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For the last year and a little bit I’ve been a member of ENGINE UK’s shadow board. ENGINE is a full stack agency which covers creative, communications, media and transformation, essentially it’s like a creative marketing and comms powerhouse that works hand in hand with data and consultancy know how. The shadow board was an opportunity for 9 of us from across the business to come together and shape the future of where we work, support our executive team and ultimately see what it means to be a leader in a different context.

As my time on the shadow board is drawing to an end, I wanted to put together some personal reflections alongside the group work we’re doing to support next year’s cohort and share the good stuff we’ve learned. 

This was the first time ENGINE had ever had a shadow board. Well, in fact, a junior board which we swiftly renamed a shadow board. So we didn’t really know what to expect. 

We went through a long recruitment process, sharing written submissions, doing hot seat interviews and group tasks all to find a group that could represent the diversity of disciplines and voices in the business, and who would hopefully work well together too. Our purpose became championing the voices of our colleagues and sharing what it was like “on the ground”, offering fresh energy and expertise to central projects, and spending time learning about the business. Alongside still doing our day jobs!

It’s been a full on experience, with highs and frustrations. 

We launched a new intranet. We rejuvenated our onboarding processes. We put plans in motion to make ENGINE culture much more active and physically present, before COVID put a little spanner in the works. We researched and designed new career progression guides. We tried to make sense of what the pandemic will mean for us as people and a business. We learned from Jim our CEO. We learned from each other. We learned more about ourselves.

Professionally, I learned a great deal about what makes a big people-centred company like ours tick. I don’t think I had ever really stopped to think about the decisions our exec made day to day, there was a lot more tactical management of the stuff that’s the “boring” fabric of the business than high flung strategic work. But the more I saw, the more that made sense. You need that fabric to be woven tightly if you’re going to use it as a sail to take flight. There’s a constant tug and pull as you go, trying to balance priorities and budgets. But ultimately it comes back down to working with people.

I learned more about how the other parts of our business work than I thought I would. Having been on a graduate scheme where I spent a year rotating around different sections of the company, I thought I had a good handle on what we did. But the time I spent with my other board members, reviewing training plans or trying to come up with cultural events, made me realise how different our approaches to problems can be. There are a lot of similar foundations in what we do (research, insight, strategise, produce something that resonates) how a group of PR people can hive mind a brief when they’re together, how a group of strategists will research and analyse it, and how a group of designers will immerse themselves and workshop it can look and feel very different. They’re each incredibly valuable and I’ve been made much wiser by watching other brilliant people work.

But I really wanted to reflect here on a personal level. If there’s one thing that will stick with me long after this experience, it’s that things are what you make of them.

It’s the most obvious lesson and also the hardest (for me) to put into practice. As I mentioned, when we started our time on the shadow board we weren’t really sure what it was. We were the first people to ever form a shadow board in the context we had. We struggled really hard with defining the role for ourselves. We struggled with getting projects going. We failed to get some things we wanted done and (in part because of that) we failed to win some people over. More often than not it was because we wanted to discuss and not do. We’d been trained as great diplomats who could come up with ideas and plans, who can research the pants off anything you need us to, but without the burning fire of a client we weren’t always the best do-ers. I wasn’t always the best I could have been. If I could go back and start this all again I’d want to be braver and bolder. In order to lead you have to go out on a limb to take a first step, knowing it might be wrong but also how much worse it can be if you don’t.

My favourite projects to work on, our careers project, the intranet, our exec shadowing discussions, were my favourites because we had a clear scope and we had a real drive to get something done. We applied what we knew of our expertise and drew on other people as experts in their own experiences.

If I’m ever a leader that’s what I would hope to provide. I would want to model clear communication and confidence in action (and responsibility with failure). I would want to acknowledge the strengths and diversity of those around me and amplify those talents, knowing I still have so much to learn. I would want to remember that things are what you make of them. 

Now that I’m leaving the shadow board behind, I’m not sure what’s next other than focusing on trying my best at my day job. It’s changed my perspective and I think it’s made me better. But I don’t know that it’s made me want to have loftier ambitions.

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If I’m completely honest I’ve lost my bearings and my confidence in lockdown. Things I would have otherwise done unthinkingly have become sticking blocks of uncertainty. I’ve been trying to take on a bit of a new role in my work and to challenge myself to do something different with my personal projects and in that process of way finding I’ve been looking up for signs, because that’s what I’d seen others do, and lost my grounding.

When I don’t feel like I’m doing my best or like I’m solidly making progress it gets to me. It becomes a vicious cycle of slipping up or struggling turning into a negative mindset turning into negative ways of working turning into more struggling and on and on. 

In those moments, I’m really the only person who can pull myself out of it. I have a bank of positive feedback that I can turn to for dark days, and people I can turn to for support when I need a helping hand. But when I’m in my own head, there’s only one person who can really make a difference.

So, I wanted to act on some advice I was given by a mentor and a passage from a book I read deep in my running phase of the year that has weirdly stayed with me.

“I kept waiting for all the old ghosts of the past to come roaring out—the screaming Achilles, the ripped hamstring, the plantar fasciitis. I started carrying my cell phone on the longer runs, convinced that any day now, I’d end up a limping mess by the side of the road. Whenever I felt a twinge, I ran through my diagnostics: 

Back straight? Check. 

Knees bent and driving forward? Check. 

Heels flicking back? … There’s your problem”

This largely uneventful moment from Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, has flickered in my mind for the last few months. Recently I realised why. I need my own checklist, not for running but for work.

My checklist is as follows:

  • Do you know why you’re doing it? – I know I need a light house to be reaching towards so what I’m doing has purpose
  • Have you done your research?- I struggle to engage unless I feel like I’m informed, I don’t need to be an expert but I do need to have an idea of what’s involved whether that’s subject matter or process
  • Have you spoken to the people you’re doing it for? – I’m a user researcher so this seems obvious, and is a reminder to do the work of meeting and working with people, but this is also important for me within our team or any illustration work I do
  • Have you written it down or drawn it? – I like to document everything because a problem articulated on paper is a problem halved, if nothing else it helps me share my thinking and gives me a physical artefact to work with as a starter

But I wanted to share some of how I got to what I wanted on my own checklist, in case anyone else wanted to create their own spot diagnostic. 

I started off by writing about what was happening at times when I felt good doing the activity, in this case my job. I tried to break it down into the smallest most basic things I could. At times it felt like I was being too simple, I ended up with some of the most elemental building blocks, but there’s a reason those things can be seen as clichéd foundations. 

Once I had my big list of things that were going on when I felt good, or was working on something good, I whittled down the list to the things that felt the most important or the most common across those times. I did my best to balance specific things, that felt really tangible, and making the list general and widely applicable. With that short list in hand, I started building my diagnostic.

Learning from the Born to Run example I made my diagnostic things I could check off. They had to be literal, not abstract. There are no feelings on the list, just actions. They are the things I can do that signal or build up to the more abstract things on my list.

Then I drew it up into a format I could use. 

If you want to make your own, here’s a template you can use. (The styling of this template was heavily influenced by Bill Brown’s guest check illustration)

My checklist sits proudly (digitally and physically) as a post it note on my desk and desktop. It’s a clear visible reminder to check in with myself. I’m hoping that having that visual cue, the reminder to check myself before I wreck myself, will eventually help me turn this into a habit rather than something I have to consciously do. 

But until then…

Do you know why you’re doing it? Yes

Have you done your research? Yes

Have you spoken to the people you’re doing it for? Yes

Have you written it down or drawn it? Yes

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Recently, the idea of learning in the open has been on my mind a lot.

There have been two main drivers. First, I’ve personally felt and heard lots of other people talking about a fear to say the wrong thing in regards to Black Lives Matter, not because we didn’t believe the message or want to fight for justice and equity, but because there seemed to be so many ways we might get it wrong while we tried to learn to be better allies in the open. Second, I’ve been drawn to making more and not wanting to share it here or on social media, because I wanted to feel free again.

This blog is probably the closest I’ve gotten to truly learning in the open. I was always the kid who wouldn’t share work until it was done. But here, in part because of the fact I’ve been sharing for years, there are plenty of learnings in progress that I’ve shared in case others are on the same journey for want of a better word. 

Yet as much as I know those moments of learning and growth were important to getting me to where I am today. I very rarely reshare them, because I’ve changed since and because I wouldn’t want this blog or me by extension to be judged on what I thought 3 years ago. I’m sure I’ll probably think the same about this in 3 years too.

When you learn in the open online, there’s always a record. That record can be searched and brought up years later, for better or worse. How many times have we seen someone ‘cancelled’ because of something they tweeted years before whether they had grown since or not?

However, if we never learn in the open and we never share how slow progress can be surely it dissuades others from even starting the process. If you can only be an expert or a master of a craft or nothing, where is the recognition that no one gets there overnight, especially when it’s learning that has to be done outside of the classroom. 

So, largely for myself, I wanted to make the case for both learning in solitude and learning in the open, to try to work out which I want to do. 

The case for learning in solitude

Away from prying eyes, you can experiment free of judgement. You can go wherever your learning takes you with no responsibility or sense that it needs to conform. This freedom can be particularly liberating when it comes to creative work. Sketchbooks that include tests and scraps can inspire bigger works, without needing to be finished pieces themselves.

You are free to shape your own opinion on the subject matter, following your reading and intuition. You are in charge of your own curriculum and can draw connections between whatever insights you’ve found, without a sense of needing to fit them into convention.

When it comes to learning more important topics, if you take the time to learn on your own, to make your own progress, you may be less likely to say something out of turn that could hurt others.

The case for learning in the open

When you learn in the open, you lose some of that self-initiated freedom. But you gain the potential to be challenged and to be introduced to new ideas that you might not have found yourself. You might be directed to different subjects or course corrected by someone with lived experience.

Someone might see something in the works in progress that you share that you might not have seen on your own, whether that’s their good or their bad qualities or their harmonies with other works.

Someone might also resonate with your progress and be inspired to make their own, seeing how far you’ve come or how close you are. You might learn together. You might learn in parallel. You might lead their learning. 

Learning in the open and learning in solitude have their pros and cons. Depending on what you’re learning, how you’re learning and why, you might find one or the other works best for you.

I typically end up doing something of a hybrid between the two; I spend time getting to grips with the basics alone then share what I learned in hindsight. I think that’s where I’m likely to stay for the majority of my work.

That said, I don’t think we shouldn’t share because we are afraid to fail. There is so much value to having a space to play and learn and experiment on your own. But there is so much more to be lost from never learning in the open because we feel too fragile to accept a stumble or a critique. 

I have definitely fallen into that camp, and oftentimes still do. I was an overachiever at school and now my sense of self can be so fragile that the slightest perception of failure threatens the careful balance I’ve been working on since I was 5. That’s something I’m working on. That’s something I think we should all be working on.

We need to normalise receiving new information and changing our opinions. We need to practise taking feedback (and giving feedback) in a way that’s positive and not defensive. We need to find a way to make it okay to be a work in progress in the open again, because that’s what we all are, works in progress.

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On 25th May I ran 13.1 miles. 10 weeks before the furthest I had run in was 5km. This is the story of how and why that was possible, and what I learned along the way. 

When social distancing began in earnest, one of the first things (aside from having to cancel a trip to see my mum) that I felt grief in losing on a daily basis was my trips to Frame. I had been going to boxfit and lift 4-5 times a week and it had changed my life, and suddenly that outlet had been taken away. 

I live in a first floor flat, so jumping up and down doing online HIIT classes wasn’t an option, which meant if I wanted to work off my anxiety (and in the midst of a pandemic I had plenty) my only option was to run.

I wasn’t completely new to running, I was a pretty regular park run goer. But I was always someone who stopped to walk up the hill in my local route. 

I was skeptical about being able to really do anything. After years of being told I had no physical ability in PE and being discouraged from sport, my confidence that I can do anything exercise related remains incredibly low.

So the first big hurdle was deciding to just run. I think I watched this video of a lady who decided to run an ultramarathon with no training (she is otherwise a fitness YouTuber and former IronMan athlete) around the same time as I started running. While I obviously wasn’t running 50 miles, I was aiming for 5km, the idea that I could just decide that I could run was really powerful. That’s what I did. I managed to keep running for a whole 5km without stopping. For me, that was huge. 

I sort of rode a wave of “wow, if I can do that maybes I can do more” for weeks. The more I proved to myself that I could do, the more I believed that I could do even more.

I was running almost everyday for a good while, 5-10km every time. I was running because I was excited to be seeing progress in myself in a time when everything else was so stationary. But I was also running because I was fearful about what would happen if I stopped. Would I lose my progress? Would I gain weight? Would I become lazy? Would I lose the worth I had started to assign to myself?

It wasn’t healthy in more ways than one. While I can’t say I’ve got over all of those mental hangups, I have at least realised that rest is as important as running.

But to be fair, I did only realise that because I put so much stress on my knee that for a few days it hurt to stand. 

Once I started a more healthy running schedule, I decided I wanted to run a half marathon and that I was going to slowly build up to it, over about 5 weeks, by increasing my Sunday runs. Having a goal that felt achievable and that I shared to make myself accountable was one of the few things that was keeping me sane. It was a marker in a time when we live only in the present without enough certainty to plan for the future. 

I just built up the distance 2km at a time. Had I tried to run it in a certain time or in a certain way, I don’t think it would have been possible. I just focused on distance, a single variable. I didn’t worry about my pace, about my time, about changes to my body. I just focused on being able to take myself around those 13.1 miles and to run past the much missed sight of Kings Cross. 

As useful as that goal was, I think it also worked against me. On the day I was nervous. I’d been running for weeks, but I’d built this one run up to be something more. That was completely unnecessary. Just because I’d arbitrarily chosen that day to run a bit further, didn’t really mean anything. The progress was what was important not the marker. Just because I’d decided that day was going to be it, didn’t mean it had to be. Just like when I’d decided that I wanted to run every day and my body said no.

About three quarters of the way round, I had to realise there’s no shame in catching your breath, in walking up a steep hill if you’ve already run 11 miles (eve n if you hadn’t). The only person I was accountable to was me. There was no point hurting myself to prove something to myself. These were two and a bit hours of my life I wouldn’t get back, I may as well try to enjoy them. 

But I got round. I was proud. I was proud until someone asked what I did at the weekend then poo-pooed my time. Then I was proud again, because even if I wasn’t the quickest, if you’d told me 10 weeks earlier I could get myself round I would have laughed. 

I don’t know what my next goal will be. I think for now I’m just going to enjoy being someone who can just lace up their shoes and go, as long as I’m not nursing an injury. That’s pretty powerful. 

Running has given me some of my independence back in lockdown. I’m so grateful I’ve been able to do that for myself, that my health and my community have made it possible. 

I’m also glad I stocked my playlist full of Destiny’s Child bangers. I think that’s the real lesson here. A good playlist can get you through anything.

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While it’s not quite the end of the year yet, the dark days are drawing in, the Christmas decorations are out in stores and I’m getting that familiar urge to reflect on the year gone by. The last few months of the year are the perfect time to check in with any resolutions you made back in January to see how you did (as long as you didn’t give up months ago). This year I set myself one big goal, rather than lots of little ones. I focused in on my impulse to shop as a past time and wanted to move towards a more sustainable relationship with my wallet and my image. So I pledged in a blog post:

“I want to break the cycle. I’m not going to buy any clothes (exceptions will be made for socks) for the whole of 2019.”

Largely, I think I did pretty well. I have to admit I didn’t completely hold true to the absolutely no buying rule. I was gifted a t-shirt and some new hiking boots for my birthday and I picked up a jumper, because I struggle to say no to good knitwear. But otherwise I’m calling it a success. I’ve definitely not shopped in the same way I would have without this resolution looming over me.

As I said in that January blog post “My wardrobe has never overflowed. My spending has always been within my means. My style isn’t exactly vogue-worthy. Yet still, at the end of 2018 I realised I always had that tickle in the back of my mind that made me want to shop.”

I think through this year I’ve felt that tickle fade away. I’m no longer browsing clothes stores when I’m bored. It’s much rarer that I will think to myself ‘I need this thing’.

That said, there are a few things I would like as I come to the end of this year, because I’ve learned what in my wardrobe I truly love and what I don’t. Despite only having the same items in there all year, there are some things I’ve barely worn or worn begrudgingly. So, there are a few things I’ve started to get rid of. I’ve learned I really value comfort if something is slightly itchy, a fabric that makes me sweat or cut in a way that I can’t move around in, no matter how much I like how it looks, I won’t wear it. As much as I like the idea of light colours, I spend my days filled with anxiety that I’ll spill something, so actually getting wear out of those lovely light pieces. These are the edits I’m making.

I’d like to add in a few more long sleeve darker cotton shirts, because I’ve worn my navy shirt almost every week that wasn’t over 30 degrees this year. I’m also looking for some simple summer dresses, because I loved wearing my gingham dress this year, but I can feel its jersey fabric pilling to a level where I fear it will have holes next year. One thing I didn’t include in my original wardrobe audit was my loungewear. I’ve realised just how much I live in sweatpants Friday through Sunday. As comfy as they are, I tend to feel uncomfortable venturing out in them, especially if I have to see someone and then I’m resentful of getting changed. So, if I can find them, I’d like a casual elasticated trouser that I’m comfortable in whether I’m sat in my armchair or at my desk in the office.

Those learnings about what I actually wear came alongside a realisation that the more I wear something the more I love it, for example I’ve found a new love for my black chelsea boots. There are definitely things I might have given up on without this challenge, that are now new favourites. 

I’ve done my best to look after those new favourites sewing up holes and conditioning leather shoes. I’ve taken a lot of pride in those repairs, they’ve made me appreciate what I own as well as what I am capable of far more than just buying something new ever would.

So, moving into next year I want to try to keep my consumption low, but try to have a more measured response to curating a wardrobe that really works for me with items I love so much I’ll repair and wear time and time again.