Looking back on my first year as a Director with All The Elements.
I officially became Communications Director with All The Elements in July 2023, and what a journey it has been since then! I’ve seen so much growth in the community, in the team and in myself it feels important to take a moment to pause and reflect back on the past 15 months.
My favourite place to start any reflection is with the joy, and there has been so much to be joyful about! Within the community I’ve seen ideas become events, funding bids become projects and connections become lasting partnerships.
For me, the All The Elements community is a daily source of hope, where I’ve connected to some of the most incredible, generous and lovely humans I’ve ever met. It’s such an honour to hear about what everyone is working on through our one-to-one community calls, and not a single call happens where I don’t leave having learned something or been inspired by the radical ways our community is making change.
As an organisation there is also so much for us to celebrate. In January 2024, I jumped from 4 hours a week to 2 days a week. Alongside All The Elements founder Soraya and consultant Kike, I spent the first few months of the year interviewing and onboarding our new incredible team members - taking us from a tiny team of 3 part-time paid team members to a slightly less tiny part-time team of 6!
In March 2024, we ran our second Outdoor Connection event in partnership with YHA Outdoor Citizens and supported by Sport England and Natural England. The Outdoor Connection is a weekend of training, capacity building and networking, designed to support grassroots leaders in the outdoors. I attended the first Outdoor Connection as a community member in 2022, and attending the event a second time was a beautiful moment of reflection on how much growth there has been both in the community and myself. There is a magic that happens seeing so many people who are working for a more inclusive outdoors together in the same space. I imagine all the ripples of change from each person, all the lives that they reach out and impact. It's a physical reminder, that change isn’t just on the way, it is being built, this very second, by people all across the country.
Photos from The Outdoor Connection - Credit Grace TSP
On stage at Timber Festival
In July 2024, we celebrated with the community at Timber Festival - a new partnership with Wild Rumpus and Patagonia. Nearly 700 festival goers joined us for 28 sessions that we’d scheduled across three days and on two stages. The event itself was filled with joy, learnings, sharing and connection. A personal joy was how it enabled us to connect with so many new people. I had one-to-one calls with everyone who requested a discounted ticket or suggested a session, and got to know so many incredible people who are now firmly part of the All The Elements community.
It has been an incredible year, filled with many firsts, both for myself and as an organisation. It has been far from easy, but not a single work day goes by where I’m not grateful to be doing the work I do.
And that leads me onto the learnings - and let me tell you.. I’ve had some big learnings.
1) Is it imposter syndrome, or is it actually just something worth caring about?
Imposter syndrome, for anyone lucky enough not to know what it is, it’s a sense that you are absolutely not qualified for the role you’ve been given, you are a terrible fit, and any day now ‘they’ are going to find out that you conned your way into it.
It’s something I am blessed to have felt at some point in almost every role I’ve ever had - and stepping up into a new leadership role, within an organisation that deeply matters to me, doing work that is also hugely personal, made the feeling quadruple.
I took my time to settle in, I spoke about how I was feeling to my therapist and others on the team, and put the energy I needed into learning about the areas of the role that I wasn’t as confident in. The biggest shift happened when I realised that maybe some of these feelings weren’t ones I needed to overcome. Instead of trying to push the feeling away, I tried to reframe the questions that accompanied it. Turning “Is this the right thing to do?” or “Am I the right person to do this?” away from Imposter syndrome, and instead looking at them more as a deep sense of care.
Being in any leadership position is a huge responsibility, feeling a deep sense of care towards it should be something that, in my opinion, we encourage more of in the world, not less.
2) There is fun to be found everywhere.
“I just imagined you as more professional” - This was a comment shared with a smile by someone at an event as myself, Soraya and Francesca (Our content manager) were having a hay bale wrapping competition between us, joking, teasing each other and laughing during the set up.
I think as a society we have confused professionalism with a lack of joy or play. We take our work really seriously. We take our responsibility to the community really seriously. We take the partnerships and collaborations we hold really seriously. But not a day goes by where we don’t also find space to laugh and enjoy the work.
Whether it’s deep in a financial planning session, during a team meeting, on a debrief call - or frantically wrapping hay bales in sheets as part of an event set up - there is fun to be found everywhere.
3) It’s not that urgent.
When I first went from Social Media Manager to Communications Director it felt like everything needed doing, and it needed doing yesterday. There is so much work that we could be doing, so many different ways we could support the community, so many exciting projects to work on.
This is combined with the challenge of partnering with organisations who have full time teams, when I am working part time. The reply rate to emails just isn’t the same!
There is only so long that you can work at a 110% speed, only so long that you can work an extra hour, or pick something up at the weekend - and honestly is that the future we’re trying to build?
I am lucky that no one comes to harm when my emails are left unanswered. Sticking to a social media schedule is not a life or death situation, and even the deadlines I have, whilst I always try to meet them, don’t stop the world from spinning if they are missed.
We’re trying to build a culture that puts wellbeing before deadlines, that challenges urgent requests and that knows not everything is an emergency.
Before expecting anyone else to work this way, it’s something I’ve had to learn for myself first.
4) No one is expecting you to have it ALL figured out.
“I don’t know”, “I don’t know what that means”, “I’m not sure I understand”, “Can you remind me what we spoke about last time?” “I’d love to learn more”.
I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that life would be both simpler and richer if I spent less time worrying about whether or not I knew the right stuff and more time asking people for more information.
These questions can sometimes feel so inaccessible to me, which is frustrating when they are very literally the key to better accessing and understanding the world. If there is one takeaway from this year that I will be continuing to remind myself of, it’s the power of being vulnerable enough to say you don’t know and to ask for help.
When we describe the community we like to remind people that “Everyone's an expert in their own thing, but no one knows everything about everything”. It’s a saying that I now carry with me at all times, that isn’t just true about working intersectionally within the outdoors, but is also a reminder that we can all take into our wider work.
5) We need less humans trying to be leaders - and more leaders remembering they are human.
I have done my very best work, when I showed up as myself. And by that I don’t mean the “best version” of myself, I mean ‘easily excitable, deeply compassionate, unable to concentrate for longer than a minute, constantly fidgeting in zoom calls’ version of myself.
The person who laughs easily and cries even easier. Who cares deeply and feels everything.
Many years ago, I read somewhere that women have a tendency to write or say “I feel” in front of the point they are about to make, and the piece suggested that this is a habit we should absolutely unlearn. I read that it was self-deprecating and that it was a way of unnecessarily softening our opinions. That often when someone says “I feel” it is actually when they absolutely know something to be true.
It is a privilege to work in an all-women team where I don’t need to worry about how my words are perceived through a gendered perspective. But what this has opened up for me is not a complete removal of “I feel” from my vocabulary, instead I use it tenfold.
I use it because I want to bring all of the feeling, human parts of myself into my work. Because I want people to know that when I am suggesting an idea, it is not just something I know with my mind but something I feel, in myself, in my body, or in the moment.
There is so much leadership advice out there, some of it really useful! But it does make me wonder how different this advice could look if more people had the space to bring their whole human selves to their work.
On stage at Timber Festival - Credit Sheree Mack
Potentially the biggest learning of all, although it sounds cliche, is how much there is still left to learn. Every door opens up a million more, every new skill opening up possibilities I was never aware of before. But what has changed is how comfortable I feel with that uncertainty, and how excited I am to see where the next 12 months take All The Elements and the work I do.
With so much thanks to everyone who has supported me this year! Everything in life is a community effort and I’m so grateful to everyone who supports me, and the work we do with ATE.
Special thanks to Soraya for approaching me to join as the second director and supporting me in 100,000 different ways. I’m so grateful that I get to work with you and learn from you.
And a final thank you to all the members of the community. All The Elements is what it is because of the work you do - and I can’t wait to see where the next few years take us!
