I’m so looking forward to our Fireside chat with Verity Harding this evening 🔥 At Verity’s request we will not be recording the meeting and Chatham House rules will apply: “When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.“ Do join for what promises to be a really interesting conversation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verity_Harding https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691244877/ai-needs-you I’m going to be racing to get home from Newcastle 🤪 I’m on the train now, so will hopefully be home to start the meeting, but if not our fabulous @Simone Thomas has kindly volunteered to get things going. See you all later! 👋 Sue xx

Hey you lovely lot, im already at BrewDog, upstairs tucked away in the corner…. Its aooo lovely and cool in here, just what we needed after sweating around Camden all morning….. super excited to see you all ✨💃🏼❤️

Right, it’s officially happening 💃🏼✨ I’ll be down in London on Saturday 25th April and I am sooooo excited because we’re finally getting to meet our fabulous @Dori Gonzalez-Acevedo in real life while she’s over from the US 🇺🇸 (still not over the fact WiTPN is this global ✨❤️) of course our amazing @Sue Black will be there too and we thought… it would be a bit rude to not open this up to the rest of the group. The plan is very chill….. I’ll be in Camden in the morning with my Finn, then heading over mid afternoon into early evening to meet up with Sue & Dori. No big event…. no pressure… just a proper in-person catch up ❤️✨💯 And if you’ve never been to one of these before, this is the nicest way to do it. No cliques, no weird vibes, just good people, good chats, and that slightly surreal moment of going “wait… I know you??….. but like… in 3D??” 🤣💃🏼✨ Whether you’ve been in the network from the early days or you’ve joined recently and you’re hovering thinking “shall I…” Come and say hi, I promise you won’t regret it. Pop a comment if you fancy joining us and we’ll make sure you’ve got the details 💃🏼✨❤️

We’ve talked about this type of thing in several of our catchups. The pressure of women and men to behave in stereotypical ways, some of which is useful, and some which isn’t. “Women in midlife may face a greater risk of chronic health issues due to decades of what psychologists call “self-silencing” – putting others’ needs first and holding back your own feelings. This pattern prioritises caregiving and maintaining harmony in relationships, often leading women to suppress their own needs, avoid conflict and hold back their true feelings.” Thoughts? https://theconversation.com/decades-of-putting-others-first-the-toll-it-takes-on-womens-bodies-278001?utm_medium=article_native_share&utm_source=theconversation.com

Since I have a break between roles, I’m happy to say I’ve taken the opportunity to follow Simon Sinek’s process to “Find my why”. It’s the central driving force of everything each of us does and does a great job in explaining ourselves to others far more than the ‘what’ we do or ‘how’ we do it. Having mentioned it on the Career chat this evening, @Sue Black thought a post would be helpful to some of you and I really hope it is. Simon has written the proverbial book on the subject, which I have read, but after failing to schedule a friend of mine to help for several weeks, I turned to Claude to help me as the recommended trusted partner instead. This was less sad state of affairs, more ADHD-I-know-I-need-to-do-this-before-my-attention-is-diverted! There are a number of steps to follow as an individual (the book also contains instructions for teams all they way up to whole organisations to do the same thing): 1) Write down 10-15 stories about our lives that were fulfilling, impactful or make us proud 2) Share them with a trusted friend, ideally not someone who knows you THAT well, but knows you well enough to challenge you and has not heard all your stories before! 3) As your partner to highlight themes from your stories 4) Draft your why in the form of ‘to (contribution) so that (impact on others) 5) Refine it until you’re pretty happy with it 6) Test it out with others, refining it until you’re really happy with it. The exercise has taken longer using Claude because of the focus only on the words I’ve used, but writing it out has forced me to be more deliberate in the articulation and made me slow down to get my point across. The initiative has been a really useful thing to explore for me as I manoeuvre to shift my career focus, and has brought a number of behavioural threads together that I hadn’t linked before. Do please note the risks and mitigations if you use AI to fulfil the same partner role. The initial prompt I used was the simplest one… “I want to complete the steps to discover Simon Sinek’s individual ‘find my why’. I want you to fulfil the role of safe partner.”