I avoid New Years resolutions but I do like to spend the first week of the year having a think about my intentions for the year. In truth I never ever manage them all but its a really valuable reference point, written in that beautiful quiet of the slowest part of the year, that I can check back with later on. So – in the midst of the usual annual happy chaos of reading, cupboard clearing and walking this is what I am been musing on:

  • I want to make sure I do what I said I would do when I stepped into my new role and be the kind of leader I have wanted to have in the past
  • I want to make sure I work in the open and explore the tensions and boundaries in the work I do
  • This is the place where my participatory practice rubs up against leadership practice and I will be exploring that this year as well
  • This means another commitment to those 500 words again (see earlier intentions!) – but find a way to make it a ritual as I have with the daily yoga
  • Up until my PHD I was an avid fiction reader and I lost that ability to lose myself in a book when I had to shift gears with my non-fiction reading and I really miss that ability to disappear into a different world. I am really drawn to Cassie Robinson’s work on imagination and I want to link that to my intention to properly commit to reading fiction – dreaming and imagination are so closely linked and I want to remind myself of that. Also – I LOVED reading!!!
  • I want to make sure that I look outside and connect to other practitioners, its so easy to become insular to the organisation or system that you operate in and I need to push against that – its partly the working in the open but its also I suppose reading in the open as well and making sure that I am giving myself the time to find and absorb new ideas
  • More personally, I want to be sure I am making time for the people who matter to me – and accepting to do that properly a bit of planning is needed (I have a theory about plans – by having them you avoid procrastination but you MUST be prepared to throw them over at a moments notice if you find something you want to do more. Its like organised spontaneity…..)

Finally, when I reread this and mused about it the words that came to mind were balance and boundaries. I feel I am treading a path between various things; balance and boundaries are needed for myself and for the work.

I put this out there as its part of my work in the open and because its part of how I ask people to hold me to account and support me with this stuff, so if you have read this far then thank you.

Original source – Catherine Howe

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