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Leadership Developer • Coach & Facilitator • Writer

Welcome to the February 2026 Newsletter

So January seemed to be over quicker than previous years but it did feel a bit relentless with the constant rain and the shocking events in the world that just kept coming.

I'm most definitely still in wintering mode - the main features seem to be eating lots of potatoes and heading to bed to read - but I did get back to work with a leadership group and had a week out in the world on the third module of my end-of-life doula training.  

All of which is to say this is maybe a skinnier-than-usual edition this month.  In it here's:

 - a great resource for those of us exploring what work, meaning, purpose might mean into our 60s and beyond
- some recommended podcasts for anyone interested in the growing social movement of the end-of-life doula
- David Whyte exploring the costs of love
- a conversation with a group of women about imposter syndrome
- a reminder of The Love Lab booking up fast
- and of course, a poem and some books

We're just past Imbolc, in the pagan calendar the first day of Spring.  I'm pretty sure it won't feel remotely like that for most of us and so I hope you can find your own seasonal rhythm in the next few weeks.  

With love, until March
Helena x


(pic: Artem Rohinyi)
 

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At the winter Solstice, I generally start a gentle process of looking back and looking ahead.  And as I looked forward and then even further forward, I realised that something significant had changed.  

My attachment to the achieving, performing, efforting, contorting part of working had softened A LOT and I saw and felt clearly that I just didn't want to work as hard as I have been for the last few years.  Not that I want to stop work.  Not at all.  But that I want things to be different.  Gentler, for a start. More spacious. Thinned out. And with a focus on what really brings me alive. It's a post-hysterectomy thing, for sure - and a gift I hadn't anticipated. 

Other people in my network are well ahead of me on this and I'm going to be tracking them carefully . People like Dr Denise Taylor.  See what she says here and here about the value of later life as an editing process.


(pic: Angie Pickman)

Many people are curious when I mention my training as an end-of-life doula. So a few places places you might want to take a look at for more info:

End Of Life Doula UK is the charity / overarching body.

Living Well Dying Well is the organisation that does almost all of the UK training.

And Dr Emma Clare is the CEO of EOLD UK and there are three podcasts she's done with various people that are really informative about what the role is or can be, why it matters and how the development of the end-of-life doula role is also social movement.  Here, here and here. 
 

From time to time the poet-philosopher David Whyte runs a 'Three Sundays' series of webinars. The one he's doing in March looks at how taking the path of love always has its costs and its vulnerabilities but refusing the path of love also has its steep costs and its equivalent and often demonstrated wounds. Whether we refuse love or risk ourselves in love there is actually no sincere path a person can take without having their hearts broken. 

I've signed up this time around, as I like the sound of hearing more about how we live and move most courageously through life by risking ourselves and by putting ourselves in some peril for a worthwhile goal, a worthwhile person, or a worthwhile life. Love may seem to be always about transactions, for good and for bad, but the exchanges in real intimacy are far deeper, far more disturbing and far more nourishing than we can at first imagine.

More details and link to book here. 

(pic: Esther Gonzalez)

The other week I was running a module of a senior women's leadership programme, in an organisation that's likely one of most male dominated that I can think of. During the Action Learning Sets the previous week, my colleague, Carolyn Parker and I heard several women say 'I have imposter syndrome'.  So we took that into a session on the face-to-face module for a rich conversation about how:

- syndrome implies a medical condition and is a form of pathologizing something that is quite ordinary and understandable once you see more of the picture

- the definition of imposter is 'a person who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others, especially for fraudulent gain' ... and was that really what they had in mind when they used that term?

- rather than it being about them and their own psychology could it be that 'feeling like an imposter' was an understandable response to a patriarchal system that recognises success and impact through a narrow lens eg white, male, heterosexual?

- and a system that equates confidence with competence and where research shows that women are twice as likely to be interrupted than their male counterparts, more likely to be mistaken as being more junior than they are, and often have their meeting contributions (ideas, questions, observations and challenges) credited to other, often male, colleagues

- plus does it help or hinder us to use a sweeping statement and a label  - I have imposter syndrome? And if we are to use that term at all, how might it be more helpful to say something like: there is a part of me that can feel like an imposter / in x situation around y people I can sometimes feel like an imposter.

(Oh, and for perspective here, it's worth adding that I was speaking to someone a few months ago who generally coaches only men and when I asked him what was the most common issue that those men brought to coaching?  Yes, you're ahead of me.  Imposter syndrome, he said, and feelings of I'm not good enough)

Equally, a recent MIT report says: at this point, there isn’t necessarily a causal relationship between the impostor phenomenon and negative consequences; it’s an area ripe for future investigation. We need to actually get some really good data behind this. So it's worth keeping an eye on the 'myth busting imposter syndrome' theme. 

 (pic: Stanislaw Wyspianski)

A reminder if you haven't already caught it, that all episodes of the Association for Coaching's podcast Love in Coaching that I hosted in the autumn are now available.  That's 6 conversations with some deeply interesting coaches, plus an extra episode where I look back on some of the themes across those episodes - and a lovely conversation with all the hosts of the AC's podcasts in 2025 where they reflect on what they took from hosting their series. 


(Pic: Sam Cannon)

THE LOVE LAB

.  We've been watching events unfold across the world in January and we might be feeling its a good time to pull up the drawbridge.  It isn't.  It really isn't.  It's the time to reach out and connect.  
Deeper connection with others really matters 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 with practical application to take back into the workplace, community and other relationships. 
 

ENDINGS & BEGINNINGS

It's probably too short notice if you haven't already signed up for this online workshop on 6 Feb exploring Endings And Beginnings in organisational life.  Details here if you find you might be free on Friday morning, online.  We’re coming at the subject ‘slantwise’ (as the poets say) and at a tangent.  We'll take a look at what nature and our garden, plus being an end of life doula might teach us that could be good for our organisational work, and likely beyond.

(If you've missed it, I'm almost certainly going to run an in-person-all-day workshop-version later in the year.)
 

ACTS OF LOVE FOR TOUGH TIMES

Acts of Love for Tough Times have been running for over 2 years now.  Always free. The next one is 19 February and the theme is how grief is a form of love.  The one after that is 18 March.   

(Pic: Chen Jialing)
 

Instructions On Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.


Ada Limon


(pic: Debo Groover) 

Bolder from Carl Honore is the first of several books on a pile I'm calling 'exploring work and meaning in older age' and it was a good one to start with.  Although it does seem to focus a little more on how you can do more in older age and I think I'm more focused on how to do less :-)

But beyond that, nothing too taxing for me this month. 

I've probably already said that no one is more surprised than me to discover I like a bit of sci-fi / speculative fiction.  The first book of His Dark Materials swept me up and didn't put me down and the other two in the trilogy are queued up by the bed.  Then the first two books in a loose trilogy from Becky Chambers were also deeply readable - the wonderfully titled The Long Way To A Very Angry Planet, and A Closed And Common Orbit. The third one is also on that bedside pile. 

And as it's very much still winter for me and as work is quiet, I've needed no excuse to escape into The Traitors, Waiting For The Out, Industry, Ted Lasso and Bridgerton.  There's a part of me that thinks I should watch less of all of that and focus on more ...er, worthy stuff. But I'm ignoring that voice.  

A module and some learning sets on a women's leadership development have been really great to work on as a facilitator, and it's been very good to hear participants say how much they're getting from the programme.  And for sure, Carolyn and I are doing a good job in curating some great material and designing the flow of learning.  But, as ever, it's the conversations that these participants are having between themselves that are (of course) the gold. Getting to know people at a deeper level, and as human beings rather than job titles; having a space where they can be unedited (or at least less edited); creating a sense of community with people they can now reply on for support and also challenge; and of course (and this keeps coming up again and again) the sense of 'I thought I was alone in all of this and now I realise that I'm really not'.  

(pic: Fumio Kitaoka)
 

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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