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.
2021 Review - Out Of The Hole And Into The Light
As I have been collecting my thoughts ahead of writing this review of 2021, that well-worn, never-quite-attributed quote keeps coming to mind: you overestimate what you can do in a day, and underestimate what you can do in a year. That really feels like the story of my 2021 – not much happened, but so much happened.
The Winter of Deep Procrastination
I feel that I open most of these letters with an observation about how quickly the month has gone - even if it doesn’t make the final edit they mostly start out that way. November, however, is the slowest month I have ever experienced.
Words To Use Instead of Self-Love: A Short Glossary
I don’t know whether I can locate self-love anymore. Influencers with privileged identities say self-love! between peace fingers; pink stationary for sale provides a self-love! checklist for you to turn the personal into the productive; a magazine article lists five things to start today to have more self-love! with product placement from a bath bomb company.
The 21st Century Witch In The Hut
It started with a meme. This meme, which reads “I don’t want a career, I want to wear a fancy robe covered in stars and dispense confusing and ambiguous advice to passing travellers from a large stone cottage on the edge of the woods where I live with a parliament of owls”.
Seeking Solace in the Before And After
Lately I’ve found myself drawn to stories of people with a distinct before and after. My attention is irrevocably held by a “but then” in the telling of a life.
Q2 2021 Review
In my first job, Q2 was the dreaded quarter. For reasons that were never quite pinned down, interest, enquiries and sales bombed during Q2 – which, of course, led to morale dropping and stress levels increasing. My Q2s since then had levelled out, being neither great nor awful, but this year the curse of Q2 came back to bite me. In every conceivable way, this has been one of my worst quarters to date.
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.
Where Are The Things That Make You You?
I was talking to someone the other day about bedtime routines, and they said that they had to go to bed early because “I can’t do the things that make me me when I’m tired”. And at the time, something about that statement clanged like a gong in my mind but I couldn’t put into meaningful thoughts exactly why it made me…uncomfortable.
The Person I Am and The Person I Want To Be
As I began to think about creating my 30 at 30 list, I began coming up against the same recurring block: The Person I Am. I capitalise The Person I Am because it really does feel like a proper noun; a thing that exists that has a bearing upon me that doesn’t always feel under my control. It is within me, but also independent of me, telling me what I can and can’t do regardless of what I actually think about the matter.
My 30 at 30 List
This week, I turned thirty. For some this is might mean nothing more than an extra candle on the cake or for others it might signal the unwelcome arrival of the end of youth. But for me, thirty feels, above all, like opportunity. Following an undeniably life-changing 6 months I feel like I am just now starting to scratch the surface of who I really am, what is possible for me and how I can truly, deeply belong to myself.
Q1 2021 Review
Well the first quarter of 2021 is over and I can’t decide whether it feels like a click of the fingers or the longest drag of time I’ve ever experienced. Everybody I’ve spoken to in recent weeks has said the same thing – “it’s been the longest winter” – and yet I also wonder what I actually got done this quarter, what I did with each week. No sooner had I got my head around the week than a new one was already beginning.
Life Lessons From The Mountainside
You may have noticed that I spent much of January and February up a hillside. I walked every day that it wasn’t completely pouring with rain. I studied the map and walked every route from the front door at least twice. I started January with a bit of a pant going up a slope, and ended February 783m up a mountain.
But What’s It For?
A few weeks ago at my workshop about time there was an artist who couldn’t find the time to paint. This, as you can imagine, is something of a problem. I suggested that she paint just for an hour with no expectation in order to get back into the habit. “But what would it be for?” she asked, “I can’t just paint without there being a point”. “The point” I said, “is that it’s your life”.
Lessons From Writing 40,000 Words In A Month
In February I set myself a challenge: write 40,000 words in one month. There were big and little reasons for this. One is that I want to write a book, but every time I got an idea I would try to squeeze it into a structure and write out the chapter headings but that also squeezed the little spark of life out of the idea. So I decided that rather than start with the structure, I would start with writing. Just writing anything and see what would emerge out of it. In the middle of lockdown, it also felt like something to do and think about and focus on that wasn’t all of this.
It’s The Hope That Hurts
I wrote this at 2am during some full moon insomnia, and it ended up being a newsletter that really resonated. I have had lots of replies about this one this week, so I thought I would reproduce it here too.
How Reflecting and Realigning Has Shifted My Content Buckets
There are a few things that clients tell me they’re planning to do that always make me cock my head to the side and ask whether that is the most effective use of their time right now. These things are my alarm bells of procrastination. They’re the things that scream of someone fearful of putting their business out there, and therefore busying themselves with Very Important behind the scenes work that no one will ever see and that won’t make any difference. Updating their website is one of these t
When Is The Right Time To Give Up On Something?
I have been asked this question a few times; it pops up in podcast Q&As occasionally. It always twists my heart in my chest. It feels so sad, like watching the last fraying strings of hope give way within someone, watching them fold up their dreams and lock them away and go back to what they were doing before with crestfallen shoulders.
Guilt and Balance: Breaking The Productivity Addiction
When I was going through the responses to my annual survey, I began to see the same struggle coming up over and over again: guilt. More specifically, guilt about not being productive enough, whilst simultaneously not taking time for oneself: “I WANT more balance, but I always seem to feel guilty when I’m not at my desk”. Over and over, in different words and in different ways people were chastising themselves for not working more, doing more, achieving more – and not being more balanced.
The Eco Lightbulb Principle Of Change
What I am learning, acutely, about change is that it happens glacially over time. Obviously, we don’t want it to happen like this. We want to stand on top of a mountain under a beam of sunlight and shout “I Have Changed” and for that to be all it takes. We want the change of the films we grew up with, where the impossible situation resolves itself and the boy realises he loves her five minutes before the end.
Goals, Intentions and Word Of The Year 2021
This new year is different. This new year there is not the clean break to “start again” that other years have. Of course this is always the case; the ticking over of a digit at the end of the year denotes nothing but our human need to control and measure time. Usually we manage to kid ourselves that the ticking over is meaningful, that it can birth us anew into a whole different world – but this year, with ongoing lockdowns and vaccine rollouts and continuing deaths around the world, it is harder to feel the change in the air.