A very Happy New Year to all of you.

Some of you will have already been back at work last week, but for many of you today will be your first day back.  I hope you have had a wonderful break and a chance to reflect on your hopes for 2019.

I suspect that like me, many of you will have been thinking about resolutions and finding the notion of setting them on January 1st uninspiring.  Over the years, I’ve read much more about the power of setting intentions rather than resolutions.  It may just be me, but I’ve found more pleasure in breaking resolutions them than I have keeping them!  So, the science behind intention setting is much more appealing to me.

Setting intentions offers a more positive approach to visualising/identifying what it is that we want to change and thinking through what steps we can take to enable that change – and then of course carrying them out.  If you are interested, there is some really interesting literature on intentions.  For those of you who have time, you might want to look at the work of Lynne McTaggart, who has written prolifically on the topic.  Her Book ‘The Intention Experiment’ was an eye opener for me and fed my early interest in neuroscience.

So I’ve been setting my intentions for this year (I’ve gone the whole hog by the way and made them at a New Moon – which is a story for another time !).  As ever, I have a list broken down by personal and professional.   At the top of the personal list is to show the Chocolates who is in charge this year.  Given that Ellie is 5 and I’ve not yet succeeded, it’s clearly the case that this is one that will likely fail again.   However, persistence is good for the soul and all that!

The ones I have made for my PPMA role are heartfelt and I will do my best, with your help, to deliver on them this year.  Feel free to hold me to account on them.  They are:

  • To continue to advocate on behalf of this wonderful organisation and working with our new Strategic Board to ensure that your voices are elevated and that we encourage and support policy makers to increasingly put workforce issues at the heart of their thinking.
  • To demonstrate why we are a wonderful organisation to belong to.  In many instances, this is the easy part of the job.  All I have to do is to harness the wisdom, experience and knowledge within our community and share that with other HR & OD professionals. We’re gaining new members each month, but I’m very ambitious for us to do more in this area.
  • To embed our new structure.  It’s been so encouraging to see how excited our new leadership team members are in terms of approaching our collective task.  We’ll see much more progress in this over the year.  One of our key developments will be completely refreshed Regional and Strategic Theme website pages, so keep an eye out for those.
  • That all of you will have opportunities to participate in PPMA activities and thrive.  I know we are all incredibly busy in our day jobs and we’re all dealing with some pretty substantial challenges.  However, one of the most important things to me – and my Strategic Board colleagues, is that we develop our current and younger professionals.  I’m very lucky in that I get chance to meet so many of you across our organisations.  I’ve never failed to feel inspired, humbled, challenged and energised by our conversations.  I want all of us to feel like that, so I’ll be doing what I can to make sure that our membership offering is accessible for all of you, whatever stage you are in your career.

In future updates we will look at how we’re doing on this.  But in the meantime, try and enjoy getting back in the swing of work.  Yet again we’ve got a massive to do list – which includes the B(rexit) word, but together I am confident that we will achieve a huge amount.

All best for a year filled with blessings, joy, opportunity and even a bit of work-life balance thrown in .

Karen x