A NEW RELATIONSHIP WITH MONDAYS
PodBean Link for those who like to listen
This morning the air is drizzle misted and the first scent it brings is warmed tea rose.
Alt text says this week’s photo is a stuffed toy in the air. I say it is the photo from September on the calendar showing Ronnie jumping for joy and the sky is blue through the clouds.
It has been one year since I started this blog and my new relationship with Mondays. This time a year ago I decided to start a blog as a way of documenting my year and holding myself accountable whilst I started a new journey in life. I had handed back the keys to the primary school I had been head of for seventeen years, and I wasn’t buying new shoes for a new term or planning my first assembly of the school year. I decided to see what the air smelt like each Monday morning as each new week began.
I see now why I focus on providing time for people to ‘think, breathe and be’ when I work as a coach. I definitely needed time for those three things at that period of immense change. This is wonderfully illustrated by the fact that when I started this blog I didn’t immediately record it as a podcast. This came a few weeks later when I had begun to land in my new space and find the voice that went with it.
The title of the podcast, ‘Singing as the Darkness Lifts’, comes from my love of and gratitude for three things:
· * the sound of birds welcoming the dawn,
· * the feeling of darkness lifting,
· * the moments of joy that make my heart sing.
Start and keep going. That’s been a useful motto for me. I know that small things repeated will make a difference and I know that it is better to get started than wait to be fully ready. I think it would have taken me a very long time to feel fully ready for blogging or podcasting. In fact there is a distinct possibility that neither would have happened if I had waited for that kind of feeling. And, I knew that at the very least I would have a pretty impressive diary for my year even if nothing else came from putting my words into the world.
I had a lot of loud thoughts in my head last week when my email system broke. I really disliked not being able to fix it and not knowing why it had suddenly happened. I totally disliked the timing of it too because it happened just after I received an email to congratulate me on becoming an accredited coach. I felt frustrated when I could not respond. Well, I did respond, but my messages went out into the ether, stayed there for a few hours and then beamed messages back to me to say they were undeliverable. I did not like the thought of learning a new email system. I liked the way I could change my signatures in the old system, and I wanted things back as they were. However after much effort to try to resolve the situation switching to a different system seemed preferable. I heard my sister say that I should be able to coach myself to deal with this and this made me laugh. It’s always good to have my sense of humour reawakened along the way. Dealing with it factually and taking one step at a time (with a few internet searches for help along the way) motivated me into action instead of using time trying to unpick something I didn’t understand. Within a day I had learned to make a decent signature in my new mail system and had organised folders and the buttons I liked in my tool bar. That’s pretty good for me. And there was something very therapeutic about deleting emails that were no longer relevant. I always used to do this ahead of the new school year and it felt good to replicate that for my new systems and procedures. It always prepared the way for the new and gave a good opportunity to remove things that were part of the past and had been dealt with. I felt glad to have been nudged into action and see something good come out of those hours of the system not functioning.
I learned so much during my time leading a school and I celebrate all of it. I celebrate all the people who made that journey special. I celebrate the email I found that said “It’s always you that makes my heart sing” and the person I happened to bump into a few months ago who told me they had loved being taught by me back in the late nineties. It feels right to take all that forward into the next stage of my journey. When needed I can still do many things at once and attend to them in priority order, but I doubt there will be a time to match morning registration combined with a suspected gas leak. We had a whole school ‘let’s take our coats outside and sit on them whilst we enjoy some spur of the moment September sunshine’ reading session. It was ‘just’ the drains. I learned quite a bit about drains and pipes and leaks, and how mops are just not enough in some situations as a result of being a head.
Whilst sorting all that email stuff out I did wonder if I should change my email address so that it sounded ‘more professional’. I decided against it because I like my email address and the story that goes with it even if spelling it to people sometimes sends me off on a tangent. That very evening I communicated with someone on Linkedin and they said: “PS love your email address.” I started this new journey to be authentically me and I might indeed set another email account with a simple address as a back-up, but I am glad I didn’t drop the one I have got when I did my tidy up.
I hope there’s an aroma in the air that makes you smile this week and that you share the joy that makes your heart sing.
Comments
Post a Comment