Week 27-28: Learning and Reflection all the way

Jul 20

What did I particularly enjoy these two weeks?

I started with The Artist’s Way. It’s a book that helps recover your creativity by digging deeper into your past experiences and the voices in your head. The book has 12 chapters which are meant for 12 weeks. Each chapter has some tasks at the end. For example, the first chapter which was about recovering a sense of safety probed me to confront the critic in my head and give myself affirmations.

The book also entails writing 3 pages every morning and also going on a solo date for a couple of hours. I enjoyed revisiting a familiar location in Rotterdam where I used to run.

As much as I dreaded the Morning Pages, I actually enjoyed them. I realised that my morning can be at 9 am or even 10:45 on weekends.

What did I do differently?

I intentionally left a lot of negative space in my calendar last week. This gave me space to catch up on many small pending tasks and also created the mind space for me to focus on a conference talk.

I also wanted to give a deep-dive talk at work about workshops. However, I did not have the time to gather my thoughts fully on that topic. Instead, I kept it lightweight and focused on “Running meetings that don’t drain you”. The slides are here.

What am I summarising at the moment?

My talk for Mendix World! For the first time, I am giving a talk aimed at developers and development leaders. In the talk titled “Lead better development through structured collaboration”, I summarise how we structure collaboration in our Business Unit. It’s quite timely as I also reflected on my past year at Mendix. 11 months ago, I picked “co-creation” as one of my focuses from the Service Design principles. Looking back, it feels great to see how collaborative our Unit has become. Time to pick another focus for the next year.