The cabin in the woods
How far will you venture out? For me, it was ~10,800 miles.
You may have noticed that The Reading List took a break over May. As much as I would have loved to continue spilling my thoughts to you via Substack, I was a little busy. From mid-May to mid-June, I was gallivanting around the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on a self-funded tour. You could call it a business trip given I attended more conferences than I can count, but to say that was my intention would be untrue. I didn't really have a way to articulate what I was hoping to achieve with this trip until a dear friend of mine shared this thought aloud: if you've only ever met someone online, can you really be friends?
When a global pandemic shut down so much of our lives, we were begging for a social connection and created virtual spaces to try and fill that void. It worked for a little while because we were content to have something, anything, marginally better than nothing. It didn't take long for the burnout to set in, and the dread of having to login to yet another Zoom or Teams call became impossible to avoid. We even tried having conferences online, and not just a webinar series where presenter after presenter shared their work, but genuine, unfolding conversations about topics that we are curious about (thank you Emergence!) and interactive avatars that could run around a virtual space (and run out of my practical session when they decided it wasn't interesting enough - totally over that two years later).
During that time, I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to connect in ways that weren't mainstream, with people who would normally be far beyond my realm of connection. So many businesses and organisations were running interactive online events across the world, so I just started showing up to them. I attended so many events in the UK as a virtual participant that I eventually kept running into the same people. I decided to actively engage in twitter, start conversations and write and share things that interested me - things that I didn't have to plan or curate but rather were happening anyway. I've learned now that somewhere along the way, my words and the little mind maps I draw to keep my brain happy and the way I explain things has impacted a few people along the way. So when I put the callout that I would be visiting the UK for the first time in 4 years, the list of people i wanted to see and (re)connect with on the other side of the world was much, much longer than I was expecting.
So can you really be friends if you've only ever met online? I think the resounding yes I feel in my heart is conditional.
The conditions come from 'Joining with the Conversation' by Carl Woods, Duarte Araújo & Keith Davids (2022): curiosity, care and hope.
Curiosity sees us continually attend to the wellbeing of what sparks our interest.
Care sees us skilfully respond to what we find.
Hope that together, we can carry the correspondence on.
For this reason, I've always struggled with the word 'networking' as I've regularly been told that I am good at it, or that as a student and now aspiring researcher, it's something I have to leverage for my own advantage. But if you actually stop to look at my network, to call them a 'network' is a gross misrepresentation of the connections we share. I'm now at a point where I am ready to push back on the idea that I have connected with a diverse group of people who share relatable but vastly different journeys and regularly challenge my thinking in the best way possible can be considered a 'resource' to be tapped into for personal gain - and I urge you to not venture into the world with that perception where you can. That is why the 'joining with the conversation' paper resonated so deeply with me: it gave me some reassurance that I do not need to exist (or research) in the absence of curiosity, care and hope. They can be my guide.
The woods 🌳
Marianne Davies is one of those people that can make you feel welcome in a heartbeat. She graciously opened her home to me for a week, and let me follow her around like a shadow at all her work events. Our road trips were filled with great conversation over Australian rock music because as the resident navigator, the aux cord was all mine. I met her gorgeous horses and in just the 15 minutes I spent with them, I learned so much about interaction and correspondence and learning to communicate in a way where no words are spoken. I can see why some people are terrified of horses, but I still remember how it feels to stand in their majestic presence and dance around the gate, like two people awkwardly trying to walk through a door at the same time. I met some hilariously sassy goats, went from cautiously swinging on a rope swing from the biggest tree I've ever seen to testing how high I could swing (all while I'm supposed to be in a moon boot). To me now, 'cabin in the woods' has a dual meaning - this moment of play with someone who inspires me deeply, and an analogy that we stumbled upon while planning for an online seminar I delivered. I want to share the latter with you, as I think you'll love it as much as I did.
I was asked to present on the wisdom of not-knowing, largely inspired by the paper written by Craig Morris and colleagues (2022) but also based on my reflections about this messy, uncertain world we live in my last newsletter. During my (brief) planning for the event, I was thinking out loud about what we actually wanted people to walk away with, and to me, it was this idea that our own learning and development (and that of others) is a process of exploring the woods (unknown) outside our window. To do so, we cannot simply follow a map that has been drawn for us because a) that takes all the fun out of it and b) how does the map drawer know how far we can travel, when we start to get uncomfortable and want to go home, and/or the kind of terrain that is actually in front of us unless they are right there with us? Well, what if we saw our own learning journeys as drawing our own maps along the way, reminding ourselves of how far we've come, what we're capable of, what a meaningful landscape looks like for us. Instead of simply travelling the path that has been pre-determined for us by others, we can write our own paths as cartographers 🗺️.
The cabin 🏠
Here's the little script I used to introduce the metaphor:
You have a cabin 🏠 in the woods 🌳. It's warm, comfortable, and cosy inside, decorated with all your favourite things. Eventually you start to peer out the window and get curious about what else might be out there. You spot the hint of a path between two trees, and you venture out, but always keep the cabin in sight so you can find your way back home.
In the open discussion after my short presentation, we continued to explore the metaphor! I was reminded of the many other systems at play around the cabin, zooming out to consider the person and environment interacting simultaneously. For many coaches, there is systemic pressure on their coaching that makes venturing out difficult, and this was discussed as a weather system.
Whether you leave the cabin and how far you venture out may depend on the weather:
In the rain 🌧️, the cabin is a safe space to stay warm and dry. If you are well equipped, you may even enjoy the rain and wear a raincoat to stay dry but embrace the cold. This is not for everyone, so you may wait in the cabin until the weather is nicer before venturing out again. The sports organisation or system that you are in may mean the weather is rainy more often than not, so you may need to stay in the cabin.
I was drawing our interactions during the seminar, so I've included this section of the map below:
This idea has been swirling around in the back of my mind for a long time, and I didn't realise it until it fell out into words as this metaphor. One of the many speaking opportunities I had on my trip was a seminar at Sheffield Hallam University. Not only did I present with some people that I've followed for years, but I also took the opportunity to do things a little differently. Like a debutant ball for nerds, I wanted to present a gif-ified version of my life story - how I (quite literally) fell into skill acquisition, how following my curiosity has led me to where I am today, and that my superpower is that I am an amateur generalist rather than a skill acquisition specialist. There's a lot to unpack in that statement alone, but the title of this talk (which will be available on Youtube soon) is what I wanted to bring your attention to:
This is the phrase that got me through my PhD.
I remember reading it for the first time, scrolling through Pinterest, and thinking nothing of it at the time. I'm sure there's more to the phrase, but I'll never be able to find it again. Instead, the part that I needed, the phrase that resonated with me on a level that I didn't yet know existed, will now never leave me.
I realised that early on in my coaching career, I was a force of nature (and not in a good way). I was sooo headstrong and bullish about how traditional coaching is wrong and bad and must change immediately, and I threw the full force of my thunderstorm into everything I did. I recently reflected on this during a podcast with an amazing group of people about philosophy in coaching.
Somewhere along the way, I realised that (very few!) people enjoy being in a thunderstorm ⛈️ as much as I do, and I was probably doing more harm than good. While being a thunderstorm is the reason why I finished a PhD at 25 and I can fly to the other side of the world and feel at home because I'm surrounded by people who are also thunderstorms, there are moments when I need to be gentle. This is not defeat, this is not mercy, this is not making myself smaller so that I am not "too much" for others (if this is the case, I thank Elyse Myers for teaching me the phrase "go find less”).
This is about meeting people where they're at, and reading the moment. I am much better now at controlling my own weather but I'll always be learning when to rage on and when to ease off. In my plight to be more attentive and responsive, to balance my fierce wildfire of curiosity 🔥 with care and hope, I write. I hope that you enjoy reading about the journey as much as I enjoy writing about it ☺️