The Blog
The emotions, actions and thought processes of my creative work.
This is where I share what I’m doing and why, how I’m thrashing out problems and what I’m trying to achieve.
The Messages In Disappointment
At the end of April, I felt pretty indestructible. I was fitter than I had ever been in my life, climbing mountains with ease and following the daily yoga practice I’d aimed for for years. I’d just turned 30 and had made my list – and as part of that list I’d booked a guided trip to do the Welsh 3000s at the end of June. I was excited to start training, and excited for a summer working through my list and being out in the green hills and woods.
How To Stop Being A Perfectionist
“Oh yes, I’m a perfectionist” – that’s always been my default position. At school, if my exercise book had an unruly dot or ink flick, I would carefully eek the page out from the staples and start again clean. There was a time in primary school where we thought I might need extra time in exams because I was so slow doing my work, but actually, I was attempting to complete each task to microscopic levels of perfection. As an adult, this morphed into an inability to take criticism and flat refusals to try anything new – as both would show the world that I was less than perfect.
The Unexpected Magic Of Low Expectations
I have always had high expectations for myself. That was something I never expected to change. I have always been planning my high achievement, whether that was ordering university prospectuses when I was 14 or setting a goal to make £100k in 2020.
When You Feel Ashamed Of Your Goals
A few weeks ago, in my 6 Month Business Check In, I shared a new goal that had come up from the planning process: to start making six figures and scale from next year.
Loneliness and the Lies We Tell
When we first told the family we were moving away, my mum told me “you’ll be lonely”. And of course, from that point on, I was adamant I wouldn’t be.
My Experience Using Tarot In Decision Making
In last week’s The Little Chapters podcast episode, Jess and I talked about ‘Woo’ – the beliefs and practises we hold that aren’t governed by empirical science or logic, and are perhaps a little ‘out there’.
Postcards From Bruges, A Slow Travel Guide
We got the train to Bruges, an affair infinitely more civilised than air travel. Although the Eurostar trains are sleek are modern, there is still a hint of the golden age of travel in the air as, laden with luggage, you saunter along the platform toward your cross-continental journey (this is not the ‘stick your elbows out to get a seat’ train travel we’re used to on the West Coast mainline).
5 Simple Living Shifts For Summer
What kind of a season is summer? With it's endless, cloudless days, sticky drips of ice cream and overhead buzz and flutter of transient birds and insects? It's a season, to me, of both rest and projects. After a spring of 'hustle' and growth there is now space and opportunity to enjoy the fruits of that labour, while this same space reinvigorates inspiration and creativity and brings new ideas to the fore.
How To Plan Your Own Micro-Adventures - with Victorinox*
[Sponsored content] Over the last month I’ve been undertaking a series of micro-adventures as part of Victorinox’s Modern Pathfinder campaign, and you know what? It’s been one big realisation for me about this whole simple living thing. I’ve written before about how I always feel like I need to be doing more in order to be slow living ‘properly’, and this is something I find very difficult to shake.
A 'Follow Your Curiosity' Weekend Getaway
How I’ve been agonising about the first line of this post! How to communicate in a pithy hook of a sentence the magnitude of a weekend spent in deep conversation and contemplation, following creative curiosity and changing my whole approach and understanding of my work. On this weekend I learned so much about myself and how my past is still affecting my present, and took away some really life-transforming lessons.
Winter In The Mountains
When we first moved to Snowdonia, I’d only really experienced it in summer. And we’d always been really lucky; the odd gloomy day but more often than not roaring sunshine, the sea sparkling turquoise and the white beaches giving the Bahamas a run for their money.