Life update: I am moving to London

Landing home (in Europe) after twelve months of nomading ended up feeling quite chaotic. My partner and I have had to make some pretty big life-shaping decisions in a very short period of time.

I've had to figure out whether I wanted to take on a job vs take the leap into the solopreneur world without a safety net, and whether my employer would offer me a job that would help me pursue the interests that I now know I want to pursue, thanks to my explorations while on sabbatical.

We've also had to figure out whether we wanted to live in the UK, where inflation is the highest in Europe and salaries aren't following suit, and if so whether we wanted to live in London, where rental prices had increased by 30% in the previous twelve months?

Of course, all these decisions were intertwined: if I signed up for a job in London then we were going to have to find a way to live there despite the ridiculously competitive rental market; if we didn't want to live in the UK then this meant I couldn't accept a job with my employer, and we would need to decide where (in the world) to set up our base.

It's been a wild ride. And most of the big life-shaping decisions have now been made!

First, I've accepted a really cool job with the Electricity System Operator (ESO), the company that balances Great Britain's electricity supply and demand in real-time.

I'm going to help the ESO set its strategy as a standalone company as it separates from its parent company National Grid. I'm also going to shape and facilitate discussions across the energy industry in which industry leaders will set out the ambitions and the roadmap that the ESO should commit to (and deliver!) to accelerate Great Britain's transition to net zero carbon emissions.

Importantly: I'll be working four days a week which will allow me to spend time and energy on writing and creating stuff that I care about and has nothing to do with the energy transition.

This does mean that my partner and I are moving back to London. For at least twelve months. We've found a flat in Southwark, within walking distance of the Tate Modern and Borough Market. Win!

Bankside Power Station was converted in 1947-1963 into what is now the Tate Modern gallery
(not pictured: our flat)

A new personal project: On Sabbatical

Most of you will know the context for this...

After twelve years working intensely for big businesses in strategy and transformation roles, I decided to take an intentional break and go on a twelve-month sabbatical starting in February 2022.

My first intention was to rest. My second intention was to figure out what kind of work I would end up doing, and life I would end up living, if I stepped out of the constraints of traditional work, stopped 'doing' things constantly, and followed my curiosity for a while.

Of course I was worried about the dent this would make in my career and about living off of the savings I had been building up for a house deposit. I was also terrified that 'following my curiosity' would result in me realising that I was not a curious person after all.

Taking the leap was absolutely worth it, though. This has been an incredible opportunity to reconnect with what matters most to me and better define my own identity, which was something I had been finding impossible to do while working demanding jobs.

You can read more about my sabbatical journey over here.

For those of you who've been following me for a while, this is old news...

So,what *is* new?!

Well, I think more and more people are curious about taking a break from the default path, pursuing other interests or simply reconnecting with themselves. The decline of the hustle culture and the layoffs in Tech are certainly going to accelerate that trend.

More often than not, those people have been working too hard on things that don't feel meaningful to them. Or they're people who have been working too hard on things that feel so meaningful that they (like me) have forgotten that they cared about other things too, and those other things are starting to cry out for attention.

Speaking from experience and from conversations with others, I'm convinced that going on an intentional work break can help people reconnect with what matters most to them. Which means they can then shape their life on more meaningful foundations.

But taking the leap is scary, and I think most people would benefit from talking with someone who's already gone through the process before deciding whether going on a sabbatical feels right for them.

I know I would have liked to have one or two guides...

So I'm offering 1:1 calls with people who are thinking about going on or who are on sabbaticals.

​You can sign up for a call with me here. Feel free to forward this newsletter on to friends who might be interested. The calls are donation-based, and $0 is a perfectly acceptable donation.

Fill this in to set up a 'sabbatical chat' with me!

I am also going to start writing more stories about the challenges, tipping points and exciting moments of my sabbatical. I'll be doing this on Substack so that readers can comment on the pieces I write, which in turn will help me write about things that both they and I care about most. That's what I'll be spending most of my writing energy on in the next 3-6 months although I'll still keep these newsletters going to write about other topics as well.

My objective is to put as much information out there on sabbaticals, be it on my website, Susbtack, Twitter or YouTube so that people who are considering taking a work break have resources to peruse.

​You can sign up to my brand new Substack 'On Sabbatical' here.

This is my brand new Substack 'On Sabbatical' and my first (and only) post (for now)

Building bridges between online course creators and the business world

Early November, I said I would write 5-6 essays on why I think online course creators and businesses should work together to revolutionise how learning is done in big organisations. I said I would write them by the end of the year (2022).

In the end, I wrote three essays. I already shared Building bridges between online course creators and businesses in a previous newsletter, in which I explain why I am so excited about this topic.

And here are two new notes in which I write about some of the challenges that need to be overcome.

• In ‘A new kind of online course for the business world’ I share the six main challenges that cohort-based course creators (multi-week learning courses) have to overcome before they are able to work with businesses
• In ‘Solving the learning problem is harder than it sounds’ I share why businesses are having a hard time improving the quality of the learning experience for their teams

Interestingly, I didn’t achieve the ambition that I had set for myself of writing 5-6 essays by the end of the year. The main reason is that the project was incredibly energy-consuming. Much more than I had thought it would be. I kept getting excited about the potential for this project, and was pulling on so many threads that the project became a mammoth project. Classic creator noob mistake.

Mid-December, I realised that I already put c. 55 hours into in this project: 20 hours to brain-dump and organise all the ideas in my head, 14 hours to write and publish 3 essays and draft another one, 12 hours of brilliant conversations with creators and people in businesses, and 7 hours to publish thoughts on the topic on Twitter.

Looking at all this information that I’ve gathered and structured, I can feel that there’s a lot of potential in there which I’m trying to figure out how to channel. Who is interested in this? How do I best reach out to them? I don’t feel like essays are the right medium for this, so if not essays and not Twitter then what?

I’ve paused this for now and will pick it up when the time feels right. When it starts sparking joy and curiosity again, sometime this year :)

In the meantime, if this topic is of interest to you, you can check out the essays above and the info I’ve already published on this Twitter thread. And let me know how you think I could help you, if at all!

Until next time!