Welcome to the May 2021 Newsletter

Hello there and I hope you’re well and looking forward to what the gradual unfurling can offer you this summer. 

The month since the last Newsletter was three flat-out weeks of work - mostly working with OD teams, as it happens - and then a week at the coast in Wales, to a place I adore and where my soul is immediately soothed. That's Rhossili beach in the picture ...

The week away marked the start of my summer.  A time when I’m choosing to work part-time and to think hard about how I break some habits of overworking.  I find that I can't work (more importantly don't want to work) at the pace I have been doing, and on Zoom too.  So you’ll see some themes emerging as you read this month’s Newsletter. 

There’s no new blog this month not least because when it came to my break by the sea all motivation just drained out of me and so I decided to go with that and not ‘push through’ as is a pattern of mine!

See you in mid June ...
Hx

A few things are on my mind as we slowly unfurl into this year: 

How's your mood?
Take a look at this article I’ve been sharing quite widely with clients.  It seems to ring a bell with many people.  It draws on research from Antarctic expeditions - long periods of hardship and isolation - and notes that people’s moods dip and change most in the ‘third quarter’ of the trip.  The parallels are with our COVID experience of course, and the teaching point is that if you’re noticing that you’re feeling flat or low at the moment, that you’re more irritable and stressed … then that’s to be expected, despite the fact that you may feel you’re on the last leg of the journey and so ‘why do I feel like this?’

The article feels true for me.  I’ve ‘had a good war’ through COVID, and not suffered.  Nevertheless, I think I’ve lost a bit of my mojo.  I feel flat.  A bit listless. And out of connection with  myself.  I only really noticed this when I stopped last week.  Until then I’d been pushing through.  I’ll be curious and see what happens next with it. But I’m glad that’s it’s on my radar now.

Returning to the office
A few things bother me about this.  One is that at the start of lockdown many (many) people said to me that they had really discovered what mattered most to them.  They realised life wasn’t all about work. I’m wondering where that connection with ‘what matters most’ has gone because I don’t hear about it much any more.  Has it been buried under a year of 10 back-to-back meetings?  Of exhausting home schooling? Of too much time in social isolation?

I recently co-facilitated a workshop using art, reflection and a connection with the body to help people work out what they needed to resource themselves as they contemplated a return to the office.  It seemed to tap into a much needed seam of What Matters Most and sparked some powerful and important conversations, including working out what requests they wanted to make of their organisation. 

I did that work with a colleague from Mayvin, and you can find out more about their ‘Artful Ways of Knowing’ approach to the way we work here, which shaped how we designed the workshops.
 
Saying no
On a similar theme,  when I read that the UK is considering legislation for the ‘right to disconnect’ and for the right to not be available for work I feel two things.  One is that (of course) we should support anything that gives workers more rights to a non-work life. 

Another response is disbelief that we need that legislation, and that we can’t put our own boundaries in place.  And yes, I can hear my unearned privilege when I say that. But I get it, of course. There are MANY people at work who don’t feel able to speak up (in fact, simply aren’t able or allowed to speak up) for their right to disconnect.  And that makes me think about how important it is to support each other to find our own voice to speak up for ourselves and others, to help each other work out where our boundaries could and should be in the face of often overwhelming work pressures. 

Which takes me to the current work of Megan Reitz, on the subject of employee activism where activism is  ‘about ‘voices of difference’ that challenge the status quo’ and find ways to hold our leaders and organisations to account for their choices. She’s exploring the importance of being able to speak truth to power and how we can do that - it feels like very important work right now - and you can download her report here.

• How easily we self sabotage our good intentions and that ‘the best way to treat self sabotage is to treat it as a signal that somewhere, deep in the murk of our internal inferno, is a belief that is hurting us’
• The extent to which we say something is ok for us or true for us when it really isn’t and the lengths we’ll go to to avoid talking about what we really yearn for.