I guested on David Wetton‘s Conscious Leadership podcast and we had a wide ranging and free flowing discussion including how we might find ways to start conversations about love in our organisations, when it’s such a tricky topic to introduce.

A short webinar here with Clare Moriarty, former Permanent Secretary at DEFRA, where we draw on her stories of working with some of the most senior teams in the Civil Service and talk about how we make space for humanity and feelings in our organisations. 

Louise Clifton of Invisible Grail interviewed me and you can see the edited transcript of that interview here.  We explore love as a form of activism, how fear closes us down and about putting love at the heart of policies and procedures. 

I got to talk with the wonderful Karen Graves of the Public Services People Managers Association (PPMA) about how organisations might heal and not harm people, the importance of doing our own inner work, and the need to find a robust and useful definition of love for the workplace.  You can listen to that here alongside many other fascinating sessions. 

Webinars

I was recently interviewed by Chris Janzen, of The Ignition Show podcast about the research I’ve been doing into Love.  In it, we talk about messiness of emotions in working life, how I got interested in love in the first place and what we can do to help people connect with more love at work.

Take a listen, and I’d love to know what you think on these and other subjects.

Why does talking about “love” in the workplace make people so squirmy, and why does it feel so alien? What does love mean to us, and why do we need more of it at work?

So many of us feel like we need to separate our “real” and “work” selves, that there are parts of who we are that we can’t bring to the workplace, and that we can’t be honest about how we really feel.

But what would happen if we COULD be radically honest at work, and not feel the pressure to always show the best version of ourselves?

In this episode, Alice talks to leadership coach and author of an original piece of research on leadership and love, Helena Clayton. Helena has been working in leadership and organisational development for over 20 years. Mostly, she designs and runs global leadership programmes to deliver powerful learning and meaningful change in organisations and her past clients have included Lexmark, Virgin Atlantic, Jaguar Landrover and the UK Civil Service.

Episode 1
With Naysan Firoozmand, Head of Global Executive Coaching at Ashridge, where we talk about how leaders sometimes need to go beyond a sense of ‘professional care’ to something much more human, how the relational aspects of coaching are loving aspects – and as we explore shame and fear, we hear the sound they make 😊

We mention a one day conference at Ashridge on the theme of ‘Love over Fear’ on 14 October and you can find that here.
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Episode 2
With Caron Bradshaw OBE, CEO of the Charities Finance Group who talks about how love is not only gentle but in fact enables healthy and necessary ‘abrasive tension’ to be worked through well and how she needed to intentionally develop the muscle of talking about love but when she does, how positively people respond.
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Episode 3
This conversation is with Gavin Bate, Mountain and Expedition Leader. We explore parallels between outdoor and indoor leadership, with gems about how fear is the doorway for those of us wanting to be more loving in our responses, and how leaders need to cultivate a ‘twin track’ of professional and personal connection with the people around them. I first met Gavin about 15 years ago and it was so good to reconnect with such a deeply warm and compassionate leader.

You can learn more about Gavin and the work he does at Adventure Alternative.
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Episode 4
This conversation is with Dr James Traeger, a long time colleague and friend, where we explore whether love is more of process than a ‘thing’ , how having a Director of Love would be the worst thing possible for an organisation, and how love, anger and expansion are all rich for exploring when it comes to the ways we lead our organisations and our communities.

And it’s full of great recommendations for reading for both poets and warriors alike 😊

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Episode 5

I talk with Toby Lindsay about his experience of ‘feeling broken’ and how we can find ways to work with the lasting impacts of loss and diminishment. It’ll come as no surprise that we talk about love.

As well as Rolexes and T.S Eliot. 😊

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