Annette: Growing for good in the world
Annette left full time work seven years ago, when she was CEO of Merseyside Probation Trust. She had worked in criminal justice for more than 30 years and her time in the Probation Service had led her to see that leadership is about how you show up in the world - how you are with others – rather than a title. She also came to know that she couldn’t expect others to change and adapt if she didn’t expect the same of herself. When she stopped full time work, she saw no reason to stop either her inner work or her work in the world.
“There was a time, as CEO,” she says, “when I realised that my role was as much, if not more, for those under supervision in prison and in the community, as it was for the employees and the organisation. It felt a natural progression to bring this mindset and whatever personal power and privilege I have, to serve a much bigger challenge. Leading Through Storms [LTS] really helped with my question, ‘what’s the agency I have and what am I doing with it?’” Now seeing achievement as something based on enquiry, community and new ways of thinking and behaving, Annette is using what LTS refers to as ‘restless energies’ in “practical experiments and exploration - using what I have, where I am, in service of the tricky road ahead.”
She found that working in collaboration with others in an LTS Community of Practice, gave her confidence to be bolder, braver, take risks, “and I was also helped by the discipline of the LTS practices of discovery. I became unafraid of being vulnerable, confused, lost and uncertain - finding ways to live with what we are called to do while a way through emerges.
“Any barriers are mostly personal,” she says. “All the inner critic voices, ever present on my shoulder - ‘who am I to think I can make a difference’, ‘who will listen to you’ - my own inner anger and rage, and a tendency to make myself small in the face of the perceived wisdom and actions of others.” She also navigated a change of identity from CEO in a large organisation to ‘Annette from down the road’, visible in her own community and back yard.
Annette’s own back yard, the Cartmel Peninsula, is in fact one of the places where she is making a difference, exploring with others the value of food and community, helping to make the locality a more resilient ‘growing peninsula’. This ‘Let’s Grow’ initiative draws on the practices she learned at LTS and she plans to stay connected to the community of practice: “I believe that people always surprise you - I surprise myself sometimes too!” she says. “You can never know where your interactions will lead, it’s not always visible or immediate. Finding allies, and companions makes a real difference.
“I’ll definitely be continuing to support the work of Leading Through Storms in the wider world,” she says. “I can be bolder and braver about starting things on my doorstep now, and can support others to do so. ‘Let’s Grow’ is an example, showing what action can be provoked through conversations and thinking about what we need to be reconciled with, what we can restore, what might be relinquished -- and what resilience means. But,
“sometimes you just have to throw your cap over the wall and follow it!”.