Search results for: “mentoring”

Every Monday I am glad to be my own boss

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.

24/03/2026
There and back again.

This week I have spent a lot of time on trains. Monday: Cardiff – Sheffield. Tuesday: Sheffield – Edinburgh. Wednesday: Edinburgh. Thursday: Edinburgh – Glasgow. Friday: Glasgow – Cardiff.

It’s been a joy to connect with colleagues and friends around the edges of a rewarding work trip and I made extra time to see more and connect with some of my favourite people who I haven’t seen in person for a long time. Work travel, when it’s not a weekly chore, turns out to be a lot more enjoyable when you can combine these different elements into one trip.

I used to travel a lot and was very used to working on the train, and this week reminded me of all the skills I don’t practice as frequently these days. Typing on my lap, tuning out the busy train, and getting things done before arriving at my destination for the day (although I must admit I am getting distracted as I am typing this, as outside the sun has come out momentarily and the beautiful and dramatic landscape of the Lake District is passing by my train window). It was good to be able to keep in touch with my work at Reclaim and complete some assessments whilst on the road.

Like the travel, in person meetings and facilitation was a really rewarding experience. It was a welcome contrast to much of my work online to connect, coach and communicate in person. The venues for work this week couldn’t have been more different: I visited the Edinburgh Futures Institute, and enjoyed use of a quiet study space to catch up on emails. It’s all tall ceilings, beautiful materials and unexpected views. It’s a lovely juxtaposition to the historic elements of the building and although it cost A LOT to build, it is clearly loved by the buzzing student population that has made a home here.

Outside view of a student space in the Edinburgh Futures Institute

My main work day, a day of leadership coaching and facilitation, took place in the spectacular St Leonard’s Hall, situation just at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. I always relish the opportunity to facilitate strategy or away days and designing these is a lot of fun, as well as challenging. Working with the team here combines my interest in coaching and educational technology, so it is one of my favourite engagements of the year already.

Thank you to Melissa Highton and her team for having me back again 🙂

The historic facade of St Leonard’s Hall

It was lucky indeed that many of my former colleagues from my ALT days found time for a coffee or even dinner, and it was fabulous to see my long-time co-blogger Martin Hawksey and Simon Horrocks complete with the rather famous Bailey (he is even cuter in “pawson”) in Edinburgh, as well as Joe Wilson, Sheila MacNeill and Lorna Campbell in Glasgow.

It’s invigorating and feels important to swap tales of what it’s like to work in education and technology in 2026, and have a chance to talk about all the things that Zoom meetings just don’t seem to be suited for.

My trip began with a long-overdue visit to my first mentor, Margaret Bennett, with whom I worked for many years when I first became a CEO. We met in a cafe in Sheffield, in exactly the same spot as we first met in 2012. Margaret has been an enormous inspiration to me throughout my career, and her incredible support for me as a leader has certainly had a lot to do with me stepping into coaching and mentoring EdTech leaders and leadership teams on a professional basis.

Ending January on a high inspired by such varied professional and social interaction has encouraged me to plan more such trips for the coming year, and reminded me powerfully just how much I sometimes miss the energy of in person interaction. More blogging to come on that topic in the coming months, I am sure.

I hope your January has had some bright spots, too.

30/01/2026
2025. My (handmade) year in review

I love writing these end of year posts and I have been doing it for quite a few years: 2024 focused on gratitude, 2023 on my (then new) business venture, 2022 I looked back at 10 milestones, 2021 – the year of the PUPPY – had a lot packed into it and 2020, well, you will remember your own 2020. I wrote two posts in December that year: 2020 #altc – the year forged in fire and 2020 – My year in blog posts, on radio and in drawings .

So what about this year?

I’ve used these close up photos of paintings I’ve been working on this year as a theme for my post, a triptych of a post if you like, to capture the three themes of my year: Joy. Creativity. Focus.

Horizon

Seascape

Beach at sunset

Joy

When I think back to January 2025… I probably wouldn’t have guessed that joy would be one of the themes to come out of my review post at the end of a year filled with unhinged politics, unfettered use of AI and so much upheaval everywhere you look. And still, the joy is undeniable. I’ve done much this year that has been so rewarding, from regular beach trips and travel abroad to getting married again and spending time with family and friends. My year as a pen pal has been prolific and one of the greatest joys of the year was the house filled with postcards and letters from friends all across the world wishing us well on our wedding day.

I’ve accomplished a long-term goal to get back into running, and managed to complete several 10k races over the last 12 months. This in turn brought about a spontaneous decision to fulfil a big dream of mine next year: running the Vancouver Half Marathon. Come May 2026, my husband and I will both be standing on the starting line, hopefully with quite a few friends joining us, too. I’ve been meaning to return to Vancouver ever since my first visit in 2019, and I can’t wait to be in BC once again.

These moments of joy have been so precious, and I am grateful indeed for the friends, family and four-legged creatures that have shared those moments with me (even very early in the morning).

Creativity

As you have no doubt gathered already from my posts this year, I have been having an exceptionally creative year, from analogue adventures in painting, drawing, crafting, embroidery and model building to digital creation, writing, making and designing. I have flexed the skills I gained in art school, and put the DIY tools my dad gave me to good use. I also commandeered a second desk (my so called “weekend desk”) so that I (finally) have a space to be messy again, to leave things to be picked up and continued later. I can’t tell you how good it feels.

To give you a sense of what these projects have been, here is a summary of some of the things I have made this year: a book nook, a flower shop model, a garden shed model, hand embroidered Christmas stockings, acrylic paintings on canvas, watercolour drawings on paper, several dozen digital artworks, an illustrated digital story, started a new book (non-fiction), wrote several short stories, a year long (12 module) postcard based coaching subscription complete with custom made postcards that I sent all across the world, many talks, presentations, workshops, blog posts, podcasts, radio shows, playlists, a vinyl yoga practice, lots of new recipes and even more DIY in the form of newly painted rooms, garden furniture and… well, I think you get the idea.

Suffice to say that I have poured a lot of creative energy into the world, in an effort, to “let creativity eat the darkness“. I have done much to shape the world with my imagination and to populate my world with things that are made by me. Which is why the title of the post refers to the handmade year of 2025.

Focus

The year has been filled with joyful moments and with a lot of time devoted to creativity. It has also been a year of clear focus and much progress. Focus on my business and my professional practice. Now in its third year of being my full-time job, my business has evolved and become more robust and tangible.

Like everyone else I’ve found the uncertainty level in Higher Education and every other sector I work in rather dampening, making it harder to find work and putting everyone under pressure. That said, my efforts in developing my offering and my company of one have paid dividend and building in more focus and flexibility has proven very effective, too.

I’ve had many professional highlights this year, including an unexpected but most welcome award of Honorary Life Membership from ALT, a community which means so much to me. Being part of the ALT Wales Member Group and continuing my work as a Senior CMALT Assessor enables me to keep up with current practice in Learning Technology and Open Education, and connect with this wonderful network.

Also, I am excited to have become a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts this year (and can how add “FRSA” to my list of post-nominal letters on LinkedIn ;)). It’s such a rewarding and interesting community to be part of, and I am looking forward to getting stuck in as a mentor in the mentoring network and start to connect with more fellows in the new year both here in Cardiff and elsewhere. If you are also a member, look me up on the Circle platform 🙂 .

My work continues to be varied, which is a joy for someone like me with many interests and aptitudes. Teaching, training and coaching continues at the University of Oxford, and Sereniti as well as internal cohorts at organisations. Whilst I continue to do some executive coaching with individuals, the bulk of my work has been with leadership teams and groups.

Consultancy projects with Reclaim Hosting, especially the innovative Reclaim Open conference, have been an inspiring part of my year and I deeply appreciate working with such a wonderful team of people.

I’ve also continued work in the digital heritage sector, building on a number of projects I worked on in 2021-2023 as part of the Towards a National Collection and Digital Heritage initiatives. Digital heritage and digital humanities is becoming more of a focus for my consultancy work, and I am looking forward to working more in that space in 2026.

One of the things I reflected and focused on this year was how I work, not only what I do. The values that inform my work have shaped my practice, what I bid for, and what I strive for. So to close this post I wanted to share a the notes I scribbled below, which helped me articulate how I embody the values of my business and why.

Here’s to a more open and blended, ethical and meticulous 2026, continuing to give back in gratitude to the amazing communities I am part of.

21/12/2025
Year 3. BOOM.

This month marks the anniversary of my business, and there is much to celebrate, and to be grateful for!

Patterns new and old

Once of the things I’ve noticed a lot this year is different patterns: first in terms of how I work, and how my activity is distributed across the year, and also in terms of what I like to do and how my curiosity shapes the work I do. One of the ongoing tasks this year has been to record my work and update my CV more regularly, and that’s given me an interesting perspective on how I return to similar interests, and also how a narrative emerges over the years. My career doesn’t follow a typical arc and like many people who work in education and technology I trained in different disciplines and bring that with me to the digital context. Although it’s only been a couple of years since I started to work as a consultant and coach full-time, it’s been 15 years since I first started working as a free-lancer on projects, and I’ve been revisiting some of these as I’ve charted my skills and experience. It’s interesting to re-examine how some of the things I’ve worked on over the past twenty years fit together in retrospect, with new patterns emerging.

Innovation

I’ve been able to work on a lot of new, innovative things this year and that’s been a joy. I love not knowing what the end product will look like, and I love the exhilarating process of creating something new, something that’s a first! It’s not always easy, and it certainly brings a lot of risk with it, but I’m good at navigating unknown unknowns.

One of the projects I’ve particularly enjoyed working on is Reclaim Open, a “one of a kind” conference that’s evolved each time it happens, and this time is no different. I’ve also loved developing my own new offering, Long Distance Leadership Postcards, for which I have nearly completed the first year and which has been a joy to work on.

Doing something completely new, whether its a talk, workshop, a new coaching client or a project, has been a huge part of my year and has stretched my thinking and my abilities in new, exciting (and sometimes scary) ways.

Anthropology

Up until this year I’ve had little opportunity to use my Anthropological training in my work, at least explicitly. But more recently I have become more and more interested in the rich and exciting work happening in digital heritage, digital humanities and cultural institutions, giving me a new area to learn about and work in.

I’ve also found that the research for my PhD feels both timely and relevant again especially during the current social and economic upheaval and I’ll be sharing a post soon on that topic. I’ve been writing more again recently, and found ideas emerging as I was preparing for an AI-related workshop, so prepare for an “AI in the cemetery” Halloween.

People

Free-lance life can be a little lonely at times, but I am lucky (and work hard at) being able to connect with colleagues old and new very regularly. I have a wonderful group of fellow coaches who I meet up with regularly, alongside my mentoring sessions for 1 Million Mentors. And there are some much valued coffee mornings, often virtual, with fellow free-lancers, swapping tales of projects, and collaborating on new ideas. I’ve loved all the wonderful conversations I’ve had on my podcast, too!

This year I’ve also travelled more, to attend conferences and to deliver in person workshops and leadership days, which has been invigorating and joyful, and a nice balance to the days and weeks working solo from home. Although of course my trusty dog Posey is always by my side.

I am super grateful for all the stimulating, inspiring days, the work life balance being my own boss has brought me and the exciting firsts I have been part of over the past year. Here is to Year 3! Boom!

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20/10/2025
Reflection: Volunteering as a mentor

For the last few years I’ve volunteered as a mentor with the One Million Mentor programme:

1MM mentoring empowers young people to become the best version of themselves: building relationships -free of assumption and judgement – where they benefit from another’s experience and perspective and can think bigger, find their own answers and take the next meaningful step into their future. We recruit, train and deploy volunteer mentors, matching them with mentees, providing high quality support to both so that they are well prepared and can have an effective and impactful mentoring relationship. Our mentoring is one to one, for young people aged 14-25 years old, for 1 hour, once a month, for up to a year.

https://onemillionmentors.org.uk/

It’s a great national initiative that I am glad to be part of and I found the training really interesting, especially as most of my work normally focuses on coaching and mentoring leaders and managers. Being part of the journey to support a much younger mentee is a different proposition and I’ve learnt a lot along the way.

Entering a career

One of the key questions that I work on with my mentees is finding a way into a career, either via higher education or an apprenticeship, or maybe through local initiatives and training schemes. Most of the time, the kind of questions they have are very similar to the questions my coaching clients ponder: they think about what they want to do, what needs a new job needs to meet and what progressing pathways are available. They often wonder about whether certain qualifications or certificates are worth having, and are always keen to hear from peers who have gone through similar experiences.

Articulating skills

We also work a lot on articulating skills and strengths. Just like the reflective approaches needed later in one’s career in order to determine and champion one’s achievements, so do early career mentees need strategies that help translate capabilities into their CVs and applications.

It’s an awareness that’s very valuable to develop, but it can be difficult at any stage of professional practice. Developing confidence and reflective practice on what types of work might suit best is even harder when you don’t have a lot of experience to draw on.

Reading the landscape

One other question that we spend a lot of time thinking about is how to read the landscape of the sector or the broader area that the mentee is interested in. Is it growing or are there issues to be aware of? Are there a lot of jobs? What kind of professional bodies are there? What is the sector like for someone like them?

Often we come across really interesting sounding initiatives that are designed to help young people into the sector, but are clearly not designed for anyone to actually reach out directly. It can be intimidating and difficult to find a route in.

As we are just at the beginning of a new year of volunteering, I am mindful that there’s now more uncertainty in the job markets, and I am looking forward to supporting my mentee through the ups and downs of finding their first role.

18/09/2025
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?

24/04/2025

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