My brain has been in full explosion mode lately. That exciting something is coming together kind of brain explosion: ideas brewing at odd hours, what-ifs on high rotation, and big, tangled stories that need unravelling.
Lately, I’ve been noticing something different happening in my work and honestly, I couldn’t be happier about it.
We’ve spent so long building systems that ask humans to fit a process, rather than building processes that fit humans – defaulting to the outcome, setting goals, mapping the steps, working backwards – we’ve lost touch with something important.
I’m not about to throw the Post-it Notes and strategic planning out the window (I might be a little bit addicted to Post Its!), but I’ve been rethinking what good support actually looks like in practice.
Here’s what I’ve experienced over the past few weeks:
Ditching planned structured sessions with an organisation and instead placing myself in the middle of their energy: chatting, listening and connecting. Instinctively knowing relationship-building needed to come first, then the deeper clinical work followed naturally. It looked different to what we expected but delivered more impactful outcomes.
Making in-the-moment changes for a group expecting wellbeing support, but instead needing help to untangle the organisational strings that had become knotted and tangled in the chaos of expansion. Clarity was needed before our original plan could be put into action.
And then there’s the work I’m doing within a project that’s so big, visionary, and abstract that instead of a formal strategy planning session, we’ve opted for lunches where I can ask questions and together we can weave the threads of ideas together slowly.
None of these experiences followed the path I expected. All of them required sitting with the uncertainty for a while and trusting that the way forward would show up if we stayed curious enough to look for it.
I think there’s something really powerful in appreciating that not every problem needs a framework. Not every conversation needs an agenda. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is stay in the question a little longer, follow what’s actually happening rather than what you planned for, and trust that the refinement comes through the process, not before it.
It takes a kind of courage to play, to wonder, to not know yet. Creative thinking and curiosity help land on ways forward that fit so much better, because they’re built around the real human experience, not just the theoretical one.
Here’s to a week of messy thinking and seeing where it takes you.
Bel
PS: I used to be quietly embarrassed about the non-linear way my brain works. Turns out being able to put the pieces together is a strength. If you’d like to embrace a different kind of support within your organisation, I’d love to connect with you.
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