When I Grow Up, I Would Like To Be...

I had a choice of posts today. I could tell you that I've spent another day with flip charts, coloured pens and post it notes. I could tell you that it was meant to help motivate us, but instead reduced one of my colleagues to tears, and left her thinking that she was in the wrong job. I could tell you that I've learned today that people sometimes know such a lot about a subject, that they forget the basics, like being courteous, like respect for people, like behaving like adults. I could tell you that this day, above all other days, has made me more intent on finding a new job than any day I've had at this company.

In 16 years of working for them.

Instead, I shall take one of the positives from yesterday, because, despite all that, I don't have to descend to their level.

Because I can be a better woman than that.

Instead, I'm going to talk to you about ambition. Do you remember when you were a child, and you had such bright, sparkly dreams for the future? Do you remember thinking that you could be anything you wanted to be, achieve anything you set out to do?

Some of us have never lost that.

We were asked yesterday to write down (on a post it note!) our ambition for the future. Didn't have to be work related. Then the other people had to try and match those ambitions to the people that were there. It was a really entertaining exercise. Two people wanted to climb Ben Nevis. (God bless the third person who said that he used to want to climb a mountain, but was now so unfit that his ambition was to walk up a gentle hill). One person wanted to do a parachute jump, one to get their golf handicap to under 8, one to travel to the Galapagos Islands.

Mine? I want to write a novel. Difficult enough, I know. Not sure how or where to start. But I know that it's what I want to do, what I've always wanted to do. But as some people achieve ambitions or discard them, instead, I collect them.

You see, I don't just have one. But they only gave me one post-it note. Do you think they would have guessed that these were my ambitions too?

1/ travel to Australia.
2/ wear Size 10 clothes. That cover all of my body. And fasten.
3/ run a half marathon.
4/ find a house that I don't want to move from every 3 years.
5/ learn to drive
6/ learn another language

And one final one.

Wake up every day, and know that I'm doing the best that I can.

That's me sorted then. What about you?