Design your own career: part 1

On finding your way into the flow of life.

One of the things I want to do with this newsletter is to explore other ways of working, other ways of using your time to make a difference in the world, ones that don’t rely on finding somebody to hire you to do it. 

I grew up in a family where the nine-to-five was the norm: full-time employment with one employer, progression within the organisation, grit your teeth until retirement. That didn’t leave me with an awful lot of models when I decided that wasn’t what I wanted to do.

All of this is to say: whenever I meet someone who’s doing something I can’t easily fit into one of the boxes I know about (find a job / find a contract / start a business), I am pinning them down and grilling them until I understand how they do what they do, both because I want to know and because I think we collectively need a more expansive understanding of what constitutes a working life. 

Philippa Bayley is one of those people. I was introduced to her by a friend – hi, Simon! – and I was immediately (a) deeply envious of the depth, breadth and topics of her work, and (b) very curious about how this might be achieved. 

"The more you show up as yourself, the more likely you are to attract and retain the people that you actually want to work with. Even when you're doing nothing, if you're cultivating your inner strength and your inner clarity – I think we don’t tend to think of that as work, but I think that is work."

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Kat: Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed. You’ve got lots of different strands to your work, including some projects which you - maybe - made up? That was fascinating to me, and I wanted to ask you a bit about your career so far, and how you’ve created a work life.

Philippa: I mean, I was a kid who enjoyed a lot of different things at school, and it was really hard for me to choose what to do. My parents were both scientists, and then my mum became an artist after my sister was born, but her background was in neuroscience, and my dad's was in biochemistry, physical biochemistry. 

So when I came to choose what I was going to do, science had that sense of generative potential for me. There are interesting questions, and it leads to interesting places. I studied science and then biology at university, and then went on to do a PhD a little bit because I didn't know quite what else to do. I didn't want to be in the corporate world, and so I did a PhD in neuroscience about how brains develop in embryonic fish.

I was always super interested in how the science gets out of the lab and gets used in other spaces, talking about the magic of it, I guess. So I moved to the States and into the science communication space, more into questions like Why does this matter? What role is it playing in society? And really starting to work with educators and people who understood how to tell the story differently.

Then I came back to the UK and worked in public engagement in universities, building bridges between the general public and what’s happening in the research world in the university. It was partly an extension of the idea of, how do we make things that are happening behind the university walls visible to the public? But also a sort of justice motivation, about people’s right to be part of the conversation and to have their views heard. Somewhere along the line, I moved into managing the university's Environmental Research Institute, because that environmental stuff had always been important to me and I wanted something a bit less broad, I wanted a deeper relationship with a tighter community.

And then my mum died from motor neurone disease, and I just felt like I needed to make a response to that, to have space and time to think. The job at the university was incredibly intense, and so I took a sabbatical, and out of that more introspective time came a project about bereavement and loss and people's creative responses to bereavement and loss. 

I've always had a sort of quiet, artsy sort of practice in there somewhere. I made some work in response to my relationship with my mum and her death, and then I just invited other people to share anything that they had made in response to bereavement and loss. It was a really beautiful experience to host that space and to let people come into it with their own experiences and their own work, their own stories.

After that I went back to the university and struggled to reintegrate there. I worked in the corporate world on and off for five years, but in reality it wasn’t a great cultural fit for me. So when there was a call  from the British Council for creative commissions for COP 26 in Glasgow, an artist friend and I put in a proposal.

The project we conceived is called Living Language Land. It was motivated by the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, who's an indigenous scholar and biologist. She talks about reciprocity with the more-than-human world and how language supports that, how her indigenous language is relational and our language is not, our language is object based. So the project was about countering the dominance of English in the climate space, where climate negotiation and legislation all happens in English. 

From that work, I stepped much more back into climate work, and I’m working now in climate policy. So again, it’s that thread of building bridges. I work with indigenous people’s organisations, giving them information that can help them target their priorities and their demands better into the international climate system, and also helping to build the bridges in the other direction so that climate policy makers are more aware of the priorities of indigenous people. 

Alongside that, always an interest in people and in seeing people flourish. That’s how my coaching came to be, as well. I have a foundational belief that if we change the way we see the world and change our thinking, extraordinary things – that we can’t even imagine – are possible.

Kat: I'm so curious about that first project: how did you figure it out? Did you work with a gallery? Was there funding from someone, how did you bring these other people in? How do you make something that involves more of the world than just you, in your living room?

I mean, it took me quite a long time to get to the idea of the project. My first motivation was to try and write a book about motor neurone disease that would be a grand synthesis of all of the different approaches, from molecular biology through to Ayurveda and acupuncture. I started, went to the library, sat down, started reading papers and references, and just felt like, my god, I'm moving through mud here. There is no way I will be able to write this. 

So, okay, that’s not an option; what else is there? And I went away to Indonesia for a while, and noodled on it for a bit, and in that time my own writing started to happen. Then I think it was a little bit like time was running out, shit I’ve got to do something, how do I actually animate this?

I can’t remember how I circulated the ask to people, but stuff just started coming in, a whole mixture of things. A woman who'd embroidered a Jewish prayer shawl after her father died, a man who’d documented the last conversations with his wife as she died of cancer on morphine, poems that people who had written after a parent died. 

There weren’t many spaces where you could talk about bereavement and loss, not just your personal story but the importance of death for life. 

It ended up being an open exhibition called When Death Comes and a series of events to talk about loss in a more open way. I did go for a grant but I didn’t get it, and in the end I self-funded, gallery hire was something like £2,000 for six weeks, so the whole budget for the project was really tiny. 

And because I was holding it all very lightly, and because we didn’t get any funding, that meant that people did have to come forward and bring something of themselves. It became quite spiritual, like a tribute to my mum’s life and to the creative part of me. 

I do have a sense that the right thing wills itself forth: it’s more of a listening process than a doing process, in a way.

Kat: Once you’d done one project, did you know you wanted to do more?

Philippa: Both projects started with a leap into the unknown as a counterpoint to doing something that felt overly heavy. So it’s like my bid for freedom, or my bid to fly, is to do a project like that. 

I think that part of me is quite adventurous and is ready to throw myself into something quite unknown, but it’s much easier to do that from a place of safety. The corporate world was a period of too much safety and too much in-house-ness, and I needed to leap into something from there. 

I think it’s maybe that search to have meaningful work that isn’t also a massive job, leading something big.

Kat: When you talk about safety, is it primarily financial safety? 

Philippa: I think there’s financial safety and the continuing predictability of it, that you know it isn’t about to come to an end. There’s also the belonging and the community, which can be both an enormous support but sometimes feel a bit stifling as well. There’s the stability of knowing what you’re doing and therefore knowing how it’s likely to continue. I think something in me rebels against that.

And maybe a challenge for me now is: how do I find that balance? Inspiration doesn’t always strike you when you want it. How do I keep that pot bubbling so there are always good ideas there, or keep a nursery that’s bringing them on in a small way, that isn’t constantly asking you to make a leap into the unknown? Because that is quite a difficult way to do it.

Kat: How do you balance that? Have you figured it out?

Philippa: My coaching work is like a drum beat that I can always come back to and it's a flow that I can either swell or or diminish, and my work with indigenous peoples organisations is relatively stably funded. The programme about working with youth activists, that’s much more nascent, and although we’ve got funding for it, we really don’t know the shape of the project. Then there are other ideas which are not funded, which are in the early stages of the nursery. I might panic that I’m going to run out of life before I can do all of them. 

That’s what enables me to be okay with this level of  uncertainty, that not all of my eggs are in one basket and that things are at different levels of maturity or reliability, but I think that’s a muscle that needs training. I think I'm still learning that, very much. 

I have a friend who’s a master coach, and what she's shown me is that the more you're you, the more people can get their teeth into you and you can have these interesting, collaborative, generative conversations. That’s where the work comes from, from relationships, people.

The more you show up as yourself, the more likely you are to attract and retain the people that you actually want to work with. Even when you're doing nothing, if you're cultivating your inner strength and your inner clarity – I think we don’t tend to think of that as work, but I think that is work. It is really valuable, and it helps us operate more cleanly in the world, be more discerning.

Kat: I want to ask about meaningful work, and about the worry about running out of life, and how that feels.

Philippa: For me, meaningful work gets a little bit murky. It’s like, well, whose meaning? If I think about my educational background, meaningful would be: make a really good amount of money, have multiple properties and do lots of holidays. And I know that’s not my goal, but there’s some part of me that believes that also. 

And then there’s a bigger part of me that knows meaningful work when I'm in it, and it's much more relational, and it's much more about what's happening between the people in the room. I can really only describe it as like being in the flow of life. That's how I experience it. It’s a sense of being nourished by the work – it’s nourishing me, and it’s nourishing life beyond me.

A challenge for me is how to seek that out. How to find it, or how to architect it, is less clear to me. 

Kat: How have you found it, in the past?

Philippa: If I think of it from my coaching principles, part of my life’s purpose statement is about listening to what life is calling forth. That could be for me or it could be for a client, it could be: what is life asking of them for the non-human world, or what is the planet asking us to do? And how can I be in service of that, or connected to that?

Kat: How does it all come together, practically, working on these sorts of projects?

Philippa: With Living Language Land, the funding call came first, and that started to generate ideas. That led me to have a conversation with an artist I knew, and that led to the project. I just knew I really wanted to pursue this. 

With the death project, it was a little bit more of a slow burn. There was a woman running the Bristol Death Cafe  and she came on board with me and wanted to make it happen, and had flexibility. That’s a key element, flexibility. It’s got to be people who’ve got the space to accommodate what you’re growing together in their lives. To come back to the greenhouse metaphor, it’s like the soil, the water and the light all have to be there at the right moment. But again, these things can be engineered. 

What I’m worried about, if you write this up, is that people are going to be like, how do I learn anything from what you've just said? Because you're basically saying it's all down to chance and the serendipity of the moment. 

How do we become a little bit more attuned to hearing when an idea is good and pieces are falling into place that are going to make this a success? That's a bit that still feels a little bit mysterious to me. 

Kat: What I've heard from you is about allowing for emergence and not holding things too tightly, having conversations and building relationships anyway. Maybe that’s what we can learn from you.

Philippa: That’s a beautiful summary. I think it’s got to do with the river metaphor. You’ve got to flow the way the river is moving. If you’re too rigid about how it’s going to be, it’s going to be very difficult, I think.