how the precariousness of starting over on a free-lance basis worries me at times. And despite the fact that these past few months have gone very well, that worry continues and it surfaces in unexpected ways. What I am learning as the months progress (and what for me sits on the other side of the uncertainty equation), is that the stories I tell myself, the habits I can’t break and the ones I don’t manage to make stick are not related to any particular role, but they come with me. Both good and bad.
This is where the collaboration + community angle comes in again. People around me, colleagues I am working with, are helping me to be accountable to take those breaks, to not work or think about work 24/7, and to get better at sharing how I am doing and what I am interested in. And so, I am re-discovering, reclaiming, the joy of what I am good at, what I can make happen and what I love doing.
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Image credit: CC-BY Maren Deepwell. Sker Beach on the only blue sky day since early January.
Time has flown by. It feels like only a moment ago that I was blogging about being 3 months into my career transition… and here we are, having passed the four month mark. Looking back at my previous posts on this topic has inspired me to share some updates about how things are going, how much my efforts to re-invent Mondays are bearing fruit and how free-lance life is treating me. In case you missed them, here are quick links to previous posts on this topic:
Not knowing what the following day, week or month would hold filled me with uncertainty during the first month of free-lance life. Although I had felt well prepared for not knowing what the day would bring, after all, life as a CEO was never predictable, I really felt it in those first few weeks. I remember recording a podcast in those early weeks, talking about my empty calendar, my empty inbox, the sense that it was really just me, sitting at my desk, alone, making it up as I went along.
Fast forward to now, and I am glad to say that I have begun to settle into uncertainty. The past few months have had many ups and downs and brought much time for reflection, and I realise now that I need the uncertainty just now. I don’t want to know what the next day or week will look like. The not knowing gives me space to experience and try out different ways of working and allows me to figure out what I enjoy and what I’d prefer not to do again.
A folder of things I have said no to
My mix of pro bono and paid work definitely keeps me busy, and I am probably overcommitting my time in the interest of trying out new things. I am mentoring at a local high school, offering pro bono coaching, writing articles and going to events alongside consultancy contracts, course design, leadership development and workshops.
I am on the hunt for what brings me joy, and what sparks my curiosity, and along the way I have plenty of experiences that teach me where I don’t feel I can contribute. Some things just aren’t a good fit, regardless of how lucrative they may be. Hence I have set up a new folder called literally ‘Things I have said no to’.
So far, it’s not very full, but the list is growing steadily, and I hope to use it in the long term to help learn what really matters to me, what fills my cup, and what I *could* have said yes to for money. It is a privileged position to be in for sure, but it is also a way of exercising responsibility. I can’t do everything, and I need to focus my energy where it matters.
Habits that work for me, and some that don’t
In some of the previous posts I have talked a lot about my work/life balance and that continues to be a big theme for me. Recently I worked on a course about digital wellbeing, and trying out the exercises I designed prompted me to focus on what habits I have that foster wellbeing and help manage my relationship with technology. Given how nuanced my relationship with technology is this is a complex topic, but one worth thinking about. Here are some insights into what I feel works well and also some things that maybe don’t:
Over the past four months, I have become A LOT BETTER at taking breaks. Breaks to step away from the screen, breaks from wearing headphones, from notifications, from social media, from email and from technology all together. This has all sorts of beneficial consequences. Take today. I had a pretty intense meeting, which demanded a lot of my attention and focus. Coming at the end of an already pretty busy morning of focused work, I ended the call with a headache. I felt tired, irritated. I got up, went downstairs, and had a drink of water. Stress headaches like that used to be quite a usual feature of my working life. Old me would have had a quick break, and then got back to work, trying to focus enough to ignore how my head felt. And it probably would have worked, but at the end of the day I would have felt spent, exhausted. Instead of returning to my desk, I took half an hour to do something different. I did a small DIY chore that had been on my to do list for ages, taking all my attention to sand and paint a small hole in the wall. Even after ten minutes my headache was gone, and I felt much better. I did go back to work after a while, feeling refreshed and ready to concentrate again. For me, that’s a win.
One area of my life where technology has become more prevalent is fitness. I usually find half an hour in the morning to exercise, stretch or meditate. I watch the video class on the screen in my office, where I have enough space to spread a yoga mat or follow the routines. My neighbours, I hope, aren’t watching my efforts at jumping jacks… . The fitness app I use works with my smart watch, and enables me to match exercise choices to my mood and energy levels. Some days I want to sweat, some days I just want to sit. For a variety of reasons, morning meetings have become rare for me just now, and this morning I stood in the sun in my office in tree pose, happy to soak in early spring sunshine and energy. Another win!
A habit that doesn’t work so well for me all the time is my CEO brain. It’s super helpful for running my free-lance business (and soon, a properly registered new company… more of that next month), and it’s equally valuable for leadership training and coaching and lots of other things. It’s helpful when I can help out, take responsibility as needed, and it can make working with me easy. I am so used to not breaking things, that I have become a very steady pair of hands. Unfortunately those steady hands are attached to a mind and heart that all too easily assume responsibility and care, too. I catch myself solving a problem or thinking about a strategy that my clients haven’t asked for. They may be paying me to design a workshop or a course, meanwhile I have revamped their professional development offering in my head. Coaching is a good antidote for CEO brain, as it’s trained me to place trust in the other person, to trust that they know or can find their path, or the solution to the problems facing them. And of course they do. They are creative and capable and amazing at doing what they do. As my own free-lance venture grows, I hope that I can utilise my CEO brain in good ways, without taking on responsibility beyond what is appropriate.
On my wish-list
At the start of embarking on this adventure my wish-list ran something like: make enough money to pay the bills, find more joy and balance. Along the way I unexpectedly acquired a record player for my study (yay!) and a lot more fun people to work with than I had imagined in those first few quiet weeks. Over the past few months my list has expanded and now includes: a sit/stand desk, more art for my work-space and a wall I can write and scribble on.
The thing that isn’t on my wish list anymore is more joy. That’s definitely happening and I am grateful every day for this adventure and all the amazing people I get to work with every week.
