Helena Clayton Newsletter - View this email in your browser

Leadership Developer • Coach & Facilitator • Writer

Welcome to the January 2026 Newsletter

Looks like we made it into 2026, then. Happy New Year!  I hope it was an easeful transition for you and that you had a good ending to 2025. 

I'm still very much in wintering mode.  Pondering the year just gone.  Gently musing on the one to come. A prescription for Dom's excellent Christmas cake, 1 x slab to be taken daily.  Walks, snoozes and reading.  Trying not to engage with clock-time until I have to. And I'm wondering if I can make that phase last until the Spring Equinox on 21 March - which feels about the right time to emerge from winter :-)

I'm not one for making New Year Resolutions of any kind.  Except that the events of 2025 have prompted me to do just that this year.  More loose intentions than resolutions, mind you.  And very much more like Rilke's 'living with the questions'. Prompted, I think by the rite-of passage that was my hysterectomy/bone cancer scan, as well as the shocks coming from the wider world. Something significant has shifted for me. 

When you read this, I'll be halfway up a Welsh mountain on my regular winter 4 day solo retreat in a little converted railway carriage.  Off grid. No phone signal in the valley at all.  They even decommissioned the phone box last year.  And so while I'm there, here for you is:

 - those intentions, because there's something about making them public
 - a new take on what's difficult and unspeakable
 - the full series of the Love in Coaching podcast series with the Association for Coaching
 - a reminder of the damage done by being a 'looked after child' no matter what sort of care system involved
 - the value of 'just' hanging out
 - a new initiative to help us strengthen our connections
 - a wonderful tool to help us get really clear on where love is showing up in our lives

Wishing you a gentle start to the year.  May you be well resourced for whatever might be in your 2026. 

With love
Helena x


(pic: Thane Gorek)
 

If you enjoy this Newsletter, please do consider spreading the word and sharing it with others who might appreciate it too.

So some intentions for 2026.  Experiments: 'what happens when I ...?' Loose, yes, and focused on inquiry and learning, yes.  But also things that have some fire in them for me, that I sense will form a turning for me this year ...

(pic: Holli Zollinger)

A theme in my Acts of Love for Tough Times workshop is that we always start by looking at the ‘tough times’ part.  Only then do we dive into the different ways that love might be medicine for the difficulties. 
 
I quote James Baldwin: not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed unless it is faced. And also Deborah Rowland: systems gain strength when difficult things are acknowledged – the truth is a turn on.

So I was delighted to be introduced to the idea of nettlesome knowledge by a recent participant.  Taking stinging nettles and the phrase ‘grasping the nettle’ as the jumping off point:

Nettlesome knowledge can be regarded as unspeakable, unhearable, unseeable, unsharable, and even unthinkable. This can link to the concept of something which is taboo. We can even take action to avoid encountering nettlesome knowledge at all, or we can close down someone who seems to be about to tell us something nettlesome. Someone who thinks they are about to receive some nettlesome knowledge can hold their hand up briefly to block being told it. A giver of written nettlesome knowledge can pass it on almost at arms length, trying to distance from it. 

Thank you Sue, I really like this new lens.

(pic: Daniel McCoy Jr)

Deborah Rowlands has said: everything makes sense when you see the context in which is it situated.

Similarly a trauma informed way of bringing greater compassion to behaviour we find difficult, challenging, or unacceptable is to ask what might have happened to that person that means they’re behaving like this?

One thing that might have happened – and did happen to many, many children who are now the adults around us in work and at home – is that they were raised in care, they were a ‘looked after child’.

In the UK, this term is usually used for children who are in social care - foster care, or a children’s home - often because of chaotic or absent parenting.  If that wasn’t your own experience, you might not know much about the long term impacts this can have on children, and the adults they have become.  One place to start might be this excellent podcast episode with the comedian Sophie Willan. Listening to it prompted me to include this section. 

There’s another version of this experience though. There’s also a group of people who went to Boarding School at a very young age.  As young as 7y or 8y old.  More sent than went at that age. 

And in the powerful work of people like Joy Shaverein, we’re introduced to the ‘trauma of the privileged child’.  Which is no less damaging than the social care system in the ways that it can produce long term effects that play out in our adult life.  Shaverein uses words like captivity, abandonment, bereavement and disassociation in ways that make perfect sense once you read more about the experiences.  And on FB, Kara Blackmore is really helpful in explaining how the experience of Boarding School can show up in adult behaviour.

Who around you might have been sent to Boarding School or raised in care? How would you know? Why might it be helpful to know? And how might that help you understand them better?

 
 
(pic: Anya Stasenko and Slava Leontyev)

A month or so ago I shared the new(ish) report from Megan Reitz on spaciousness.  Also in other Newsletters how Claudia Hammond talks about the restfulness of 'just doing nothing'.  And how Jenny Odell writes wonderfully about it too. 

I'm adding to that here with Margaret Heffernan's current take on that - 'hanging out' - and why sometimes it’s vital to do a little more nothing.  And that nothing happening is something happening.

In world of fast, performative, urgency, we definitely need more hanging out. 

 (pic: Niki Bowers)

Back in the summer of 2024 I met Kate Pumphrey.  I remember sitting in a hot courtyard garden in Norfolk where she shared she was newly pregnant and also had something else exciting, something she was growing in parallel.

Kate now has a beautiful baby.  And she's also just shared her other new project with the world.  The Social Gym is all about reducing loneliness and social isolation, increasing connections and social ties, and strengthening friendships and relationships.

Human flourishing and creating a socially healthy world is what Kate and her team are all about. And in times of fracture and separation, that's a vision worth supporting. 

Kate is also on Substack. 

 (pic: Tokuhiro Kawai)

If you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll have seen the seven episodes of this podcast series released weekly through November and December. Here's the link to all episodes, if that passed you by.

I just couldn't have wished for 6 more fascinating and compelling people to be in conversation with.  I hope you think the same as you listen.  They work as solo episodes, of course.  They also work well if you take them in order - Marie Quigley, Clare Norman, Craig White, Amy Elizabeth Fox, Aboodi Shabi and then Ian Mitchell. Or you could start with the final episode where I reflect back on the series and go from there.

However you do it, I hope you get to listen to what each of these deeply experienced and thoughtful practitioners have to say about things like:

- what love in coaching looks like in practice
- how what people want and need from coaching is changing - and we coaches need to respond
- what that means for the way we contract for that, and the inner work we need to do ourselves
- how men can best do their deep personal growth work in men-only spaces
- and how bigger questions of love, spirituality, meaning and purpose are increasingly the vital heart of coaching work

Huge thanks to the Association for Coaching for commissioning this work.  And Maxine and Rob, thank you so much for making the whole practical side of things so easy!  .  


(Pic: Sam Cannon)

THE LOVE LAB
 

What does it mean to create an 'ecology of connection'?  How might we do that, especially with people we don't know?  It requires a willingness to trust and to open up to yourself and to others.  Not easy, for many of us.   Yet also very simple.  Come and find out.  Because deeper connection with others really matters that we try in these fractured times.  The Love Lab is running again on 24 April in London.  A rare chance to experience some deeply meaningful and powerful work in person.
 

ENDINGS & BEGINNINGS

Then a short online workshop on 6 Feb exploring Endings And Beginnings in organisational life – but doing so through some very non-organisational lenses and models.  Details here. We’re coming at the subject ‘slantwise’ (as the poets say), at a tangent, to see what new insights that might give us for our organisational work, and likely beyond.
 

ACTS OF LOVE FOR TOUGH TIMES

These workshops have been running for over 2 years now.  My monthly Acts of Love for Tough Times workshops, always free.  The next ones are in January and February.

(Pic: AITCH aka Heliana)
 

Meanwhile, in Aotearoa, Christopher Miller has been thinking about love in a really practical way, designing a tool to help discover the love in your life. 

'The Expansive Love Assessment is a brief self-reflection tool designed to help you explore how love shows up in your life. In just 10 thoughtful questions, you’ll examine the ways you give love, receive love and witness love around you. By the end, you’ll have a clearer picture of your current experience of love and practical ideas for nurturing it day-to-day'.

Take a look.  I found it challenging, interesting, helpful and very illuminating!

I had a wonderful conversation with Christopher earlier this year on my podcast (here - episode 27) if you'd like to know a bit more about who he is and how he came to focus on love.  And you can also read the guest blog that he wrote for Clare Norman recently. 

(pic: Maria Berrio)

Hymn To Time

Time says 'let there be'
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnat's flickering dance.
And the seas' expanse.
And death, and chance.

Time makes room 
for going and coming home
and in time's womb
begins all endings.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing, 
the shining, the seeing, 
the dark abounding. 


Ursula K. Le Guin


(pic: Debo Groover) 

A couple of lovely and gently powerful books with When The Cranes Fly South from Lisa Ridzen and Noah’s Compass from Anne Tyler (that one read pretty much in one sitting in between snoozes in bed on Boxing Day).

Less gentle but excellent were Agri Ishmail's Hyper and a rare dip into some sci-fi with Becky Chambers’ To Be Taught If Fortunate.

Workwise, two short books.  Unleash Your Complexity Genius from Jennifer Garvey Berger and Caroline Coughlin because I’ve been meaning to read it for ages.  Also because it’s the book I’ve chosen for a client leadership development programme Book Group in Feb.  And then Karen Foy’s Breaking The Coaching Code.  Like most books about coaching it made me think plenty about my own practice as well as the ways I communicate that to coaching clients.

And this lovely book - The Poetry of Presence - kept me very good company.  Some wonderful poems in here.  

(...and not books but The Diplomat and Ted Lasso - such great TV!)
 

Not so much on the work front this month and that’s been good. 2025 was a year when things changed. 

A major client cancelled a big project. That coupled with the general economic wobble-board we're standing on, plus my surgery shifting my perspective on a few things, means that 2026 is looking very different with less work planned in or in the pipeline. 

Which is more than fine. I've been ready for a while to work less hard, and certainly to work only on things that really light me up.

As I've said here, I’m experimenting with saying no more often and with practicing saying ‘I’m working part time’.  In some ways I already do with many weeks off each year for holidays or learning.  But it’s the week-by-week-overloading thing I want to get a handle on. 

Also, I've never needed to do any marketing.  All my work has come through recommendation, repeat business and word of mouth. I'm not planning to change that. But I notice I'm in the mood to create more and be a little more proactive and creative.  This year does offer me some space to do that.  

I'm looking forward to seeing how it all rolls out!


(pic: Margi Lake)
 

If you enjoy this Newsletter, please do consider spreading the word and sharing it with others who might appreciate it.  And do let me have any feedback or reactions -  I love hearing from you.  You know where I am on LinkedIn, or connect via Email. Or call me of course. 

Helena x

helena@helenaclayton.co.uk
07771 358 881

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