Helena Clayton Newsletter - View this email in your browser

Leadership Developer • Coach & Facilitator • Writer

Welcome to the April 2025 Newsletter

A month of hard work but balanced with plenty of other lovely things - a weekend away with a girlfriend, 4 days on a module of my end-of-life doula training and two gloriously sunny days walking on the South Downs with an overnight stay at Truleigh Hill YHA - one of my favourite walks. Oh, and some sea swims (well, dips, more like). 

In the garden, I have tulips in bright red and others coming any day soon, the buds on the little damson tree make me smile every day (it's a tree that produces about 6 damsons despite the blossom) and the camellia has been the best its ever been. 

And my delight in damson flowers matter - an intentional focus on joy and beauty to balance out the cruelty and hardship that pours in at me from the news. 

And so this month:

- a really great newly recorded podcast conversation including the importance of standing in for love when love isn't present
 - some new resources on endings as I continue to explore how do we end well 
 - a reminder of the Love Lab in November, which already has a great group of people signed up
 - introducing the theme of rest and how it's both a form of love, as well as an act of resistance - and more - which will be the theme of the next Acts of Love in May
 - a helpful way to protect some time to write

So until I see you again in May, do dial up the focus on joy and beauty - take it wherever you can find it. 

With love
Helena x

(pic: Nina Pace)

When our lives are so intense, and there's barely a moment in between one thing and the next.  When the world is more and more terrifying and our nervous systems are overloaded.  When all of that, what is our relationship to rest?  How can it be both an act of love for ourselves and for others to rest? What do we even mean by rest (that is different from going for a lie down or getting more sleep)? How might experimenting with rest be a doorway to love and also to more ease and connection as well as performance and getting shit done?

That's what the next Acts of Love for Tough Times will be exploring in response to our usual starter question of: what keeps us sane, well and loving in these tough (and getting tougher) times?

Rest-as-love
Love-as-rest

Book HERE for 21 May 0800 - 1000 BST

We always start by looking at the tough stuff.  Joanna Macy teaches us that honouring the pain of the world is a form of love.  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?'. 

In this May workshop, we'll take the theme of 'love-as-rest' - how rest is both a form of love and also a form of resistance to the extractive capitalist / grind culture that we are entangled in that so often means we are exhausted, close to burnout and very far from what brings us alive and enables us to be loving. 'You can't be a hurried person and a loving person', as John Mark Comer says.

Do come.  It will be lovely to have you there. 
 

(pic: Daniella Willett-Rabin)

Very often people introduce me to other folk who are talking about love, or interested in love in leadership.  I always follow up on those introductions, and I am always glad I do.

And so it was when I was introduced to Christopher Miller, a strengths-based coach and consultant in Aotearoa/New Zealand, working with global business.  After a coffee online, it made complete sense to have a second conversation using the podcast - and so here it is.

It's fab.  Christopher is one of the few people I know who not only talks about love but actually 'coaches for love' in organisations.  In this episode we cover:

• how to stand in for love when love isn't present
• how conversations about love in organisations, including with men, land easily and well when you position it as Christopher does
• the importance of giving people 'permission to care'
• and the value of the question 'what would love do?'

And if you like the conversation, please do like, subscribe and pass it on to others. 

Christopher also has a deck of cards he uses in his work, called Let's Talk Love, with questions designed to explore love directly and indirectly.  I have a set and they're lovely - and I'm looking for the next available opportunity to use them.  My favourite is 'how would it feel to increase the amount of love in your life exponentially?' You can buy these cards on Christopher's Expansive Love website here. 

(pic: from the Dandelion Appreciation Society on FB)

I find writing stuff down really helpful.  Lists, sure.  But also the content of my head.  Sometimes I have no idea what's really swilling around in there until I do one of two things - go for a walk, or get out a pen and paper and start writing.

I'm ill-disciplined with it, though.  I'd love to cultivate a more regular practice.  I've started writing Morning Pages more times than I can remember and have maybe got 2 weeks in before it goes south.  But I no longer mind that, and have come to accept I'm not a daily-discipline kind of gal. 

For those who like to put aside specific time to write, and could do with a community and a bit of loose structure, no better way to do that than via The London Writers' Salon - an hour of protected time online at set times each day (you'll sometimes see me at the 8am session) to write. A novel, Morning Pages, a bit of poetry ... whatever.  Just show up and start writing.  And see what happens.  


(pic: David Hockney)

When it's easy to make a choice to disconnect, what might be possible when we connect?
If it makes sense to make our hearts small to cope with what's around us, what greater sense might it make to allow our heart to soften and expand? 

In The Love Lab, that's what we're trying to understand - how we might tap into the love that exists between people  - and people who don't know each other - so that we can create a bigger version of Us.  A version of Us that can provide buoyancy for choppy seas. 

The Love Lab 2025 is on Friday 28 Nov, in central London, and full details plus the link to book is HERE. This is the fourth or even fifth time of running this event - and it remains one of the highlights of my year. 

Our venue is the lovely 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: Marina Krasniasky)

You'll know, I think, that I've had an interest in endings - and in death and dying - for some time now.  Both from an individual perspective - how do we support people really well as they die - but also systemically as we watch so much of what we have relied on for most of our lives here in the West crumble (or be dismantled) around us. 

And as when you buy a red car, the world is full of red cars... so it was that as I started the second stage of my end-of-life doula training, then suddenly there were several new and really interesting other people and places to go to to explore endings.

One is a book that's just arrived through my door called Good Bye from Lizzie Bentley Bowers and Alison Lucas about how we can better lead change by attending to endings. 

And then this wonderful card deck, Tending to Endings, drawing on the garden as a metaphor, reimagining our relationship with endings - shaped by some great people including Will Brown and his work with garden thinking. Looks really interesting work with this intro session later in April as an introduction. I've signed up to it, although will get the recording as can't make it live. 

 

(pic: Nora Sendejar Verdin)

These Poems

These poems
they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
whoever you are
and
are you ready?

These words
they are stones in the water
running away

These skeletal lines
they are desperate arms for my longing and
love.

I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me

whoever you are
whoever I may become. 



June Jordan

(pic:Sherry Clingman)

Richards Powers' Playground is likely to be one of my best reads of the year, I'd say. So so good.  Not so much Caledonian Road from Andrew O'Hagan which I had to work hard to keep reading, though it got better as it went along.

I finished the excellent Meditations for Mortals with my Book Group - we read it in chunks, meeting fortnightly to discuss - and it'll be one I'll dip into again. I do love the way he comes at things and I think it's been his voice that's influencing me to experiment more with dialing down work a little bit and dialling up life.   

In A Human Voice from Carol Gilligan was deeply interesting, on what happens to boys and girls' natural ways of expressing themselves as they grow up, in particular what happens to their relationship to caring. 
 

It was an in intense month of work with two proposals - one for a some listening spaces for a leadership team put at risk of redundancy, the other for an introduction to management but through the lens of love, one of their core organisational values.

Also the planning and delivery of modules for the senior leadership teams of two clients, one a manufacturing business and the other a net zero consultancy - meant a lot of time in the Midlands and my first trip to Chester in decades. 

One explored the demands and invitations of modern leadership and how do you show up at your best for all of that. I don't know why I'm still surprised after 25 years of doing this work when senior people say: wow I have never thought of my own leadership style before and how I might need to adapt it. The other a day with the Exec of a fast growing organisation - hugely attentive to profit and results but equally paying attention to what's good for people and planet - a fascinating combo - exploring how they need to show up as a team to their organisation during a time of very high performance targets. 

Plus a day of discovery work with an organisation where we used these many tiny terracotta pots for people  to plant seeds to represent an aspect of their leadership they wanted to cultivate, to start a year long programme of development. Not often are leaders working with compost, water and trowels in the working day :-)
 

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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