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Author / Michelle Howie
18 January 2021

Anxiety and our experience of it

by Michelle Howie
The online Oxford dictionary defines anxiety as “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.” There has been a lot of uncertainty in 2020! Are there more people experiencing anxiety? We are a long way from having hard data on the impacts of COVID-19 on our wellbeing but anecdotal evidence suggests most people have felt a bit more worry, nervousness or unease. Yet life is actually always uncertain, we’ve been dealing with uncertainty our whole lives. Covid-19 has just rather abruptly brought a focus on uncertainty. So what is anxiety, how do we experience it and what can we do?CONTINUE READING
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Category:Leadership, Peace of mind, Thought/thinking
13 October 2020

The Power of Rediscovery

by Michelle Howie
Few of us realise how smart we already are. As babies, we learnt to walk and talk. We did this naturally. We figured out balance, coordination, communication and relationships with very little formal teaching. Those that love us marvelled at this intelligence, we were cheered on and celebrated for the smart little beings that we were. At some stage in our development, adults inserted themselves into the process and suddenly our learning was handed over to teachers who claimed to know more than we did. The intelligence that had been developing quite naturally was now no longer to be trusted, it seemed. It’s a bizarre concept to see written in print.CONTINUE READING
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Category:Learning, Wisdom
3 May 2018

Resilience and Shower Spiders

by Michelle Howie
There’s spider living in my shower at the moment. ​ This spider is tenacious. It has woven its delicate web all over my bars of soap and shampoo. And when I need to break the fine strands of gossamer thread to retrieve my bar of soap each morning, the spider scuttles away from dripping water, shelters for a while, then comes back out to rebuild it all once I am gone. This spider got me thinking.CONTINUE READING
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Category:Resilience
3 May 2018

Thoughts That Don’t Stick

by Michelle Howie
I woke up at 5am with great big thoughts. This happened on Friday 5 July 2019.  The date and the time are very clear to me, because the thoughts were so big and so vivid that I felt sure it would be one of those unforgettable moments in my life. So much certainty, in that moment. These were big thoughts. At the time of writing this, I am four days ‘post-moment' and things look different now. Sorry for the buzz-kill, this is not a particularly exciting blog about a momentous insight and how life changed forever at 5am on 5 July. This is a pretty ordinary blog about what happened to my thoughts between 5 July and 9CONTINUE READING
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Category:Resilience, Thought/thinking, Wisdom
3 May 2018

Climbing the Hill

by Michelle Howie
This morning I climbed the Hakarimata summit track alone. To put that in context, I've only done the track about a dozen times in total over the last 12 months so there is no pattern of regular habit here. I have never gone alone before, I normally go with Shawn my husband and once we did it with the kids...very slowly.  It's a beautiful track, filled with birdsong and bush. It's nature's gym these days, a well-worn track used by many, many local people pursuing physical goals or simply aiming for the view from the top. CONTINUE READING
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Category:Exercise, Resilience, Thought/thinking
3 May 2018

Why I Give

by Michelle Howie
When the business began to keep me consistently busy I made a commitment to donate annually to charity. Last December I made my first donation – a humble $50 to Brainwave Aotearoa Trust. Here’s the post. This decision falls out of some introspective work I did in 2016 around my long-term goals – and it also reflects all the learnings I have taken from the hardest (best?) times of my life. Let me explain… ​CONTINUE READING
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Category:Business, Charity, Purpose, Wisdom
3 May 2018

Leadership and the Invisible Contract

by Michelle Howie
So you’ve ended up leading a team. You know how you got here, you were complicit, there was an offer and an agreement. This is your first leadership role – perhaps it’s paid or perhaps it’s not. I’ve had both kinds of leadership roles, both count. You did make this choice, so how come it is not quite as it seemed? Time has gone by and ‘stuff’ has started to creep in. What has happened here? Did someone hide the facts from you? Was there a second more-accurate version of the job description that never saw the light of day? No, my friend. You are simply a leader now.CONTINUE READING
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Category:Business, Leadership, Purpose, Resilience
3 May 2018

Talk About It Vs Type About It

by Michelle Howie
Yes, I see the irony of typing out a blog when I’m discussing a message about talking to other humans. Give me some grace, let’s see if I can get to where I’m going with this.Several events over the last week have all spun in their separate planetary orbits, seemingly unconnected. Then the final event joined the swirl and bang, the planets aligned like a string of blindingly bright beads pulled taut between my conscious and the very centre of the universe. A roundabout way of describing an insight, I suppose.CONTINUE READING
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Category:Conversation, Honesty, Leadership, Wisdom
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