Hello, I’m Helen and I’m a continual and lifelong learner with many years experience in the corporate world…..which I have now left behind in 2022.

During and after COVID, I experienced a profound personal transformation where I questioned everything – and everyone – when it came to how business was enabling their staff to build new capabilities, skills and learning for an uncertain and ever changing future. 

Most of all, I questioned society and the world I live in.

What I found valuable – community, learning, personal growth, human connection, communication, empathy and creativity…PEOPLE  – were not what were deemed valuable, critical or important in business driven by data, profit and the bottom line.  Conversations were also moving to artificial intelligence (AI) which also seemed misaligned to my values of continual learning, community and learning through curiosity and exploration. 

You can say, I lost trust in the systems that I was working with, in or under.  It meant that I had to have a radical change to prepare me for the future ahead. 

This set off a period of intense reflection and activity which mean I had to restart a new ‘me’, so I: 

• deleted all social media accounts
• closed off all my online communities and discussion boards
• moved my CV off LinkedIn and put it here
• stopped taking requests to work in the business world in the field of learning and development

Put simply, I stopped believing that my skill and expertise effected any real change in organisational systems – so it was time to kill off my corporate career and “retire” from work.

• How I could I incorporate more creativity in my life?
• What comes next in my middle age and beyond?
  
• How do I get back to ‘me’ knowing that retirement enables us to be the person before work killed that off in you?

It was time to put my skills as a curious, passionate explorer and lover of learning to the test.  It meant having to design a new life for myself in this phase of life.

What does the future hold?

For some reason, I decided to revisit literature and the classics and read books – heaps of them so Life Lessons from Books (my YouTube channel was born) 

Maybe in the future, I may even get to write that novel….

My Past Life

Co-Author of two books: Microsoft Teams: A Manager’s Guide to Communication, Collaboration and Co-ordination & Gourmet Teamwork: Recipes to Inspire Engagement, Improve Business Processes and Make Hybrid Work with Microsoft 365

  You can buy your copies on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

Winner of the Jay Cross Social Learning Award

I was also the inaugural recipient of the Internet Time Alliance Jay Cross Memorial Award in 2016 in recognition for my work advocating a more humanistic approach to workplace learning.

 

 

Microsoft Ignite Community Reporter

In 2019, I was selected to be one of ten global community reporters to cover the largest technology conference in the world, Microsoft Ignite at Orlando, Florida. You can see all the videos I created and shared about what I was learning at this event here.