Dear 2025,

I had high hopes for you. It seemed like there was something special about the year being 2025. As such, my word for the year was “abundance”.

I optimistically wrote the word on a poster behind my monitor along with my goals for the year. I can barely look at that poster now.

A better word would have been “struggle” or perhaps “dumpster fire”.

I could talk about all the crappy things that happened this year, but I know 2025 was crappy for many, so in my last newsletter for the year I thought I would share all the great things I got to do.

We often hear about how important it is to understand our values when thinking about our career. It actually took me a while to work out what was important to me.

 I think back to the time I was working for a chain jewellery store, straight out of finishing that super useful Applied Science Degree. I was in their management development program and then worked my way up to store manager.

I have been delivering some workshops on respectful and inclusive cultures, and have written a couple of newsletters on the topic, here and here.

In the first one, mostly written on a plane between Brisbane and Mackay, I was reflecting whether the mostly male audience would feel a bit attacked by the topic, because workplaces that are more at risk of disrespectful and exclusionary behaviours (sexual harassment, bulling, discrimination and victimisation) are those where:

• Most of your workers are men

• Most of your leaders are men

• Your workplace lacks diversity across the board

• Your workplace is isolated or remote

• Your workplace is divided by gender (for example, women in the office, men on the tools)

“Nearly 2 years ago (over the summer holidays in Thailand) I read the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less (by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy).

One of the takeaways for me was organising my week to have:

• Free days, for exploring, recovery, learning, idea generating and testing

• Focus days, for getting stuff done, working on important and revenue generating activities, and

• Buffer days, for meetings, organising, planning, admin, and preparing type work.

I decided then that Fridays would be a “Free” day.”

“How do we change these people’s minds?” I was asked during some recent training on respectful culture.

I had been sharing some of their people's comments from the gender equity survey I ran with the organisation.

I won’t share the direct comments here but they were along the lines of “women shouldn’t be in our industry” and “males are just better at some jobs more than women” and “women aren’t capable of doing the job. There was more, but you get the flavour 🙄

Last week I was in Australia delivering workshops on building respectful and inclusive cultures for a particular industry and organisation experiencing rapid growth and unprecedented investment.

I was delivering these workshops to the most delightful groups of people leaders. All up to around 60 people. I built their training around their own gender equity survey results, which we ran over the last 12 months. Their own survey results were the most powerful part of the training.