A Reflection on This Year

On independence, alignment, and learning to trust my own way of working

At the start of this year, I genuinely thought my institutional life might be over.

Not in a dramatic way, but in the quiet, disorienting sense that a familiar shape had collapsed and I would need to rebuild myself from scratch. There was uncertainty, a feeling of being constrained, and a growing realisation that whatever came next would require expansion rather than repair.

The word that keeps returning for me is unfurling.

Becoming and unbecoming at the same time.
Cutting away what no longer belonged.

I thought this year would be about recovery, using my deep institutional knowledge to secure another senior role and regain stability after a difficult period of work. Instead, it turned out to be about independence. About learning to trust myself again. About rebuilding confidence not through permission or positioning, but through alignment.

The turning point came after encountering institutional resistance for the second time. It was political, disorienting, and difficult. In that moment, I started thinking about the stories I’ve told over the years, the ones that consistently make people pause, feel something, and say that work really matters.

I realised I keep telling those stories because they are my ley lines.

They matter because they mark where meaning, trust, and transformation reliably run. Each one has changed how I understand people, systems, power, or collaboration and, in doing so, changed my own trajectory.

So I started writing them, not for strategy, not for approval, not for marketing, but as I tell them to friends. Holistically. From inside the experience.

That’s when I saw it clearly: I had not been seeing myself accurately.

What had been framed as “too much,” “too intuitive,” or “out of scope” was, in fact, a coherent field of practice. A way of working that involves sensing the invisible lines that hold teams together, noticing where pressure builds, where trust flows, and where collaboration can either fracture or deepen.

Once I saw that, I knew I couldn’t return to the old shape.

Day-to-day constriction had felt like hypervigilance: constant checking, over-explaining, narrowing attention just to survive. Independence arrived not as a bold choice, but as a necessity.

It brought relief, fear, excitement, and a lingering anxiety about whether I was “allowed” to work differently.

What needed to be cut away was my faith in authority, the idea that someone else might know better than I do who I am, how I work, or where my leadership sits. The hardest thing to let go of was the belief that I should not be the named leader.

This year also brought coaching more fully to the centre of my work. I’ve coached on and off for years, but working with a much broader and more global mix of people, at very different career stages, has been deeply energising. It reaffirmed that the first hour with someone is one of the most absorbing forms of work I know: complete presence, intuition, flow, and witnessing transformation in real time.

Trusting that instinct mattered. I was advised to soften, comply, and accept a subordinate position. I didn’t. I chose independence instead.

Within weeks, I was leading funded work. By the end of the year, I was recognised as a research associate, co-leading a national working group, speaking at conferences, co-authoring an academic paper, and developing new methods for working with teams as live research.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned how to make work fit my natural rhythms - focused mornings and evenings, space in the middle of the day to move, think, and integrate. Now that work is aligned, I’m turning my attention back to balance: energy, exercise, adventure, rest.

This year wasn’t about fixing myself.
It was about seeing myself clearly again.

I’m learning to follow the lines that were already there.

This piece is part of an ongoing practice of reflective writing from lived experience.