Soft Skills Reloaded

After a two year social media hiatus and a great number of distractions I'm excited to announce I've quit my day job to reboot my coaching company, Soft Skills.

My purpose remains the same - giving teams wings - but the company mission has been refocused:

To empower and equip leaders and project teams to achieve more with less.

It's been a long and bumpy journey getting to this point. The tail end of our earthquake insurance claim put the financial brakes on until the start of this year and what followed when we finally sold the Christchurch house was not joy, but grief, anger and regret. So much of our family's living memory occurred under the shadow of great financial uncertainty and I felt I had denied them far more opportunities than I would have liked. Fortunately I have wonderful, supportive wife, plenty of emotional intelligence training and a great network of coaches to remind me to use it.

After a couple of months the grief passed, and I began to realise I can finally afford to take a risk again. I was contracting before the earthquakes and I never intended to go back into full time employment. Unfortunately life sometimes has other ideas and it was safer to take a job. This was a good option, and I'm grateful to all my employers over the last 7 years - thank you for the support, stability and the learnings.

So now I'm super excited to be back in the contracting/consulting space, and very grateful and fortunate to be kicking off with a (semi-)agile transition project in flight. I'm also grateful to the innumerable friends, colleagues and new acquaintances who have shared their insights and experiences to allow me to get to this point. It has been amazing to sit with complete strangers - potential competition even - and experience openness and abundance.

Thank you all. Hope to see you in the next chapters. In the meantime I'll be holding on to this thought - perhaps it will help you also: