Evolving my 10 year intentions:

Reorienting my 10 year inquiries

IN BRIEF

I’m evolving my 10year inquiry question from a focus on death and endings to a focus on lifecycles of change.

What’s my contribution to a shift in culture and practice around death and endings?
TO

What’s my contribution to a shift in culture and practice around lifecycles of change?

This might seem inconsequential to most people, but it feels like a subtle, yet significant reorientation for me and the lens on the world and my experiences.
It;s a consolidation of meaningful insights and practices I’ve gleaned over the last few years. You can read on to dive into some of the details.

IN MORE DETAIL

Orientation

I’m four years into a ten year cycle.
2021–2031.

The arc of ten years framed by a guiding intention helped to anchor me in these times. Like a personal scaffolding. It comes alongside a commitment to live into that in all its shapes and forms. Something I’ve set to frame and tether my attention.

Ten years.
Not as vast as a lifetime, which feels too big.
Not just a couple of years, which feels too short to deny the time for things to ripple and work their way through.

There’s also something significant about having just turned 40, stepping through a threshold of a new decade also feeling significant in choosing to do this now. Not to mention the fact that it happened mid year, the day after the solstice, mid decade and quarter of the way through this century.

Key insights

A few key insights have emerged over this four year period. Each of these really shapes how I see myself and how I am showing up in the world.
They have both helped me evolve my questions and perhaps ironically have been the things that have kept me stuck and not allowed my questions to evolve..

Loyalty
An early commitment to my starting question was to participate in the Life x Death Huddle, hosted by Christina Watson. This process made explicit to me that my achilles heal is a loyalty. I will be loyal to things, people, organisation — longer that might be helpful for me. A sense of obligation, often correlated with a sense of time. This process invited the question “what does it mean to be loyal to myself”.

In the context of this ten year arc, loyalty to the starting questions meant that I didn’t feel able to evolve it. In the spring I felt that things weren’t fitting, I kept avoiding looking at it, procrastinating. It felt too hard, and was worried it might require a more significant change. Joy Green’s course helped me gently see and articulate the next evolution of it, in a gentle, creative yet profound way. And supervision sessions with Max St John as part of my work with The Decelerator solidified it.
I was being disloyal to myself by holding something that didn’t fit now.

Fixed fluidity
On paper, the question I was holding allowed for expansive possibilities — big intentions, different ways of orienting life, lifestyle, and work beyond the confines of a fixed role or identity. Yet in practice, I held the question too rigidly. Again preventing it from evolving in the very way it invited me to. It’s a bit meta, but by gripping the question so tightly, I was stifling the fluidity it was meant to enable. The real invitation was not to fix the question in place, but to release it — to let my shoulders drop, to allow the process to breathe, and to trust the unfolding rather than control it.

The key blocker — was me being able to change my mind. The repeated advice I had was that it’s ok, and actually welcome to have people modelling changing their minds. But it’s easy to get fixated by what you know.

Time as an anchor
I experience time differently from many, through time–space synaesthesia: for me that looks like a two-year cycle around my body. So within that framework, I’ve now completed two of the five cycles in this larger ten-year arc.

Time has always been a constant anchor for me, a way of orienting myself in the world, though lately, it feels more overt and something I’m more explicit about.

This arc began with a focus on endings. My personal inquiries have turned toward ancestral lineage and the untended endings that exist there. In contrast, my early career was all about orienting to the future, setting my sights forward. Now, I see time less as a straight line and more as a spiral, constant cycle — where endings and beginnings weave together. Where change and time meet we have lifecycles and lifetimes.

WIth this — endings aren’t gone, but are seen in context of the bigger cycles of change.

Foundational practices

It’s not only these insights that have bubbled up over the last few years. There’s been three practices that I’ve come to see as foundational to who I am and how I live. They’re less relevant for the question evolution but more important for the ongoing exploration.Some have always been there — and are now visible and others i’d been denying, but i’m now more fully stepping into.

Writing: tapping into creative life force
At the start of this cycle writing was something I thought I hated. I’ve had to really work at this practice, re-write my own story of writing to allow myself the power of what it can bring. But it has become a key grounding practice.

Writing for me helps to process, make sense and is part of how I live with change. The writing now takes many forms for me- writing to process and make sense, writing for wider sharing, and a poetic voice that is emerging and is still quite surprising.

But it’s not just writing — it’s about tapping into the innate creative lifeforce that we all have. A route to getting the story of separation that has been the dominant one I’ve grown up in. These creative acts are small acts of defiance and reconnect with both what is within and beyond.

Relationships: Really owning being a sociable person
I’ve always drawn energy from meeting people and connecting deeply, especially one-to-one, even when for years I carried early stories of being shy and disliking talking to strangers. Those old narratives cast a long shadow, obscuring the truth that I’ve spent decades building deep and meaningful relationships.

It’s through some of my dearest relationships that I’ve been able to see myself more clearly, reflect on this stage of my own cycle, and recalibrate. My life is woven with a whole cast of people I interact with regularly- personally, professionally, and often in the spaces in between. The chats, sketches, voice notes, and shared moments, online and in person. I’m trying to no longer deny my own needs for support, nor place others’ needs above my own but create genuinely reciprocal relationships.

Now, I can finally admit that I am, in fact, a sociable person.
Who also needs a lot of alone and quiet time.

Although working in the funding ecosystem, this can feel challenging and compromised. Not because I think I am showing up any differently, but often because of the projects and assumptions others have about people in these roles.

Owning my role: lessons in leadership
In many ways I have been a reluctant leader. Rejecting the old models of hero leadership and quietly cultivating an approach to leadership that is really enabling the best in others. I’ve been doing this through this 10 year by cycle stepping into a CoFounding role with The Decelerator and organisational leadership role at Thirty Percy. Naming and framing it as a polyamourous relationship to work. But not always fully owning ‘leadership’ in it’s fullness and rejecting some of the old trappings I perceived. But perhaps in the process, also denying the full potential of this for myself and others. I’m learning to embrace, own and cultivate a more liberatory and integrated form of leadership. Modelling there is another approach to this that doesn’t have to be extractive and self sacrificing. It’s a process and one I want to bring more voice, perspective and lived experience to over the coming years.

What this means in practice: some wonderings

This process has been an important lesson in how things evolve. It can be subtle, not even noticeable. And even when something is ready to change — it doesn’t mean I was. Nor that it is easy and happens seamlessly.

This all leaves me with some new questions and curiosities. Lenses I will be taking into the coming months and years and applying these to the different practice groups

I still believe they’re overlooked and the part of the lifecycles that need more work but need to be seen not in isolation. Still much work and attention is required — and a catalyst into this bigger exploration.

This isn’t changing the work related practice ground I’m going to be committing my time to, but it brings some renewed clarity and focus to these.

I’ll still be exploring what this means in the context of running a philanthropic foundation at Thirty Percy.
- How can we better support and resource the full lifecycle of individuals and leaders?
-If we took more of a lifecycle lens on the funding ecosystems, what might that help us do?

I’ll continue to play a co-leadership role at The Decelerator
-What can a focus on deceleration practices tell us about lifecycles of change?
-What can a focus on endings and transitions as an overlooked part of lifecycles tell us about change and evolutions more broadly?

And it situates my work with the School of Systems Change- in creating the writing and creative practices that are so foundational and powerful.
-what are the creative and reflective spaces and practices needed to support us to transition through different phases and lifecycles?

And knowing it’s not only the professional domains where this is all alive. In day to day family life, social life and beyond — this shows up.
-Where do lifecycles and relationships meet?
-Where are they showing up in my relationships and what are the day to day practices to nurture and evolve?