Week 41, 2025 — socks weather, officially

A while back I told myself that the sandal weather was over for the year but of course chanced it one more time. It’s really over though, despite how sunny it may seem. I shall wear socks from tomorrow onward. And shoes. I should hide my sandals.

It has been a super busy week. In my brain! It feels like a week of fresh air, mountain views and wonderful conversation cleared my field of vision and now that I’m back, all kinds of ideas and desires are rushing in to fill it. It was frantic, it was exhausting, and it was thrilling.

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I finished Kasia Urbaniak’s book “Unbound: A Woman's Guide to Power” this week. It’s my second time reading it (the first attempt had a strong start but disappeared into the Kindle blackhole as my eBooks tend to do) and having recommended it to a new friend, I wanted to read it properly so that I could enjoy discussing it with her. It was still great and I’ve been having fun mapping Gestalt concepts to it, with the help of ChatGPT. To be continued.

I also read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World”. It was a speedy read, as I’m familiar with her writing from the Ness Labs newsletter. I don’t think I really wanted to read the book per se—I wanted to sit with the idea of experiments as a default mode of being, and chose this book as a way to doing that.

I spent an average of 60min per day reading on the Substack app. There are some great writers there, and it’s easy to discover new ones. But the creep of the algorithm is always there. It’s inevitable that soon my hours will explode and I’ll start resenting the experience. The trick is to stay connected to the writing that I want to follow, and not get sucked into anything else.

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So, a ton of fun with reading, exploratory conversations and all kind of scheming, on top of my regular client work load. I’m also in rest and recovery mode from a week of hiking, so I slept a lot. Next week I will re-start my daily stretching and exercise routines.

Hey it might be the first time I’m publishing a weeknote on Saturday. Tomorrow I’ll spend the whole day with a friend in the forest.

Week 40, 2025 — Hiking Picos en Europa

I spent the week in Northern Spain, on a long-anticipated hiking trip with friends and collaborators. We started on the Basque Coast, then crossed into Asturias and Cantabria to explore different areas of Picos en Europa. Two short walks and three big hikes.

I loved it! Can barely believe my fortune, in good company in good weather. I have half-finished reflections and stories swirling in my head, not to mention photos and route information to organize, but will publish this short piece to keep with the weekly practice.

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And in keeping with my habit (practice?) of lugging home bulky, beautiful books, I discovered a biography on Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim in Bilbao. Author Julia Voss casually mentions that she learned Swedish to be able to read af Klint’s notebooks. Spurred by this display of commitment, I am now a happy owner of a copy of her efforts and relish diving in.

Week 39, 2025 — Lake Balaton and back home

After a very intense training period, I met with a good friend to decompress and catch up. We rented bicycles and rode around Lake Balaton for a few days. The infrastructure for leisure cycling there is excellent, with paved bike paths with good signage and villages every hour or so to grab a bite to eat. We dipped in the lake a few times—parts of it are very shallow as you can see from the photo—and let the sun dry us while we cycled on. What fun! We celebrated the intentional investment in our friendship, our foresight in planning an enjoyable, easygoing trip, and our good luck with the late summer weather.

I flew home to Paris afterwards and spent the rest of the week playing catch up, while checking in with my training cohort peers to support each other re-enter our respective home and work systems. Tending to re-entry is a lesson we were encouraged to learn after the first module: to reconnect with those who held down the fort while we were away, to have compassion for ourselves as we adjust, and to consider what to put in place to serve our learning. I find this perspective very valuable, considering all the travel that I do. I’m fortunate to have these opportunities and it causes a lot of wear and tear.

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Oriana and I ran the first Emotions at Work public workshop, Your team's emotions about using AI. It was great to see participants jump in with both feet to discuss this topic with strangers. I find that in general, people are hungry for conversational spaces where they can pause to reflect, and learn from each other’s experiences. With our renewed focus on team leads, the potential ripple effects are even larger—an experience with EAW could be the difference between being able to breathe during a hard conversation or not, impacting the nature of that relationship in uncountable ways.

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I started reading Leadership in the Age of Not Knowing: Strategies for Leading in a Learning Way by Mary Ann Rainey and Jonno Hanafin. I’ll read it in parallel to The Fertile Void: Gestalt Coaching at Work by John Leary-Joyce to deepen my understanding of the Gestalt ways of being that I’m learning.

Week 38, 2025 - in the grand city of Budapest

I’m in Budapest for training, fatigued but feeling alive with new experiences and the certainty that I’m learning exactly what I want to be learning. The barrier to entry to this training is high, in terms of the time, energy and financial commitment. It acts as a forcing function for each of us to make the most of the opportunity - people are hungry to learn, ready to take risks and intent on making the most of every moment. The goal is to become more of who we are as we develop as leaders, and strengthen our skill of influencing human systems.

It’s my third time here, so I’ve decided it would be acceptable to forgo sight seeing. I still stumbled onto some amazing sights while taking night walks with my peers, though. What a city!

Week 37, 2025 — almost the 40th week

It was a week to relish. Busier with work than I had anticipated but still got out every day. And didn’t drink any alcohol, either. Check out this Swedish rhubarb cider. I didn’t detect any rhubarb taste but hey why not 🤷‍♀️

A new neighborhood opened up to me on Tuesday after trying a new route to my climbing gym. It’s lined with big trees and delightful little shops, so I’ve decided it’s fine that it’s a longer and steeper road. I’ve always known it was there, of course, but I usually head in opposite directions when leaving home. Really pleased with this discovery.

I’ll leave this short, as I’m off to Budapest for training. There’s lot of comms that I need to do for Emotions at Work, and I haven’t figured out how to make time for it yet.

Week 36, 2025 — Tasting September

A third of my week evaporated when I caught a cold from the sudden temperature drop. I put 100% effort into recovery and it’s behind me now. The worst of it was losing my step count streak, a fine example of a tragedy in the grand theater of my tiny inner dramas.

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The new Emotions at Work site is live, after a big weekend push. It's a very big leap to go from a single-product page to a full-blown website and I'm delighted at how steady I feel after having made it. We are now presenting EAW as the vessel for inquiry and exploration that it is, rather than yet another training service provider.

I've been taking in the reactions from our community - we got a lot of congratulations, good work, nice design, is this a bug? etc. All genuine support that I am thankful to receive. And as far as I'm aware, no one that's seen the site has reacted to the vision or story. Which may mean that they haven't read the text in-depth, it's not really landing, or the message is so obvious to them already that they feel no need to comment on it. Or D, all the above. It's funny. As our friend Kathleen put it, no one spends more time looking at our sites than us.

Next week as I start letting more people know about the site and more importantly, the next cohort of Navigating Emotions at Work for team managers, I'll draw a bit more attention to it and see what happens. There are thoughts on Squarespace, Substack, AI-assisted writing and vibecoding, too, that I would like to capture. Making a mental note to protect time and energy for writing next week.

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I also had an EAW alumni session, calls with two of my org dev practice groups, and an online birthday hang for a good friend. Renewed my rock climbing gym membership, made progress on reading Confronting Shame, schemed an October co-working week in Germany, took on boring tasks so a colleague could take holiday, cooked a lot, had a post-summer reconnect with a few friends, and picked up a foldable yoga mat for an upcoming trip.

Getting sick aside, it’s been a good week.

Week 35, 2025 — Is it fall already?

Another quiet week at home. The weather has turned cool in Paris, even raining a few times. On Saturday I went for a long walk in the forest and was surprised to find fall foliage.

I’ve restarted indoor rock climbing. It’s great to mix up the range of body movement. I love cycling but repeating the same movement and going in one direction cannot be good for the body. The height and the possibility of an equipment failure (and subsequent fall) still scare me. But I like the cheery atmosphere of my gym, and am unbothered by my utter lack of ability, so commit to going 2-3 times a week for the foreseeable future.

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Oriana and I mapped out the bones of the rest of 2025 for Emotions at Work. We are almost ready to launch a new website, having outgrown the single product one-pager, and will finally start a newsletter along with it. We will run another cohort of Navingating Emotions at Work, this time dedicated to team managers. The hypothesis is that this focus will allow for more targeted messaging/inviting, and even stronger connection and exchange within the group. Most managers become managers by being thrown into the deep end, and supporting them is a cause that's dear to my heart. Let's see how it goes!

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In wrapping up a 1.5-year project about gift economy, I listened to “The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World” by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The Guardian calls it an "ecologically-inspired alternative to consumerism". The book was a sweet listen, just under 3hrs, and I enjoyed it alot. (which was a bit of a relief, as I haven't managed to work through my copy of Braiding Sweetgrass.)

Collecting is one thing, storing responsibly is another, but increasingly I find the hoarding and accumulation of material wealth to just be gross. Kimmerer argues that it is in fact criminal, and while the book worldview feels quite idealistic overall, I think it taps into the need for hope and inspiration.

Serviceberry talks about the ripple effects of daily acts--how abundance thickens among those who live in gift. Last week I had been gifted a jar of homemade honey, and thought it would be fitting to send back a Tupperware of food where I used this honey instead of sugar. I hope they like it, or at the minimum enjoy trying a new flavor profile. Having my friends in mind made it more fun to go ingredient shopping and cook. It also spurred me to go to a specialist shop I haven't gone to in a while, where I picked up some bitter melons. I hadn't bothered to try the ones available in France because their size and coloring are different from what I know... but it turned out they taste and crunch the same, so now I've re-discovered a great vegetable. Not bad, huh?

Week 34, 2025 — Nesting at Home

This turned into something of a second week of break--technically I've been back at work from Tuesday but everything on the client front was quiet, and with just a trickle of social commitments, I had the chance to rest and think in a luxurious, open-ended way. That's a different mode than being on holiday and I'm grateful for this unplanned time to re-orient.

I'm actively closing a few chapters in in my professional activities in September, as well as begining the process of renewing my French visa. The perceived high stakes, time pressure, and bureaucratic complexity of these kinds of tasks tend to leave me procrastinating and panicked. In an ideal world I would not have to go through any of it, and in the past I have been very good at scraping by with the bare minimum. But I've come to recognize the harm that this avoidant attitude can cause, and cautiously trying on different approaches. Asking for help, identifying questions to ask myself instead of brooding, setting up bite-sized tasks instead of all-or-nothing deadlines...

Baby steps to be sure, in a state where the stakes are objectively not high at all. It's still hard, though, and I've benefitted greatly from having elastic time and the comforts of home (and thankfully, no more heat dome for now).

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I saw this beautiful 1910 illustration in the window of an antique bookshop in Turin last week. It’s the same view of my photograph in last week’s Weeknote. Here is a digital copy from the Mountainmuseums website.

Panorama du Mont-Blanc depuis la Flégère —WEIBEL Charles, MULLER Théodore

Week 33, 2025 — Summer cycling

The heatwave is intense but our legs feel strong. I’m cycling with my sister from Annecy through Chamonix Valley through Aosta Valley down to Ivrea then Turin!

Week 31, 2025 — The start of summer

Paris has been cool, even a bit chilly at times, in a cheery, magnanimous mood as people disappear into their holidays. It's also the time to look around to connect one last time with those still here. I've had a more social week than usual, and enjoyed it a lot.

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My own vacance will be on my old road bike. I'd decided this was the kick I needed to make all the improvements I've put off for the last decade. Put on a more comfortable saddle, get flat pedals for sneakers instead of clipless shoes, give it a good clean, get the gears checked etc. I had ordered a new rain jacket and seatpost bag, too. So this week I ran around town chasing down deliveries that hadn't made it to my door, and trying to get bike shops to give me useful advice. It was time-consuming and more expensive than I wanted but I'm almost there. It it feels good to have my trusty companion be functional and welcoming to ride again, instead of gathering dust as I default to the new and new-fangled bike. (I'm going to lend that one to my sister for our trip, while I take the old one.)

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I went to the David Hockney 25 show at Fondation Louis Vuitton, after really enjoying his retrospective at the Pompidou in 2017. The highlight were several series of drawings, some of them on the iPad, from his home in Normandy. This was basically his COVID project, except unlike most COVID projects, he kept going. The Pompidou show had a few exploratory pieces. It had looked super basic, and I remember thinking huh, everyone's iPad drawings looks the same in the beginning, and does Hockney need to be on the iPad in his 80's? But fast forward seven years, and gosh his work is beautiful and unequivocally his. It's humbling and inspiring, and I was happy to learn more about this phase of his life in "David Hockney in Pays d'Auge", a work journal by writer and gallerist Jean Frémon who periodically visited him. I read half of it in the crowded gift shop instead of getting in the queue. One day I'll encounter it again in a bookstore, and enjoy re-discovering it.