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Leadership Developer •
Coach & Facilitator • Writer
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Welcome to the March 2025 Newsletter
I've been loving
the sun this week - such an underestimated delight to be out
walking with no hat! Our camellia has started to blossom, the
tulips are going great guns, and the smell of wild garlic in our
local park stopped me in my tracks the other day.
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This month's
Newsletter is a tad over heavy on two workshops coming up - the
March Acts of Love for Tough Times, and confirming the details
and the venue for The Love Lab. Otherwise, a wonderful
offering from someone else about how we stay sane in these times,
an encouragement for all of us to have a go at lowering our
standards, and an invitation for us to think about how to engage
men in conversations about love.
I'll be back with you in April and I hope your garden - actual
and metaphorical - grows well in the meantime.
With love
Helena x
(pic: David
Hockney)
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Acts
of Love for Tough Times
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What sustains us when we look ahead at what's
coming down the line? How do we honour the pain of the world? How
do we stay connected to love when things around us can
feel unloving?
ACTS OF
LOVE FOR TOUGH TIMES (online - and always free)
Book HERE for March 12
0800 - 1000 GMT
In the Feb Acts of
Love we explored hope. In March, we'll turn to anger
and activism and how both are forms of love.
David Whyte says:
'anger truly
felt at its center is the essential living flame of being fully
alive and fully here - it makes the mind clearer and more
generous, the heart more compassionate and the body larger and
strong enough to hold it'. And here's a piece I wrote a
while ago about anger and love.
In these (always free) monthly online
sessions, we begin with a connection to what we're finding
difficult, because in the wise words of James Baldwin, not everything that we
face can be changed - but nothing can be changed
until it is faced. And then in each
session we take a couple of different things each time and ask
'how might this be a form of necessary love for these tough times
we find ourselves in?'.
There's a seat in the circle, if you'd like to take it?
There's always a wonderful group of people there with you.
(next one will be May - can't find a date in April that works
with Easter and planned work)
(pic: Edward
Burra)
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Could
you lower your standards?
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The poet
William Stafford was being interviewed by a journalist. In
awe of how he could write a poem a day (every day) she asked him
what was his secret to being so prolific. His response? 'I
lower my standards'.
I happen to be reading Oliver Burkeman's latest, Meditations for Mortals, and
that's sort of what he says too.
And then the other week in the Guardian, a piece on 'parental burnout'
for which at least one way out of it was to lower
our standards for parenting.
Much easier said than done, obviously, as we're having to do
business with massive systemic pressures to be amazing, awesome,
extraordinary. It's a full-blown act of resistance to not
respond to that. But it can be done. What would a 5%
lowering of your standards mean for you? In what area of
your life? What could you have a go at experimenting with?
(pic:
Spencer Frazer)
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'Each of us
is small but powerful; together we make the world'
Jennifer
Garvey Berger
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When it
comes to love, where are the men?
When I run Acts of Love for Tough Times, and The Love Lab, the
groups are 98% women. And often it's the same man. And it's
been this way for all the years I've been doing this.
What's that about, do you think? ( ...and men, I'm asking
you specifically)
Yes, the word love is synonymous (unhelpfully) with sex, romance,
religion and sentimentality. Yes, it is historically
considered to be for the private domain, for home life.
Those are understandable blockers.
But 98% Really?
As well as compassion and care, love is also forgiveness, radical
inclusion, deep listening, expansion, grief, anger, activism,
generosity, holding tight boundaries and so much more.
There's a blog I wrote a while ago about how
love-as-care is gendered. Based on a
wonderful book, Labours of Love, by Madeline
Bunting, about our social care system, you can really see how the
fact that care/love is so gendered makes it pretty tricky to get
conversations going in organisations about the role love could
and arguably should play in leadership, the working world and
beyond.
I always position my work as not-sex and not-romance. So
I'd love to hear from you about ways that more men might engage
(and with me) in conversations about love, and also to hear about
places where they already are, of course.
What would I need to do to make that possible, I wonder?
It's not rhetorical, that question. Email me if you have a
sense of what's needed. And I'll put this
section on LinkedIn this coming weekend and see what folks say
there.
(pic:
Arte Apatagonia)
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The
Love Lab: Nov 28 2025
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OK, so
booking is live now, for The
Love Lab 2025.
I could
have called it The Connection Lab. Or:
The Don't Other Others Lab.
The Expand Your Heart To Let More In Lab
The Move Past Fear Lab
The Raft-Up Lab
The Getting Us Through It Lab
But it's The Love Lab.
Friday 28
November. Full details and link to book HERE.
When there's so much happening in the world that's creating
fear and hatred, that means we might separate, push others
away, make others bad ... then we need to work with clear
intention to stay connected to other people.
Sea otters 'raft up' to get through the night, to make sure they
don't drift away from each other in stormy seas. This workshop
helps us do a bit of that. Raft up. Reach for someone's hand.
Build an ecology of connection. We need it for what's coming (what's
already here...), don't you think?
Exploring how we create loving connections with people we
don't know, in ways that will serve us in our organisational life
and beyond, this a rich and powerful day. Sometimes playful and
sometimes serious, always working towards practices that will
serve us and others in the world.
The Love Lab is the perfect antidote to a world where it's easy
for us to be pushed apart, to cancel others and to make them
'other', and to pull up our personal drawbridge. It
explores how we stay connected, how we find what we have in
common so we can trust, build bridges between us and create a net
in which to hold each other.
We need it.
Come. It probably takes a bit of boldness to say yes. But I am
certain (certain!) that you'll be pleased you came.
It's in central London at the wonderful St Ethelburga's, a venue
with its own story to tell about damage and repair, and holding
our hearts open while things around us fall apart.
(pic: V+V
Kniazievi)
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'Be like
water making its way through cracks'
Bruce Lee
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I follow
Palestinian photo journalist Motaz Azaiza on Instagram and have
found his stunning images of the Iftar meals in Rafa so full of
hope ... like this reel from earlier this
week.
(pic:
Becky Maynard)
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Wholeness
in a Fucked Up World
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Yup, a
bold heading. But do take a look at this 30 day online
course, Wholeness in a Fucked Up World, from
Gwyneth Jones. I've
signed up on the basis of two things. I need all the help I
can get in working out how to muddle my way through the
unholy mess that's coming fast down the line at us.
And I was introduced to Gwyneth recently, and when we met for
coffee online, I knew I'd like to get to work with her in some
way. This is a way.
Let me know if you sign up - always good to know who I'm
travelling with.
(pic: Sigita Paulauskiene)
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Wild Geese
You do not have to be
good.
You do not have
to walk on your knees
for a hundred
miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have
to let the soft animal of your body
love what it
loves.
Tell me about
your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the
world goes on.
Meanwhile the
sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving
across the landscapes,
over the
prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains
and the rivers.
Meanwhile the
wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading
home again.
Whoever you
are, no matter how lonely,
the world
offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you
like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over
announcing your place
in the family of
things.
Mary Oliver
(pic:David
Blackwell)
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Through
my recent visit from Covid, I had Paul Lynch's Grace with me at all
times. A dense read, not least as it mirrored the intensity
of Grace's journey through Ireland in the famine. And
another wonderful Irish writer who I'd come across via his
Booker-winning Prophet Song.
And then I took Siri Husted's The Sorrows of an American
away on a half term break, about a wealthy psychotherapist and
his grief, and a greater contrast with Grace would be harder to
find.
I've had SQ: Spiritual Intelligence from
Dahah Zohar on my read-list for years and that Covid week in bed
was my chance to get to it. I'm doing a Diploma in Coaching
Supervision that has the title Supervision as Spiritual Practice,
hence the interest.
Meditations for Mortals,
from Oliver Burkeman, which I'm half way through as my Book Group
absorbs it over a fortnightly session. A wonderful mix of
gentle practical guidance with generous dollops of philosophy
(but cunningly disguised as worldly wisdom and sensible advice -
which I suppose is what philosophy is). An excellent read,
and one that's making a difference to how I do
things.
And the gut punching On Tyranny from Timothy
Snyder. Written in 2016 as if he was in 2025. Highly
recommended.
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First
there was a week with Covid, then a week off at half term with
family - so not a work heavy month.
Mostly a lot of prep and then delivery of the first 2 day offsite
for a leadership programme, to help an organisation separate from
its previous owner, work out who they are and then become
it. We're already working with the SLT, and the back end of
Feb saw the first workshop with their direct reports. We
brought them together with their SLT as part of building
something that blends learning into the flow of work and creates
an extended leadership team - a rare and powerful way to start a
programme. I felt I earned my money but it was a really
great few days.
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Do get in touch and let me know how you're finding
these Newsletters, or if you'd like to see more info or
anything I could include. I love hearing from
you. You know where I am on LinkedIn, or connect via Email. Or call me of course,
whichever suits.
Helena x
helena@helenaclayton.co.uk
07771 358
881
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