Happy February! These are my honest reflections about being human, creating meaningful connections and how to live a more intentional life. I encourage you to grab a favourite ☕drink , put your feet up and take a proper 5-8 minute break reading this. Hopefully, it will spark new thoughts and ideas. Let’s connect - share them in the comments below ✍️ or email me 📥.
Dancing with an old friend and getting my Zouk addiction 💃 fulfilled at an International Zouk Congress and Marathon recently👆
👋 Hello Friends,
What a ride 2024 has been and it is only February!
I thought my medical adventure during NYE was an outlier. Instead, life has been serving me opportunities to let go more. To clear the decks, embrace and allow the boat to sail into a different direction. ⛵️
I’ve stepped down from a large set of responsibilities as a leader in Sandbox (see #2), ended a collaboration, and am facing the potential loss of a treasured teacher…
At my last retreat I was struck by the news that one of my teachers has just discovered he has stage 4 cancer. It was an incredibly emotional opening to the retreat for all of us, and I couldn’t stop the emotions flowing through my body. Nor did I want to.
As the tears flowed, touching places of deep sadness, I found an opening to some of the most immense love I have ever felt. As strange as it sounds, I am fan of sadness for many reasons:
It’s raw and intense, demanding our full presence. Here-ness.
It reminds us how precious every moment is. How permanence is a great illusion. That everything is always in the act of birth and death.
And it shows us what we care about. And how much we do actually care.
Grief is the gateway to love. ❤️
I have a lot of deep love for my teacher. Since we met in 2017, I’ve worked with him multiple times a year and he is a source of some of the most growth-full, rich and nourishing moments I have had, which I treasure. And he is also a wonderful person - full of enthusiasm and joy, often laughing and an inspiring organiser which too many projects (which we often connect on!).
Whilst I’m hopeful for the success of the treatments, I am also feeling into the fragility of our lives, and its positive potential to help us access the immense beauty and preciousness of each passing moment.
👉 I’m curious what your relationship to grief, letting go and loss are? And what gifts it has brought for you? 👈
And beyond grief, read on below to discover more reflections, scrolling down to whatever you’re most called to.
1. Thinking About… Goals
2. What I am Celebrating 🙌
i. 🎓 My first PhD study was accepted to the DESIGN24 Conference ii. 🪴 Celebrating the end of 3.5 years as Sandbox London Ambassador iii. Goodbye Avoidance, Hello Decisions & Getting Help 😌
3. Consumable Delights 😋
i. 📖 Article - How to be Successful by Sam Altman ii. Inspiring Human - Ben Keene iii. 📕 Book Unbound- A Women’s Guide to Power
4. Catch me Live 🏃♀️
i. 🌏 Asia Travels
ii. ✨ Transformational Conversation Programme - Spring Edition
iii. 🔥 Transform Conflict into Connection Programme
iv. 🎓 DESIGN24 - 18th International Design Conference
5. A Parting Thought📝 by Anthony de Mello
6. Conversations Starters (a new experimental section) - join in!
Thanks, as always, for reading (and responding!). 🙏
Sending (Virtual) Hugs, Love & A Warm Smile,
Georgie 🤗💜
1. Thinking About… Goals ✅
Whilst I have some great systems for weekly and annual reflections, my goal-setting system could do with an update. Last year, a lot of good stuff happened, but a lot of important goals didn’t (book writing, podcast creating, website updates, alumni offerings) because I avoided or didn’t get round to them.
And I suspect that was because I didn’t formulate clear small and large goals that I was accountable to. So this year, I’m being more decisive and action-oriented. I’ve spent large chunks of January in the goal-setting process (yes, it has taken a while!), and I’d love to share the process I went through, inspired by a friend and fellow coach Paul’s Goal-Setting & Planning System for Excellence .
There are six components to this:
Discovery - Create a big list of all the potential goals you want to achieve, under a variety of categories. You can write both process (e.g. write 200 words a day) or outcome goals (deliver a highly rated workshop to my team). Don’t censor at this stage - allow your mind to dream and imagine. Some of these goals might not make it to this year/quarter but they might be not far away. I included quarter, 1 year, 5 year and decade goals here.
Selection - Narrow down the goals by priority. I chose three for each category -primary, secondary and tertiary. You can also sort them by quarter, which I found helpful as I had too many for just three per category.
Formulation - Take the selected goals and restate them in a SMART way. e.g. If one of our goals from the selection step was “find a job”, you could restate it as “find a job that pays $50,000 per year by December 31”.
Planning - This stage is about understanding the condition we need to ensure each goal actually happens. What barriers are in the way? What do we need to put in place to enable this? Robust plans are much more likely to be implemented. All my process goals live in my calendar e.g. exercise, typing, writing, goals.
Evaluation & Reviewing - This is about creating the systems to ensure that we are continuously tracking and reviewing our progress towards our goals. It’s important to do this so you can a) celebrate progress and b) make changes when life inevitably changes your priorities and you need to adapt. I evaluate my goals weekly with my Saturday Weekly Reflections Ritual.
Rewarding - Such an important step! What will you do to celebrate success? The act of pursuing goals should feel rewarding.
👉 What is your goal-creating and tracking system?
Useful Resources 🧰
✍️ My weekly reflections questions template (recently updated) for Stage 5 Evaluation & Planning. This is my favourite weekly ritual, best completed with coffee ☕️ and has been the space in which I dream up many new ideas, solutions and grand plans.
🔧 Paul’s very thorough goal-setting tools: Goal-planning system & Journal Reviewing System
📈My current Q1 & Q2 Goals - for inspiration when thinking about yours
2. Keys Celebrations 🙌
I’ve been practicing acknowledging, speaking aloud and feeling pride in achievements to increase self-love and fight the doom-and-gloom nothing is enough narrative everywhere! I encourage you too to outwardly explore celebrating achievements in your own life.
🎓 My first PhD study was accepted to the DESIGN24 Conference
🪴 Celebrating the end of 3.5 years as Sandbox London Ambassador
After 3.5 years leading the London Sandbox community as an Ambassador (and serving in the Governance Council before then), I am ready to step down and handover to the new 4 Co-Ambassadors I recruited (a much more sustainable team who are already excelling and bringing energy to the hub!).
In many ways I feel ready to close this chapter of my life, and create space for all the other projects on the waiting list 🤣. There is also a little grief as I feel like community building is at the heart of my identity.
It’s also been a really rich and rewarding leadership experience full of learning, connection and fun. It has also been a lot of work, especially as I worked solo for the last 1.5 years! I’m especially proud to have (co)led the recruitment of two new cohorts 👨👩👦👦(2021, 2023), 2 London retreats 🏡, and many many rich reflective dinners. 🥘. I have been incredibly touched by the love that has been sent my way (DMs, messages in the group and Georgie Love Fest dinner) since I announced the news. Not only do I feel appreciated and seen for my commitments, others’ reflections have helped me understand what my most valuable leadership qualities are (a few hints: balancing being logical and getting stuff done with warmth and emotional intelligence, the art of nudging others into action, and showing up and committing to the community)
Goodbye Avoidance, Hello Decisions & Getting Help 😌
One of my intentions for 2024 is to lean into the things I have been avoiding and make decisions faster. In 2023, I had way too many open loops as I waited for more or better information before coming to a decision. This doesn’t always come, so the best thing we can do is make the best decision given the information we have and accept it is a risk that may need to be reversed.
I’m delighted to say that my website(s) and operations will finally be improving! Thanks 🙏 to Haneen, I’ve found new VA and also someone to redesign my Transformational Conversations sales page (which is currently mostly slides). Such a relief to have help with this as it’s been on my to do list for 3 years… 🤦♀️
3. Consumable & Inspiring Delights 😋
📖 i. Article - How to be Successful by Sam Altman
“It’s useful to focus on adding another zero to whatever you define as your success metric—money, status, impact on the world, or whatever. I am willing to take as much time as needed between projects to find my next thing. But I always want it to be a project that, if successful, will make the rest of my career look like a footnote.
Most people get bogged down in linear opportunities. Be willing to let small opportunities go to focus on potential step changes”.
All 13 thoughts about how to achieve such outlier success are excellent. I especially appreciated the comment above on perspective. 👉What might that one project that makes your career look like a footnote be right now for you?
🪄ii. Inspiring Human - Ben Keene - Time for a radical sabbatical...
I want to celebrate Ben Keene, a seriously inspiring human who continues to surprise me. ✨ He lives and breathes the mantra of life being an adventure.
Having a family and running two start-ups Rebel Book Club and Raaise has never held him back from going on ‘radical sabbaticals’. 🌎 Asking himself...'How will we feel the week after we come back about our decision?' The answer is very likely going to be: That was worth it.’
His latest adventure to Kenya 🇰🇪 is the latest radical sabbatical. And a great reminder that practical more linear life decisions don’t always add up to a life well lived. As someone who wants to live a rich life full of many different kinds of adventures and projects, it is so helpful to see others making it happen.
It is never really the right time to go for an adventure or take a sabbatical. It's not easy to organise but the efforts are worth it.
Alongside inspiring us all with his adventures, Ben is also a great supporter of people and inspiring ideas💡. In the very early days of Trigger Conversations, when I was just about to launch my first ever event to bring together strangers to have deep meaningful conversations and feeling a bit nervous, he was very excited about the idea. This was such helpful validation of what was a ‘crazy’ idea to some, and really helped me have the confidence to drive it forward and create a business (and potential career out of it, with the PhD taking me further).
📕 iii. Book - Unbound: A Woman’s Guide to Power by Kasia Urbaniak
Such an insightful and practical book from a former ex-Toaist nun and Dominatrix (a unique mix!) helping women stand in their power. It has been fascinating to understand the different kinds of power you can have - domination and submission - where the latter is not powerless at all.
‘In the submissive state, you create a world in which your desires have already come true, and invite the other person to join you in it’
I’m reading it as part of a book club with friends and in contrast with a few others in the group, I’ve realised I find the former much easier than the latter!
4. Catch Me Live 🏃♀️
Thanks to Yannick who write great monthly Nuggets for this phrasing! One of my intentions for 2024 is to ensure I more explicitly share projects I am working on and how to connect or work with me.
🌏 Asia Travels
I’ll be travelling throughout late Feb and March in Asia, attending the Sandbox Global Summit in Vietnam 🇻🇳 and then working remotely whilst exploring some more of the country (23/02-10/03) and then Japan 🇯🇵 (10-24/03). I’m especially excited for Japan, as I have always wanted to go and have heard incredible things!
👉 Going to be there at the same time? Know someone I should meet? Would love to hear from you!
✨ Transformational Conversation Programme - Spring 2024 Edition
‘A practical, inspiring, laughter-filled crash course in the art of conversation, connection and curiosity’ - to quote one of my previous clients. Join for my 17th and 18th cohort!
👩💻Virtual 6 Week Programme - 9th April-14th May
🇬🇧 In Person Programme - 26th-28th April
Taster Workshops - Fri 22nd & Wed 27th March
🙋 Curious? Apply here (you’ll be sent a link to schedule a discovery call with me)
🔥 Transform Conflict into Connection - a new programme!
Every client I have ever worked without has asked me to design curriculum for difficult conversations; it’s something we all struggle with. And my own struggles (and desire to embody these skills perfectly) held me back from previously offering this. That time is over, and I am SO excited to be offering a new programme in 2024, co-designed and co-delivered with one of my best friends and fellow facilitator Haneen Khan, who excels in this realm.
A 4-week course (3 days in person in London 🇬🇧, 4 weeks online) beginning 10 May 2024. We'll be exploring:
👉🏼 What are your triggered patterns in conflict?
👉🏼 How to identify your emotions & regulate your feelings.
👉🏼 How to bring up difficult feedback & requests with ease.
🙋 Curious? Sign up to the WAITLIST HERE
🎓 DESIGN24 - 18th International Design Conference - 20-23rd May, Dubrovnik, Croatia 🇭🇷 - I’ll be presenting my recent study ‘Weak Ties Interactions in Networking: Five Types of Interaction Structures’
5. A Parting Thought 📝
“Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better lighting, better ventilation. Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place.”— Anthony de Mello (found via Tim Ferriss)
6. Conversation Starters
Inspired by Chris Guillebeau’s substack 🌻 A Year of Mental Health, I’m playing around with ways to open up the conversation with these letters. Pick a question and share your ideas in the comments below.
What are your radical sabbatical ideas? Let’s inspire each other.
What goal-creating system or tool do you use?
What is an example of a project you’ve undertaken that made your career look like a footnote?
In what way have you found meaning and joy in experiencing grief?