Happy New Year!
As I prepare to return to work tomorrow, tapping away at this blog, the couple of weeks annual leave seems to have breezed by fearfully quickly. Still, I’ve picked up a half price calendar for my office wall. (I seem to go alternate years of being given surplus calendars for Christmas, or none at all – this proved to be a fallow year). If it seems odd to be still using a paper calendar these days, in which you can’t get away from electronic ones (on your phone, on your desktop), then I always flashback to a couple of years ago when I attempted to go calendar free, and was alarmed at how regularly in online calls, when discussing the coming week(s) my head would involuntarily swivel to stare at the empty patch of wall where my previous year’s one had been pinned. Calendars save necks.
Coaching is inextricably linked to this time of year, I find. It’s the “resolution” time in which people are looking back, looking forward, and swearing to make the changes that they haven’t before, and rarely stick to. All the coaching tools, techniques and processes are geared towards helping firm up those ideas and aspirations and work out practical ways of building them into your day-to-day in a way that might possibly, potentially, last.
My business partner at Aspiration Experts, James, has been beavering away over the holiday period (and over the past year) working up some more tools for coaches, coachees and the curious to help solidify and plan out approaches to the challenges and dilemmas that life throws in your direction.
https://www.aspirationexperts.com/resources
In his last one of 2025, he turned his attention to producing the “Gratitude basecamp tool” to aid self-reflection with an eye to using gratitude for clarity, resilience and leadership impact. Sounds pretty nifty, doesn’t it? Anyway, when he sent through the draft of it, I thought it’d be a great way for me to take stock going into the New Year.
The format of the tool and its interface with the other ones that James has pulled together over the past twelve months, is pretty familiar and the mountaineering imagery does help to take the sometimes abstract ideas and apply them to a scene that we (perhaps theoretically, perhaps practically) are familiar with.
Working through the reflective sections got me pondering the rhythms and rollercoaster of 2025, which proved to be a trickier year than I could have imagined when I was sketching out my plans 12 months ago. There’s been triumphs, travails, health hiccups aplenty, laughs, wobbles and strength and resilience in surprising places.
The work challenges that shook me last year, were rendered manageable when I focused in on (as the zeitgeist would have it) self-care, but in my case is primarily ensuring that I take the time to do the reading for pleasure, and music listening, and art projects that give me the space to decompress.
Running a high performing technical team by day, a coaching consultancy by night and juggling the responsibilities to my son, partner and family is a lot of plates to juggle, and when one or two of them start to wobble it can be hard to keep all the plates spinning.
Running through James’ tool was a good way to take stock and suss out what things were working, what things weren’t quite hitting right and what things I was making worse through worrying.
In these blogs I’ve regularly talked about the way in which coaching can be used to helicopter out and provide an overview of a situation, or perspective. I find I get that from a number of different channels, but the new perspectives that I gain through reading fiction and poetry are invaluable at broadening my horizons. I was bought the Forward book of poetry 2026 and the Best American Poetry 2025 anthologies, for Christmas (and have gifted myself a Poetry Book Society https://www.poetrybooks.co.uk/ subscription again), so I’m sure I’ll have plenty to get my teeth into, and share in the blog later in the year.
I was also bought some weird seeds for the garden from She Grows Veg (https://shegrowsveg.com/) though the germination time for the ‘prickly pear’ seeds means that I would suggest that you don’t hold your breath waiting for me to report back (more to come in the 2027 blog…).
And it would be nice to get back to doing Music League (https://musicleague.com/) fun with some of my musicgeek buddies – I promised, this time last year, to kick off some new leagues with rounds of new themes, but life and health things got in the way. Maybe a year to refresh our ears was needed?
As a coach, we’re trained and adept at asking and teasing through the things that are going on for other people, but it’s not always as easy to pick that through for ourselves. “Physician, heal thyself”. I’ve found the supervision sessions and peer support I called upon invaluable, but the gap between intention and action can be pretty tricky to enact.
So, to today, with the insights I gleaned from the tool fresh in my mind, we went on a clear, but chilly visit to Raglan Castle – a site that somehow I’ve managed to completely miss, despite driving past it regularly for over 26 years.
The pond plants frozen beneath the crystal clear water of the moat felt particularly poignant today. My son and I had guesses as to the thickness of the invisible ice and explored the ruins high and low, and it was lovely to be there in the sun, in the cold, and present.
I don’t really do resolutions, but I think in the coming weeks I’ll be looking to see where I can find moments of stillness, and times to reflect that stillness doesn’t need to mean being frozen.
