Category: The Journey 2019

Since getting home to Wellington in early-November, I have had a lot of coffee with a lot of amazing people. I am incredibly humbled by the way in which everyone has responded to the news that I’ve moved into the world of self-employment.

My LinkedIn post which announced my intentions to ‘go out on my own’ was incredibly vague – mainly because when I wrote that post I was still working out how I could best work toward my goal of growing social enterprise in New Zealand. When I asked myself how I could add the most value to the social enterprises I’m wanting to work with, I realised it was a pretty difficult question to answer. Luckily, I have met a lot of wise people in the last few years who have been more than happy to help me answer this question (side note: asking for help is working so far). So, while I’m definitely still working out how I can be the best version of myself and add the most value to the businesses delivering the Good round here – I do have a much better idea of how things are going to look.

At this stage, my consulting business has a name, Seedling Consulting Limited, a LinkedIn page (with one follower – me!), a very basic Google My Business website (I’m patiently waiting for address verification so that I can actually start editing things properly (edit 31/01/20: I’ve now got a proper website!), and a broad scope of work:

1. Helping people establish new social enterprises, and
2. Helping people transition their existing enterprise into social enterprise, and
3. Helping socially-focussed businesses with project work.

I’m calling these the three pillars of Seedling Consulting. At this stage, I’m looking at building out the 3rd pillar while I work on how I can succeed with the first two pillars which would ultimately help me achieve my goal of growing NZ’s social enterprise sector. 

It would be fair to say it’s early days.. but, of course, I have to start somewhere.

Now, the intention of this blog is definitely not to be a sales pitch but, that being said, if you’ve read those last few paragraphs and thought that you could use an extra pair of hands or help on a project – let me know and we can chat in the New Year.

Lastly, to anyone reading this, Happy Holidays – have a safe and restful break and I hope you all welcome in the next decade with gusto!

I’ll be returning with my next blog post on Friday 3rd January, 2020! See you all next year.

Prior to departure for my OE back in May 2019, I was sure I would be heading back to work when I returned to NZ. Many people enquired whether I would actually be returning and I quite confidently confirmed that I would be.

What I didn’t expect is that the experiences I had while travelling would change the way I thought about things as well as changing the very things I thought about. It’s terribly cliche but travelling had an incredible way of encouraging me to reflect and reorganise my priorities.

At the time of writing, it has been six weeks since we touched back down in New Zealand and I can quite honestly say they’ve been some of the best six weeks of my life. These weeks have been busy – I think I’m currently busier than I have ever been before – but they have also been incredibly fulfilling (and it’s only early days in my search for meaning and fulfilment!).

But why am I writing this?

A couple of weeks back, I caught up with Chris Desmond (shout out to Chris!) and he encouraged me to put myself outside my comfort zone – Chris has a saying that ‘uncomfortable is okay!’ (also the name of his podcast) and challenged me to write a weekly blog about my journey.

So, here I am, writing my first ever blog post to hold myself accountable and, some day down the road (when I’ve hopefully achieved some good stuff in the world of Good), to give myself the opportunity to reflect on the journey through the words in these blog posts. 

So, how’s the journey going so far? That’s next weeks post!