Happy Tuesday afternoon! This letter is an excuse for you to take a 5-8 minute break with ☕ to peruse my thoughts, learnings, updates and see what you feel curious about. I started this experimental letter as a way to (re)connect through stories, promote serendipity and share learnings. What can/should/can you do with this email? A) Respond 👋 and share something that resonated with you in your life🤝 or B) Tell me something you want me to write about ✍️ (or talk about - future versions may include videos) or C) Surprise me! 😮
👆 (Re)discovering the immense joy of live music, listening to a saxophonist play on top of a DJ set on the dancefloor. Every event needs this!
👋 Hello Friends,
This month I am practicing the art of plodding along consistently.
After experiencing a strong incident of writer’s block in the run up to a PhD essay deadline, I realised I needed to find a way to get myself into the habit of consistently writing. Otherwise, the book and PhD projects will remain just that, projects without an end in sight. I took a couple of days off over Easter to properly rest and then broke down the essay in smaller 20-30 minute parts, and enforced a writing schedule of 2-3 hours for a few days. There is great value in creating constraints - giving myself a small-ish window every morning where I have to show up at the page but where I don’t have to go beyond this. Important to add - what I produce doesn’t have to be the final version, it is all working in progress so it can suck!
Plodding along consistently doesn’t feel particularly glamourous or shiny. I don’t know about you but the thrill of novel unexpected intense adventures each day feels much richer than more groundhog day-esque routine and repetitive structures. And yet, if we want to build or create anything meaningful, it takes time.
I’m re-remembering James Clear’s principles on the need for sustainable consistency and grit:
That doesn’t mean life can’t include the glamourous and shiny by the way - I’ve added one fun thing a day (e.g. meal with a friend, watching a film, dancing etc) as a treat of sorts to create a reward cycle into my workflow. And its working; I’ve written 5000+ words in the last 2 weeks!
What do you want to achieve that requires consistent plodding along? Exercise? Writing? Art? What small amount of time could you allocate towards this every day? How can you reward yourself?
Here is how to plod along reading this letter. 😛 It’s structured into 4 sections - feel free to scroll down to the section that pulls you in the most.
1. Human Connectivity Insights 💡
- How to Design a Fun & Inclusive Wedding 💒
2. What I am Celebrating 🙌
i. 🎓💰PhD Funding ii. 🎙️ My Work Featured Online
3. Consumable Delights 😋
i. ✍️ Article - ‘Attention is all you need’ ii. ▶️ Video - The AI Dilemma iii. 🎵 Music - Echoes by Martin Roth iv. 🌳 Retreat Experience - The Garden Residency
4. A Parting Thought📝
-Pale Blue Dot (1994) - by Carl Sagan …The only home we've ever known
Thanks, as always, for reading (and responding!). 🙏
Sending (Virtual) Hugs, Love & A Warm Smile,
Georgie 🤗💜
1. Human Connectivity Insights 💡- How to Design a Fun & Inclusive Wedding 💒
Just over a week ago I found myself in a beautiful French Chateau just outside Paris, celebrating the wedding of a friend. 🎉
100 guests. The majority French-speaking 🇫🇷. And the groom was the only person I knew. Naturally, I was nervous beforehand, knowing I was going to have to put a lot of work in to make friends, so I didn’t end up alone for the whole weekend.
And make friends I needed to! As well as having fun I also had to find a car lift to the church 💒 (would have been a great disappointment to miss the main event!) and then also back to Paris on the Sunday. Although it would be a beautiful venue in the middle of nowhere to get stranded…
I’m pleased to share that I made more than 1 new friend! And by the end of the weekend with a few people different offers for lifts, and people to stay in contact with.
En route home to London I was reflecting on what made this possible - what features of the event design made me feel so included, and likely for me to join in, and what actions did I myself take that increased my human connectivity outcomes? I’ve condensed them into to a few insights below.
🎩 Play a role. I was asked to inform the grooms-party that it was time for photographs. This gave me an opportunity and excuse to go find them and also to introduce myself, which I did in a playful way. I knew they had travelled far (all the way from Australia!), I made a comment about their dedication and I referenced myself as I was the sole representative (and proof) of the groom’s time living in London. This knowledge gave them an opening to ask me more questions, and the playful spirit was reciprocated back, creating openness and fun in the dialogues. Meeting this group then made it easier to join their conversations/dancing group later on in the evening.
🎁 Go first + self-disclose. When you know no-one, you can either wait for someone to approach you, or choose to approach someone first. The latter takes more bravery but delivers a lot of agency and possibility because you get to meet a lot more people. I asked to join various tables for meals, broke into the conversation by sharing a little bit about myself (like the fact I had just arrived, after getting up at 5am that day) and later into the dialogue mentioning the fact I didn’t know how to get to the church or get back to the city after the wedding. By lunchtime pre-ceremony, I had already been offered my first car-lift! In conversation, we have a tendency to wait for questions before sharing anything, but that places the burden on others to know what to ask us. You can reduce this burden by giving an easy hook - a gift for the other to build on.
🤏Use proximity. By far one of the most impactful ways to enable human connection is to leverage moments of physical closeness around a shared context. The drinks/canape table, the playful photobooth/message book area, the dance-floor, the confetti station… all places where there are easy prompts to use to start dialogue. ‘I’m feeling drawn to a second round of cake-eating’/ This is a such a good song'/ ‘The family look so alike and gosh, such a big family’….Talking from a place of shared context creates a sense of ‘us-ness’, an easy invitation for others to build on and therefore safety and trust.
👋 Smile and say hi - micro-moments count. Not all interactions need to be conversations. The fun of group events is that they provide multiple opportunities to cross-paths with the same people over a period of time. Wandering past people en route to the toilet, accomodation, food is the perfect setting to simply acknowledge faces with a smile, thereby creating some familiarity and making it easier for you to approach each other later in the event for a longer conversation.
🗣️Communicate inclusively. The party was made up both French and English speakers and whilst most people could speak English, everything was translated into both languages (the speeches, the stories behind the table names etc). It seems like a small thing but nothing disengages quite like the inability to understand. This applies beyond the basic language to giving everyone access to information. The groom and bride also had a whatsapp channel where they shared key updates - timings for the lunch before the church, the brunch after etc. It is easy to assume that everyone understands and knows what is happening but in reality, people (often those who know few people) will get left out.
❤️ Create stimuli, make it playful and invite people to participate in it. I loved how the groom and bride shared their story (from their first date to today) in a series of chapters and events, with every table named after one. They then shared their love story, encouraging each table to go wild and cheer at the relevant moment. This was an example of a small but effective way of sharing their story (more inclusion for those who knew only a little about one of the couple, like me!) and inviting them to play a role - thus moving guests from the role of listener/consumer to active participant.
2. What I am Celebrating 🙌
This section is an experimental way for me to practice the challenge of self-celebration, feel into the experience of pride and gratitude for good things happening in life. Hopefully, it will encourage you too to outwardly celebrate achievements in your own life!
i. PhD Funding 🎓💰
Last week I found myself surprised and speechless (quite an uncommon experience for me!) skimming my email on auto-pilot and discovering that the first line did not in fact read ‘‘unfortunately, you’ve been unsuccessful with your funding application’’.
Turns out, most rejection emails don’t tend to start with ‘I am pleased’….
I paused. Wanting not to rush or skim over the moment, and instead be in touch with the emerging series of rich sensations and feelings I was experiencing.
Slowly I kept reading…
This really is one of those moments where the circling question ‘what is it like to be you right now?’ is highly powerful. ❓
I held my breath, quickly reading on, checking to make sure that they really meant this. Were there any hidden conditions that I had to fulfill, before I could allow myself to fully sink into the experience? Then followed disbelief.… ‘no way. The application wasn’t that much better than the one I had submitted the year before, and been rejected for. Maybe it was, maybe it was the more academic research proposal that made all the difference’.
Then came accountability. ‘Yikes, they think I’m worth fully funding! The research idea I have around human connectivity is deemed ‘‘legit’.’ Now I’m going to have to deliver on that.’
I re-read the email in full, wanting to see if a sense of pride was also there. If I could feel into some self-love, some self-celebration for getting me to this point that to be honest, I had given up on. After the first rejection I decided that a PhD is something I really wanted to do, regardless of circumstance, so I would self-fund the fees and work on my business part-time to make it happen.
Pride is something I’m practicing feeling into. Sometimes I don’t feel it in the moment of success and then it emerges later on and I find myself with tears of gratitude for everything that had to come together for this reality to occur. For the mix of hard-work and ambition married with love, emotional and cognitive support from others, and of course, the luck that is underneath much of everything in life.
I had designed the following 4-6 years of my life around this dream and it hadn’t really occurred to me that I might ‘get lucky’. In all honesty, I didn’t even realise I was allowed to re-apply for the funding having started the PhD.
That is how ‘luck’ and opportunity can suddenly smash our plans and perceived sense of reality into pieces. We think we know the future but hahaha, we have not even considered the unknown pieces that fall into our tracks.
It is like when someone asks you an ‘if’ question you hadn’t considered, and you’re suddenly able to imagine a whole new creative possibility and how to make that happen. That is why I find coaching so valuable.
Suddenly, the vision of my future shifted. Maybe this PhD thing is going to take less time than expected. Maybe I won’t have to work as much to make it possible, and I can de-stress about the need to make a lot of income. Maybe I will have less time which means I need to make more decisions about where my attention and energy flows. Maybe… how can I fit the book project in amongst the PhD?
It’s funny how constraints make you realise even more what is important to you.
I’ve not yet solved this challenge yet, as I’m becoming more aware of the reality that writing anything demands. But I trust my subconscious to think about it and come up with some solutions for how to make this work. I also welcome any suggestions you may have about how to do both!
ii. My Work Featured Online 🎙️
🎙️ #1 - Me, My CTO & I - How to trigger conversations
🎙️ #2 - Communications Secrets - How the late Queen Elizabeth II made everyone feel heard
3. Consumable Delights 😋
✍️ Article - ‘Attention is all you need’ - Great article about how Chat GPT, 🪄 with the addition of plugins will become ‘one destination for nearly everything: search, discovery, travel planning, restaurant booking, gift shopping, first drafts, research’. Organisations need to get ready for this change.
If you’re not already playing around with ChatGPT, you must! I’ve been exploring Chat GPT’s abilities to help me write more succinct summaries, craft deep questions and design some curriculum around difficult conversations (after a few requests from organisations this year, it seems like I might need to expand my offerings to include this).
▶️ Video - The AI Dilemma by The Centre for Humane Technologies. One of the best (and simple) explanations I have seen so far on the safety risks AI poses. They talk about the fact that creating new technologies uncovers the need for a new class of responsibilities, how we didn’t manage to control social media early enough before it became emerged into our everyday systems, what the negative impact of some very recent (and incredibly advanced) AI tools are already having because they haven’t been safety tested, and also how AI is so much stronger than atomic bombs, because AI can make AI stronger (there is an exponential effect). Watch this.
🎵 Music - Echoes by Martin Roth. Listening to this really touches something in my mind, body and heart. 🙏 Thanks to John for sharing this.
🌳Retreat Experience - My friend Andre has just launched a non-profit co-created co-living retreat in private paradise (Portugal). A camp for curious weirdos. A melting pot of multidisciplinary experimentation. A place to work and play as your best self [or whichever self shows up]. I can vouch for the beauty of the space, especially! So many wonderful trees, and even a local garden stallion🐴 🌳.
Apply here 👉https://ecosystem.thegarden.pt
4. A Parting Thought📝
[Best read while listening to moving music🎵]
Pale Blue Dot (1994) - by Carl Sagan
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
🙏 Thanks to Josh for sending this beautiful prose my way. Given the current climate (literally and metaphorically), these words feel very topical.
Thanks for this Georgie! So much to respond about. I particularly resonated with the idea of 'find a role' when in a big group of others you don't know yet. I've often found this useful myself. Having been writing about Host Leadership for a decade and more, it strikes me that what may put some folk off this is the idea that 'someone else ought to be doing it'. Well, if it needs doing and there's no-one else, then get going. Good guests always seek to help their hosts, and getting stuck into making sure something happens, people know where to be, helping move things along, these are all wonderful ways to both participate and also 'scaffold' some interactions with others. Indeed, people have told me that one way into this is to put yourself in the host's shoes and simply start acting to introduce people, point up what's happening, asking about what people are looking forward to and are hoping for, and so on.