Welcome to the January 2021 Newsletter

Hello everyone, and especially new subscribers to this Newsletter. I hope you like what you find here.

This past month included a few weeks of no work over the Christmas break. I sorely needed it.  As well as time away from the laptop, I got more reading done - as well as many hours of Schitt's Creek - and that was wonderful as the last few months had been work and not much else. 

It's a time of transition for me. There was the death of my dad in September and my adjustment to no longer having any family. Obviously, the shift to a new way of working from home and really missing wider human connections (yes, even this raging introvert). Also December and January sees the end of three major and much-loved work projects that I've been involved with for many years. So I am feeling deeply connected with endings and transitions.  And on the morning of December 22, a friend and I, on our weekly 6am walk (these days with headtorches...) lit a couple of tea lights in the woods to welcome another major transition for us all -  the Solstice and the return of the light to the world. The fact that the tea lights wouldn't stay lit... well, I'm not reading too much into that! That said, I'm making no grand plans for 2021.  Let it be what it will be :-)

But going back to the reading I've been doing, it's been a renewal of my commitment to bring you here the best of what I'm reading and learning about. Always with a link to love and leadership, even if tenuous some months. With a focus on work-work-work, I had lost the time and space to share with you what's getting my juices flowing. 

So as well as reading, I've also been writing. 

The first new blog is very firmly in leadership. It reflects my work with leaders this past year - in groups and 1:1 - and what I feel we need more of. I am increasingly questioning traditional forms and settings for leadership development (do we really need MBAs any more...?) and am noticing how much my coaching work increasingly supports a leader's being as opposed to their doing.

And a second piece, this one reflecting the tricky balance between focusing on self and on others when it comes to life and also to love. Any literature on love is inevitably about generosity and sacrifice but how do we not overdo that?  

As ever, let me know what you think...

So thanks for reading and for being here. And please do send this Newsletter on to anyone you think might like to subscribe. 

In the meantime, let's see what the rest of January brings us...

Helena x

A friend bought me How to do Nothing for Christmas, thinking that it was about working less hard and taking more time off. She was way-off. It's really a book about how caught up we are in responding compulsively and 'out of awareness' to the relentless and punishing drive for productivity. It's about how even our attention is directed and controlled. And it's about how, through art and observation, through standing back from life a little bit while staying firmly in it, we can take our attention back and direct it to where we choose. This, says the author, is a political act of refusal and an essential form of self expression. 

I read it because us was already on my wish list and because Sam bought it for me. But I'm recommending it here because it's for all those of us who aspire to be a change agent of some sort. And because it builds on Audre Lorde's words when she said 'caring for myself is not self indulgence, it is self preservation, and that’s an act of political warfare'. And because this feels like a year when many of us might want to take small and strong steps towards building the world we want and not the one we've ended up with'. As the author Jenny Odell says 'it is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way attention forms the ground not just for love but for ethics'. And that feels like good territory to be in this year.