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Leadership Developer •
Coach & Facilitator • Writer
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Welcome to the July 2026 Newsletter
We're
past the Solstice now, and also the mid point of the
calendar year. Gently tipping into the second half with
a sense of summer's abundance.
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June was lovely,
and mostly away from home. A two week holiday (Gower, of
course) with the weather not letting up from howling winds and
whole heap of rain - you know, those two weeks in-between the
heatwaves. It gave me plenty of practice in
letting go of attachment to outcomes. It's very good for me to
not get what I want, when I want it and exactly how I want it :-)
Heat and heatwaves, of course. And more time away, this
time for the final module of my end of life doula training.
I ran a second Death Cafe with a friend in
Horsham, and am working in slow time to feel into what, from my
doula training, I'd like to bring into the/my world.
Otherwise in June I got to the beach and into the water as
much as I could, doing my best to have the sort of summer
I didn't get to have last year because of the
hysterectomy. So far, so good :-) And needing a
creative burst, I signed up for Tom Hirons' exciting new poetry
course, encant, starting later
in July. And if I say Corn Bunting, Greenfinch, Coal Tit and
Greater Whitethroat, then you'll know I'm making good use of the Merlin app.
And this month, here's: the regular poem, my event
update, a snapshot of my work, and what I've been reading
and inspired by, plus:
- two lenses on how to make something special from the mundane
and a reminder that small things really matter
- how willingly embracing a sense of impermanence helps us
live fully
- a reminder that there are many ways of looking at and
interpreting the state of the world
See you in August, when we'll all have taken a few more steps in
various directions and things will be different as a
result.
With love
Helena x
(pic: Sophie Wake)
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'The future
arrives looking like something else'.
William
Bridges
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There are parts of
me - I think you know this already – that see things as Margaret
Wheatley and Jem Bendel do, inclining to ‘we only have a
few more good years’, and 'things have gone past any tipping
point and all we can do is learn to live with the catastrophic
changes that are heading our way'.
I’m always interested in introducing those parts of me to other
ways of seeing the world. I like it when Oliver Burkeman
says 'the end isn't nigh'. Or
when I read a piece in The Guardian about how 'an equal and habitable world is possible'.
And I've bought but not yet read Mariana Mazzucato’s new
book, The Common Good Economy,
which tends in a similar thrutopian direction.
She argues that how we achieve collective goals – through
collective action, participation and reciprocity – matters as
much as what those goals are and is 'a rigorous reimagining of
economics and a manifesto for a future economy that serves people
and the planet'. She's getting a lot of press and I
think I'll have a go at it even though a book on economics isn't
generally within my paygrade.
(pic: Tarsila do
Amaral)
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The French writer
George Perec asked: 'how
should we take account of, question, describe what happens every
day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious,
the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background
noise, the habitual?
He said: ‘our
worlds move in the peripheral, the unnoticed, the habitual and
yet, we remain unaware of the little nothings of our days’
and he believed that the things which have ‘ceased forever to
astonish us’ are actually the most essential parts of our
existence. Because 'small
does not mean inconsequential. These small things are, of course,
life itself, and when attended to, become as large as each of our
lives is to us'. More here and (slightly less
accessible) also here.
In lockdown we tended to pay more attention to the small stuff,
the invisible. Perec's infraordinary. It came to matter
more and it was a way of keeping us sane. Focusing on
the details – colour, numbers – is what also helps bring us out of
a panic attack. It’s what the poets pay more attention to
than the rest of us do. It’s deep in the heart of a mindfulness
practice. It made me think of The Patience of Ordinary Things.
This practice of making something sacred from the mundane.
And then something else about small … 'tending to the
tiny', a lovely phrase I got from an episode of the Great
Simplification. Nate Hagans is talking with Nora
Bateson about community building and how we need to practice it
now, while we don't have to fully rely on it. Building
community happens naturally in hardship or a crisis, but how do
we practice building it so we can use it every day? We do it
through micropractices and building habits and by ‘tending to the
tiny’. It’s a lovely episode – covers all
sort of things.
(pic: Bob Kebic)
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'No-one ever
told me that grief was so much like fear'.
C.S Lewis
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Being with Dying from Joan
Halifax is a Buddhist lens on accompanying people who are
dying. It's also about life though, as are most things that are
to do with death. One thing it focuses on is how we
can lessen the drama and trauma of death and loss by preparing
for it, including intentionally recognising and keeping a focus
on the impermanence of everything. Staying in contact with
the ways that we all age, grow sick and die helps us stay
connected with the life that we do have.
And as it happened, another Buddhist, Satya Robyn (whose
Newsletter I mentioned the other month) also wrote about that.
She comes at it by exploring our reactions to when a much loved
mug breaks. But it’s the same thing. And it’s a
lovely post. By asking 'when
you remember the impermanence of everything today, what happens?'
... really brings in the ways we can practice and prepare for the
big losses.
(pic: Kevin Kia)
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'I am larger,
better than I thought; I did not know I held so much goodness'.
Walt
Whitman
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MANAGING TRANSITIONS 27
July, online, free
A pop-up session sharing some of my key takeaways from a reread
(after at least 20 years) of William Bridges' Managing Transitions. Already
heaps of great people signed up. Maybe you know the
book well, or perhaps have never read it - or like me,
you quote from it a lot but are not sure if what you're
saying isn't just made up from scraps of memory! Whatever it is,
come along, you'll be sure of some stimulation for whatever
ending(s) you're in the middle of - whether personal or from an
organisational perspective. Detail and booking here.
ENDINGS & BEGINNINGS 18 Sept, in London
Rarely in our organisational work do we consider
'what would make for a good ending'. Introducing the idea
of doing this to a group of leaders recently, they were shocked
by how little attention they gave any of the many endings they
and their teams were in the middle of.
In this workshop,
we look at how we can make endings good ones by drawing
on what palliative
care and the role of an end of life doula
can teach us, how we might work with ritual to
create movement and release stuckness, recognise the complexity of emotions
during endings, and remind ourselves that most of the
lessons we need to learn to do endings well in organisations come
from nature.
Details and booking here. And there are 50% price tickets for anyone who feels that
the full price is a bit out of their reach at the moment.
ACTS OF LOVE FOR TOUGH TIMES online, free
The next Acts of Love for Tough
Times is Thursday 16 July and as ever,
there will be some wonderful people there, and we'll explore
together how a loving response is the only sane response in these
challenging times. Details and booking here.
And August's will be 20 August 4pm-6pm BST. Details and booking here.
(Pic: Kirsty Wither)
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From Vacillations
My fiftieth year had
come and gone,
I sat, a
solitary man,
In a crowded
London shop,
An open book
and empty cup
On the marble
table-top.
While on the
shop and street I gazed
My body of a
sudden blazed;
And twenty
minutes more or less
It seemed, so
great my happiness,
That I was
blessed and could bless
WB Yeats
(pic:Phil
Greenwood)
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Heading
away for two weeks was always going to result in a good reading
haul. I retrained my fractured reading brain. With
barely any wifi or phone signal it was easy to put my
phone completely aside and read for hours at a time. Slowly I
could watch my compulsion to reach constantly for my phone while
reading dim and dim.
I started with Susan Choi’s Flashlight and couldn’t put
it down. She has a tricky way with punctuation so every
line needed concentration, but the story was wonderful. Then
onto The Subtle Knife, the second
in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Material trilogy. I’m rarely a
fan of reading things that were written for children but these
books are pretty special. Devoured it.
Then another from the Women’s Prize for Fiction shortlist, Heart The Lover, from Lily
King. Really good and it’s on a pile to send to a friend.
Ditto Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed The King - so
original, although not sure I fully understood the ending.
Then after Helm last month, back to Sarah Hall for The Wolf Border - another
strong read. And to top off the fiction, She Who Remains by Rene
Karabash (thanks Max) was a reminder to read more international
fiction.
For my end-of-life doula training and work, it was the wonderful
Joan Halifax and Being With Dying, that I
mentioned above, followed by (the very different) Alua
Arthur's Briefly Perfectly Human.
And for the workshop on Endings coming up in September, listening
to William Bridges’ Managing Transitions, to see
what I could remember from reading it decades ago. Pleased I did
– plenty of good stuff in there (resulting in this session in July)
When I wanted shorter bursts, I turned to another page in Poetry of Presence for some
gorgeous poems. You can expect to hear many of these turn
up in Acts of Love over the coming months, I reckon.
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I’d
hoped to have a really spacious summer this year with heaps of
time to get to the beach and onto the Downs – and work that could
accommodate and flex around those things instead of the other way
around.
And so it’s proved to be. Admin, project management, client
liaison, coaching and some coaching supervision… a light load
with plenty of flexibility, and I’m loving that.
(pic: Angela Smyth - do take a
look at her work - it's very good)
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If you
enjoy this Newsletter, please do consider spreading the word and
sharing it with others who might appreciate it.
Helena x
helena@helenaclayton.co.uk
07771 358
881
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.
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