Category: Updates

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.

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.

Image credit: CC-BY Maren Deepwell. Sker Beach on the only blue sky day since early January.