Travel, work and family have been interwoven this spring and summer.
It's been full of really significant family milestones. Watching the generation after you entering adult life (marriage, emerging careers, leaving home, moving country, children) feels very different from watching your own generation do it.
Being involved is an honour and a fascination.
This period has seen more rebalancing of online with face-to-face, and also more group work counterbalancing 1-2-1. The team days I have been facilitating are an absolute joy. I’d almost forgotten how life-giving I find it to hold a group dynamic. It asks different things of you, and draws different things out as a result. It’s good-scary.
St Beuno’s in May felt different from last autumn; retreatants overall were in a more resilient and moving-beyond-pandemic state.
And as always, it is wonderful to settle there for a while. The place and the work fit so rightly together.
NOT so wonderful to catch COVID on that trip … but I was very grateful to catch it only after three vaccinations, and in one of the milder variants.
In July, a group of leadership peers that has been gathering online for three years, met in the flesh for the first time, near Ghent in Belgium. The depth of connection was palpable.
It’s been good to travel again, but I’ve been scheduling events in batches to keep my carbon footprint down, and staying within Europe.
3. Crash! A less charming milestone was my first ever bike crash, so I’ve spent August and September on crutches, which has been quite illuminating. Meeting up with my friend Helen on her Camino (left) felt like a contrast of extremes. And my sister Naomi’s long-awaited visit from the USA (right) had to change shape quite a bit...
Accompaniment. There has been a lot of flow in and out of my pool of 1-2-1 clients; packages ending, new encounters, attuning to one another.
There are moments where that is daunting, but more often it’s refreshing and intriguing. I guess in the early years, the energy that pours into performance anxiety and trying to prove yourself credible feels inexorable, but with experience, and a slackening in the grip of your tedious jostling ego, it gets easier simply to accompany people as well as you can in that moment, and to try and learn from your worse moments.
I trained in a coaching model that focusses on fulfilment and growth, but I believe generative listening is broader than that.
Coaching and retreat work are, at base, about helping people to LIVE: with choice, in good times and bad, whether growing or sustaining or hibernating or simply surviving with more dignity.
Mutuality. I’ve been spending quality time with peers, and I realise how thirsty I have become for that solidarity and shared depth and laughter. Whether it’s a big group or 1-2-1, it’s nourishing.
Later this month I’m returning to London for the first time since before COVID, to facilitate a leadership programme module and do some face-to-face coaching (YES!). I’ll then head up North to Mirfield to guide on another retreat.
On returning home, most of my work for the coming half-year will be online facilitation, coaching and accompaniment.
The one big in-person event is in January; another Europe-wide Ignatian Leadership programme which I will be co-running with a newly configured team.
We are Flemish, Portuguese and British, and we have widely differing perspectives on what the training needs to contain, so everyone gets to stretch and shift and see things differently.
And the icing on the cake? It’s being held in Portugal again, so no airports involved!
Thank you for reading!