Our small (and perfectly formed!) team is growing by the day… I’m delighted to introduce you to the newest member of the Do What You Love family, Rose Radtke. Rose joins us in the role of Marketing Officer/Community Manager where she’ll take on the happy challenge of growing and nurturing our buzzing community. Rose is an avid believer in choosing a lifestyle that enables you to do more of what you love. She left the office behind to explore her own passions and she’s now excited about helping you to find yours. We’re thrilled that she has chosen to join us and we can’t wait to see her blossom in her new role. ~ MR K
Two years ago Rose went on a quest to find a new hobby. After flailing her way through several Zumba, Nia, yoga and aerial circus skills classes, she decided to dust off an old sewing machine. After a few YouTube tutorials she was hooked, and now loves making her own clothes and home accessories. She is passionate about the look, feel and smell of beautiful fabrics, and has become an advocate for ethical fashion. This year she has decided to reject fast fashion altogether; you can read more about her journey on her blog.
Rose describes herself as optimistic, curious and colourful and when she’s not sewing, she can be found snooping around flea markets, scrawling in notebooks and relaxing with her family and friends in the country, or by the sea.
She says: “For me, being curious and creative and having space to be me are the key ingredients to happiness. When I was growing up, my parents always encouraged me to be myself and do whatever made me happy. I’ve carried that with me; each day I’m true to myself and others, and I’m always exploring new opportunities. Brighton is my home and always has been. I love to travel and experience different cultures, but I’m always delighted to come home to my family, my friends and my quirky little city sandwiched between the sea and the countryside.”
March has seen us settle back into life after our expedition to the Arctic Circle and continue working to put the foundations in place for a very exciting year ahead.
The highlight of the month was finding our new Marketing Officer/Community Manage and I look forward to introducing you to her next month. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who applied for the role. We were overwhelmed by the quality of the applications, it reminds us that we live in a fascinating world full of talented, inspiring and interesting people.
As always, our commitment to helping you and others like you has never been stronger. We are currently working very hard to ensure we continue to deliver free resources and online courses that exceed the standard that is expected of us.
Beth has been super-busy putting together two brilliant new e-courses which are coming your way soon. She says: “It has been a very personal and contemplative process, and in these courses we give away much of our business model and DNA. Why? Well the simple answer is because it can help you change your life and that is what we are all about. It has certainly changed how we view the world.”
The first jam-packed, business/life-changing course to be unveiled will be The Business Soul Sessions. Registration opens shortly and we can’t wait to share the details. Interested? Jump on the waiting list now and make sure you don’t miss out.
When life starts to feel like it’s all work, work, work, we know that it’s important to make time to play. Beth took her first creative workshop in months the other day, and came back a different person. Read this to find out why you should do something nice for yourself today.
Do you feel lost or as if something is missing in your life? Maybe you want to make a bigger difference in the world than you feel you are, but you aren’t sure how. So many of us walk through life, feeling numb and desperate for a deeper connection, but aren’t sure how to get it. We can help you change that. Tell us what you need today and we’ll help you do what you love.
This is a guest post by Louise Armstrong. You can read more about Louise here.
In my last two posts I looked at how we can embrace our ever-changing world and evolve the way we live by adopting some simple techniques to help us survive and thrive in the future. Today, in my final post, I wanted to share with you the most powerful technique of all: it’s one that will help you to unlock your own potential and inspire you to make the most of the human experience. It’s the power of imagination.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”– Albert Einstein
We all know what it’s like to dream, even if we can’t remember what we actually dream about, and scientists have now proved that dreaming plays a central role in our emotional health, our memory, our learning and as a way to help us find creative solutions to our problems. They’ve also discovered that over half of our waking thoughts are daydreams and that this is when we ‘unthinkingly’ do our best thinking.
In fact some of the biggest inventions of our time came about through daydreams – the Internet, robots, rocketry, test tube babies, the list goes on. All these things were dreamed up by imaginative people; people who went beyond facts and thought globally and synthetically, made serendipitous associations and came up with surprising and novel solutions.
“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem
Imagination really can change the world because new ideas can change the world and it takes imagination to have a new idea. Imagination fosters empathy – the ability to “walk in someone else’s shoes” – and it also enables us to find creative, innovative solutions to problems. By unlocking the power of imagination for ourselves we pave the way to a life of awareness, fulfilment, freedom and personal power. Imagination is not the product of a gene pool lottery; it’s inherent within us all.
Here are my top tips for developing your imagination:
1. Create space for your imaginationto roam free
“Imagination is like a muscle. I found out that the more I wrote, the bigger it got.” ― Philip José Farmer
Allowing yourself to dream is like making a statement of intent: you are giving yourself permission to explore the possibilities and opportunities that open up when you free your mind. In our hectic daily lives, we don’t always give ourselves the time or the freedom to dream and yet it’s one of the most valuable gifts we can give ourselves.
I make time to dream in the morning when I first wake up and I write my thoughts in a notebook – it’s fascinating to see what emerges. Sometimes I daydream while I’m cycling to work. It’s amazing what thoughts pop into my head and very often I’ll come up with the perfect solution to a problem I’ve been having.
When do you give yourself time and space to unlock your imagination and dream?
2. Share your future truths
We all have dreams – big and small – but all too we keep them to ourselves. When you put yourself out there and start to share you find that amazing things can happen. Often you realise that other people are dreaming the same thing too! Unlocking the collective imagination goes a long way to counter all the negativity and angst we face in the media.
This happened for me recently as a result of a little project that I started in my own community. The Peckham Coal Line began as a seed of an idea we had to turn a bit of disused railway into a park. The dream was shared on Facebook and then we built a simple website to raise awareness. Before we knew it 50 people in the local community had emailed me to show their support and offer up their time to help. It is still early days but the project is gathering momentum and this is allowing us to talk to the local stakeholders and ride out the collective imagination of the local community. It’s so exciting to see the dream come to life.
A forgotten space: view of the west part of the coal line route from the Bussey Building with the city skyline behind
What’s your dream? Where are you going to share it? It might be a conversation with someone you know, a stranger, or a post on social media – start small and be open to where it takes you.
3. Create a prototype: make your dream a reality one layer at a time
Have you ever noticed that the ‘hi-tech’ communication devices you used to see in Star Trek look just like the early Motorola phones? It’s a commonly held idea that fiction informs reality and film props add that element of believability by making ideas a little bit more tangible.
The idea of developing and prototyping future concepts is widely accepted in design circles – so why can’t we apply this same idea to our own lives by adding layers of reality to your dreams? By experimenting with our dreams and taking small steps to bring them to life, we stop feeling stuck or overwhelmed and instead start feeling excited and that we’re making progress.
One project I worked on this way is IoTA – a space to help non-techy people make use of the ‘internet of things’ technology that is set to grow massively in the future.
The first thing we did was to draw out the idea. Then we described it. And then we made a film about it. We didn’t think much would come of it but when we shared it on social media people loved it. Before we knew it we were running a session with teenagers at a school in Manchester to put the ideas into reality. Being open to possibilities has meant that the project has now won some funding to enable us to develop the ideas further and we’ve created a new company as a consequence. It sounds grand but in retrospect all we’ve done is kept adding more layers of reality to grow our idea.
What can you do to add a layer of reality to your dreams? Maybe you can draw it, paint it, or make a little model. Maybe you can act it out, or do something productive towards making it happen.
4. Be your future, today
We think about the future being far away, and so it’s easy to put things off and tell ourselves that we have all the time in the world to realize our dreams. The fact is the future will be here before we know it so we may as well start living it today!
“The future is radically open, and it is shaped by who we choose to be in the present” – Maureen O’Hara, Dancing on the Edge
You owe it to yourself and to the world to make your dreams come true and sometimes you have to think outside the box and be imaginative in order to help bring your dream to life.
For instance my dream for my future is to feel aligned in my mind and body. To get there, I know I need a better work/life balance. So today I decided to experiment with my work day. I worked in flow with my natural energy patterns and decided to go for a swim at noon, which boosted my creativity, motivation and productivity in the afternoon. Ok, I’m not making huge life changes, but starting small makes it manageable and when my goals are manageable I know I’ll stay committed. I’ll keep experimenting until I find what works best for me, and this will take me another step closer to the big dream of living more holistically.
The big question is: what will you do to unlock your imagination and realise your dreams today?
If I have learnt anything over these past few years, it’s that it takes a village to build anything worthwhile. And by that I don’t just mean having a team with you, or an active community around you, but I mean having people ahead of you, guiding you.
As a business owner, or a professional in any industry, one of the smartest decisions you can make is to find yourself a mentor. By ‘mentor’ I don’t necessarily mean someone you meet with regularly to discuss challenges and ideas, although that is incredibly valuable. I also mean people whose leadership you admire, whose values you share, and whose behaviour you want to model (without copying WHAT they actually do!)
Today I want to introduce a few of the key people who have played a mentoring role in my life, in the hope that it will inspire you to find mentors of your own.
The Oscar-Winning Film Producer
During the years I spent at UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund) I worked very closely with film producer Lord David Puttnam, who was Chairman of UNICEF UK at the time.
David is an impressive man on so many levels – he spent thirty years as an independent producer of award-winning films including The Mission, The Killing Fields, Local Hero, Chariots of Fire, Midnight Express, Bugsy Malone and Memphis Belle. His films have won ten Oscars, 25 Baftas and the Palme D’Or at Cannes. From 1994 to 2004 he was Vice President and Chair of Trustees at the British Academy of Film & Television Arts (BAFTA) and was awarded a BAFTA Fellowship in 2006. He retired from film production in 1998 to focus on his work in public policy as it relates to education, the environment, and the creative and communications industries. In 1998 he founded the National Teaching Awards, and he is now the Republic of Ireland’s Digital Champion. He also has more honorary degrees than I can keep track of.
But the thing that made him such a shining light for me wasn’t actually any of that. It was his deep-rooted commitment to furthering human potential. We worked together on one huge project which brought sporting opportunities to over 12 million children across the world. Together with David Bull, the inspirational Chief Executive of UNICEF UK, we pitched it to the government and a host of sporting bigwigs. We then spent several years building a complex partnership to make it happen, and its legacy lives on. Time and again in the process we came up against brick walls, but instead of banging his head against them, Lord Puttnam always kept the end in mind, and found a way round or over, or reconstructed the wall completely.
What I have learnt from this mentor: Keep your eye on the prize. Fight for what you believe in. Don’t let bureaucracy stand in the way of big, brilliant ideas.
This month we just had to share this inspiring Tedx talk by Billy Ward on the importance of loving others and of being loved. Hope you enjoy it as much as we did…
Who’s the sunshine in your life? Who’s your lighthouse? Who’s your disco ball? How are these people encouraging you to live and love?
This is a guest post by Ben Keene. You can find out more about Ben here.
Has moving to Bali for winter with our family worked out?
I’d only been at Bali’s first co-working space, Hubud (a bamboo beehive of digital nomadic activity at the heart of the island’s ‘eat, pray, love’ capital, Ubud) for an hour when Steve Munroe (a ‘post-UN-cubicle survivor’), uttered his mantra. Perhaps even more interesting than what Steve was saying was the fact that he was speaking to a group of Harvard students who had come to Bali to study ‘remote working’ and sustainable business.
