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.

•

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.

•

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.