December 2023
Monthnotes
Hi, welcome to my MonthNotes — reflective notes looking back over the past month, loosely based on a set of questions which help me reflect.
1. What went well?
- A fireside chat I did on my career with colleagues in another business unit in Elsevier — we got some nice feedback
- An episode I recorded with Hazel Carter for her podcast ‘Endings’ on managing life’s transitions
2. What did you experiment with?
- Thanks to a nudge from a colleague, and together with him and two other collegues, we organised the first ever social/virtual get-together for home-based staff in the UK— a year-end festive celebration. People had fun, and we got nice feedback afterwards, so I guess we’ll experiment again.
- A new way of describing my career journey:
I normally describe my career journey as unusual and mention a few highlights. (In my mind I picture my career journey, as a non-linear path that included lots of interesting people/places/stops/scenes along the way). Sometimes it’s helpful to tell a story with more structure, so I’ve realised that it’s also possible to describe my career journey as having three phases (with the bonus of added alliteration!):
- political (working in Parliament);
- people & projects (moving into technology and then the Food Standards Agency); and
- products & publishing (moving into Elsevier).
Of course, as with any story, it’s incomplete.
“Some people love their story so much, even if it’s of their own misery, even if it ties them to unhappiness, or they don’t know how to stop telling it. Maybe it’s about loving coherence more than comfort, it might also be about fear — you have to die a little to be reborn, and death comes first, the death of a story, a familiar version of yourself.” Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby*
3. What inspired you?
Barbara Mindell broke her back in a car crash and become a paraplegic at the age of 19. Despite being told her paralysis was permanent, she healed through practising continuum movement. Over 30 years later, she wrote an article about that transformation, “about learning how to feel, how to move through a deep process of change to embody new life […] about waking up to the richness of feeling truly alive and connected to oneself and others through movement and sensation.”
“There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life.” John O’Donohue*
4. What made you proud?
- Sessions with two teams reviewing 2023
- My colleague Elizabeth Munn explaining how technology can make a postive impact on medical education:
“Be empathetic to your customer ― It’s essential to really know your audience, who they are and what their pain points are. That’s not just important for frontline staff. This needs to be true for everyone, including, and perhaps especially, technology staff.”
- The progress we continue to make on building psychological safety in Elsevier:
At Elsevier, psychological safety is an integral part of our Inclusion & Diversity strategy. In 2023, the focus was on continuing to embed Psychological Safety in the fabric of our organization. The group leading this initiative took a proactive approach to supporting teams in need of support in this area. They held over 100 workshops in 2023, attended by more than 1,000 people — great stuff.
This new open access journal is owned by the Lowitja Institute, Australia’s only Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research institute, and is supported and published by Elsevier. Led by a team of First Nations researchers from around the world, it is dedicated to expanding access to First Nations research, and to improving the health and wellbeing of First Nations communities. This community-led journal publishes high quality research about First Nations health and wellbeing by First Nations researchers (rather than by non-Indigenous people doing research on Indigenous people). It is a core policy of the journal that all papers must include substantive contributions from First Nations authors.
5. What made you sad?
- Hearing about a colleague’s difficulties outside work
6. What was difficult?
- Going to A&E on Christmas Eve
7. What did you learn?
- What David Bowie liked to read — his 100 favourite reads
- Approximately half of the world’s population, ~4bn people, are in countries with elections in 2024. Massive amount of potential political change.
- Humans are bioluminescent*
- The parable of the three stonecutters (HT Eric Nehrlich)
- The ‘90-second rule’: whilst our emotional reaction often continues for a lot longer, it only takes a maximum of 90 seconds for the initial physical response to a stressful event to pass through your body (eg for stress hormones such as adreline to flood and then clear your system). So, Dr Jill Bolte Taylor advises, if you wait 90 seconds before reacting to a trigger, you can avoid a lot of emotional pain.
8. What did you get reminded of?
- The STAR model for telling a story, giving an example, or answering a behavioural interview question
- A great question for asking for feedback: ‘What’s one thing I can do better?
- Seeing Amp Fiddler (RIP) play live at the Montreux Jazz festival in 2004
- David Marquet’s ‘ladder of leadership’:
9. What books did you read?
- Essays in Zen Buddhism — second series, by D.T. Suzuki
- The Light Inside the Dark, by John Tarrant:
“A habit is essentially an artificial limitation we have put upon ourselves because we cannot endure the newness of each moment.”
“Who are you and what do you love?”
“To understand is quick and exciting, but to embody is slow and penetrating.”
10. What poems touched you?
- Spring and Fall, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
- Death is, by Hanna Heiting
- Tarantella, by Hilaire Belloc (which I learnt by heart when I was a teenager)
- I’d like to be a Teabag, by Peter Dixon
- Let’s love each other, by Rumi
11. What was fun?
- The Mill road winter fair: “a celebration of community along one of the most diverse and vibrant roads in Cambridge. Usually held on the first Saturday of December, the Fair brings together local businesses and organisations, shops and stallholders, musicians, artists and dancers in one day of festival joy.”
- The London Loft party
- Katy Bowman’s hands exercise advent calendar
- Playing the card game racing demon for the first time
12. What did you enjoy?
- Lunch with a colleague
- Seeing family
- Seeing friends
- Christmas
- Rohatsu
13. What are you looking forward to in January?
- A day of practising Somatic Experiencing in Hebdon Bridge, with a group of people on my training course
- Going to an Allison Russell concert in London
“And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.” Rilke*
