2021, My Year of Setting Forth
I help the people I work with to set forth in their work and/or their life. This can range from individual career moves to changing the direction of a whole organisation.
And with the generous and loving support of my family, friends, mentor coach, coaching circles and many others, I am setting forth myself and have been ever since I left formal employment 6 years ago.
I am often asked about my own journey but have found it difficult to write it down.
So as an experiment, as we approach the end of 2021, I thought I would record my experience of setting forth looking just at the past 12 months, rather than the long version. This feels closer to the actual experience of moving in a new direction, rather than the version sanitised through the rosy lenses of hindsight. There are loose ends, things coming to an end, some things already in progress, and yet more things just starting. It’s messy, organic and inter-connected, and it certainly doesn’t all make sense.
So what was my experience of setting forth in 2021? And what did I learn from it?
The year started for me in London, having set an intention with my amazing wife Nuria to move our family to Mexico in the summer, ready for the next school year. The wheels were already in motion and we had accepted an offer to sell our flat. And our plans seemed a world away from the day-to-day experience of a fresh COVID lockdown.
And it really was these personal plans that took centre stage this year.
We spent what felt like months packing up our treasures for storage (rather, Nuria packed brilliantly, I lugged boxes around and invented a numbering system for them)
We said goodbye to the flat that had been my base for 15 years and which was the only “home” that our children had known - a big deal for all of us as it turned out. On our final day, we walked around the flat together sharing memories from each room and having a good cry, before bicycling over to the estate agent to hand over the keys. This was the first time I had been deliberate about “closure” in my own life.
But it wasn’t time to move abroad yet - we had a few months of school left so had to set up camp in a small rental flat nearby. It was hard to be so close to our old life but with less space, fewer of our things and no dishwasher. We were in limbo… departed from one home but not yet arrived in the next. However, this did at least give us time to say a proper goodbye to friends and family once lockdowns eased.
We arrived at our new home in Puebla, Mexico, naively imagining it would take us a month at most to set everything up, in time for the start of school. Two months later, we had yet to move in, and the children were still camping out on mattresses on the floor of my mother in law’s house. Earthquakes, floods and a smoking volcano reminded us that we were definitely not in London any more!!
I tend to move pretty easily between places (perhaps due to the dislocating experience of starting boarding school aged 8) and while aware that this was a big move for the children, I somewhat ignored the effect on me. It was only as I started to relax into my new routine that I realised how unsettled and off-centre I had been throughout the year (I had merely been better than the children at hiding this from the world, and myself). I also started to notice a role-reversal with Nuria, as, away from my home country, I was seeking more and more emotional support from her. This will change the nature of our relationship - an important journey for us in 2022.
I’m a person who loves to start new things, while I often find it challenging to finish them off (especially when there are so many other exciting things to start!). This year has shown me the importance of closing big things down properly in order to pay attention to the new. Pretty much everything took longer and was more complicated than we had hoped, and as a family, we all needed to support each other at times when things got frustrating. For this, it helped hugely to have celebrated and moved on from the past.
And professionally? This was a year where I chose to pace myself. I focused on serving my existing clients and having the flexibility for my family and personal journey rather than growing my coaching practice. Even so, it was a milestone year for me, and many things started which I hope will gather pace over the coming years as I spend more time on them.
At the start of the year I chose to make my small but growing coaching practice my main professional activity. My energy was already in my professional development as a coach and in supporting my coaching clients, and I had gained (just) enough momentum and confidence to stop hedging my bets with other forms of paid work.
I also decided to stay independent rather than join a more established coaching business. This is without a doubt the more difficult path, but coaching is such a personal activity that I’m hugely enjoying and valuing the process of discovering the way I work best with my clients, and indeed how I work best with myself.
But staying independent is lonely. Especially when moving countries too! So I got experimenting to see if I would find support from groups of peers.
With my friend and fellow coach Kerry I started “Not Another Book Club”. We crowdsourced the initial book selections and experimented with topics and formats for meetings. I found it hugely rewarding to explore and debate big topics with a group of deeply thoughtful friends and peers who opened my eyes to new perspectives and even helped me describe how I feel about these topics. [See here for my books of 2021 including those we covered in the book club].
And I made common cause with three fellow coaches to stretch and encourage each other and compare notes on the world as we each travel our very different journeys, which has brought extra joy and playfulness to my journey.
I started to complement my coaching with mental fitness training, which adds a fascinating additional dimension to the 1:1 work.
And I was honoured to be invited to support the reflection element of the Executive MBA programme at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga. I have found working with this exceptional group of individuals to be truly enriching, with highly interactive work to weave deeper reflection throughout the academic programme. An added bonus has been exposure to the Baltic states, a fascinating part of the world about which I was truly ignorant!
Just as I found closure with moving home, I said my goodbye to my identity as a “consultant” this year, which has been my professional identity since leaving university. This allowed me to set forth wholeheartedly as an independently practising coach. While this felt like throwing away a financial lifejacket, it was increasingly getting in my way, so it was time for this to go!
So I finish the year with my family in a different country, with lots of endings and lots of beginnings. A big year of change for everyone in my family! Allowing myself to feel the effect of this change on me, really helped me to tune into the the way Nuria and the children were feeling. And re-reading this, it’s curious that closure is the most consistent theme in this year despite it being a year of setting forth.
Perhaps endings and beginnings aren’t quite as opposite as they seem…
Have you enjoyed this blog? I would love to hear from you … Tales of your own setting forth, what you’re learning along the way, suggestions for future blogs or anything else you feel like sharing… click below to find a time that suits for us to chat over a virtual coffee.
Richard Smith, December 2021
Richard is an executive coach who works with founders, CEOs, senior leaders and professionals in career transition. You can subscribe to his newsletter here: https://www.setforth.pro/newsletter