This time last year I planned to move toward three things: building my professional identity focussed on followership, travel, and creativity/relationship. The words I chose to guide my moves were ambition, contentment and petrichor.
So 12 months on how is it going?
My website is updated, I’ve presented followership workshops and taught leadership modules, I’ve begun publishing regularly about followership and leadership in organisations right here and I’ve received helpful, business support through SEA, The City of Charles Sturt’s Business Support Program and a trio of fabulous, generous, women.
During 2025 I will present workshops to new audiences and extend my professional offerings to coaching and strategic planning and implementation all through a distinctive followership lens. I’ll explore a paid newsletter option which will give subscribers access to my book, chapter by chapter, and to a community of folk who think leadership can be done better if we take followership seriously.
I’ve also begun a more creative publication 1000 Words which has nothing to do with organisational followership but is a place where I occasionally share my photographs and poems.
A combination of work and play in Scotland and a very fun week in Sydney got me packing my bags last year after a long travel break. And I went camping in the Flinders Rangers (yes, camping… me… I know.) This year I plan to be at the Global Followership Conference in Southern California with a late-in-the-year trip to Europe in the offing.
This year my word is consolidation… to keep building on what 2024 began. There will, I hope, be some new and unexpected things throughout the year too. My advice to a recent career workshop was to be brave enough to say yes to opportunities that are a stretch and which are aligned with where you want to be. And brave enough to say no to opportunities that aren’t quite right, which solve someone else’s problems but add to yours, or which are unproductive diversions. This seems good advice which I will continue to take for myself.
And the personal stuff is going very nicely too - refer to Sydney and camping above. Thanks for asking!