Author Archives: eugenie

On form

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I was talking to C today about the perils of teenage sex. One of her sons is sleeping with his girlfriend, and although she knew it was happening, she hadn’t seen (or heard) any evidence of it. That meant it was sort of okay. Girlfriend is shown to the spare room, everyone says goodnight, that’s that.  I mean, I guess that’s how it’s been in many families for a fair few decades now. Centuries, even. Crikey, I sound like some temporal prude.

The point is, C was upset that after a supposedly innocent ‘sleepover’, she woke up one morning to discover that the girlfriend had left the spare room door wide open and was not to be found in the bed. C went into her son’s room where they were both asleep, spooning. And that had to be that; the rule was enforced, no more sleepovers. Why? Not because C actually really minds about them sleeping together under her roof (better there, she thinks, than in a graveyard), but rather because ‘form’ had been broken.

Form.

I think that it is one of the root causes of the social problems, inequalities and silos within this country. And many others.

Form. The awareness of what is going on and the associated refusal to acknowledge it in public, or sometimes even in private.

victorian family

It’s feels so Victorian. Silent expectations of what to say or do, or not say and not do. Expectations that are learned through osmosis, held in common by a group of people, often unknown to outsiders. A secret code of conformity. A willing suspension of disbelief. That stuff works for plays and movies and books and other cultural things. But day-to-day interaction? In my mind it is one of the biggest social dividers. We all know that the mime artist isn’t actually in a box, that the Emperor doesn’t have new clothes, that the elephant is in the room.

Keeping form is one of the tenets of civility. As adults, we tend to get embarrassed if a kid asks why someone’s skin colour is different from theirs, say. But this type of colour blindness, or any other form of ‘civilised’ denial of difference reinforces social division rather than undermining it. But that’s the form. Teenagers should at least try to hide the fact that they are having sex under your roof. That’s the form. Professional women shouldn’t openly acknowledge that they spend half the day in serious meetings and the other half  high-fiving their kid for peeing in the potty. That’s the form.

Earlier this week I broke form. I scraped off the professional veneer of my bio, and put some more candid truths in there instead. I did it for two reasons. Firstly, I was never the kid who liked to play dress up and pretend to be someone else. I just didn’t believe in it. I was never going to be some power player who liked feeling slick in a suit for half my waking hours. In fact, if you put my life roles in a pie chart (mother, wife, worker, daughter, friend, colleague, etc), I feel most comfortable when I don’t have to alter what I look like or what I say too much as I move between one and another. I would hope that if everyone who interacts with me in any aspect of my life came to my funeral, the picture painted of me would be clearly recognisable to all of them. That’s a morbid thought on a sunny day, huh.

Anyway, back to the candid bio 2.0. The second reason I did it is because I wanted to push myself beyond my own comfort zone. I’m pretty open and honest when it comes to talking to friends; I can confide in fellow mothers in a flash these days, even if they’re strangers; and there’s something very liberating in talking about personal (or professional) flaws to a potential sea of unknown folk. But to share that stuff with people with whom I’ve only ever interacted professionally? With whom, if I’m being really honest rather than pseudo-honest, I’ve tried to create the impression that I’ve totally got my shit together? That, that was tough. Put it this way: it wasn’t something I posted on my LinkedIn profile.

I’m not saying that I feel it’s necessary to acknowledge my kid’s bowel movements or my facial hair routines at the start of a meeting with an investor. But I am interested in exploring where professional and personal worlds elide—something that happens with increasing frequency in this hyper-digitalised world.

windmil

It’s about authenticity, I think. And authenticity is complicated. It’s not just about cross-pollinating different roles with each other, and sharing them equally. It’s also about being honest (rather than just pseudo-honest) about what’s really going on in them. I’m a long way from getting it right. I post on Facebook that I got offered a funded place to a conference; I don’t post that I got turned down by two funders the previous day. I instagram a photo of a windmill that I saw on a run, but I consciously chose not to photograph a dead duck on the road just before the pretty windmill came into view.

We’re in an age of open authenticity. At least, it has the potential to be that way. It also has the potential to be just a lot of pseudo-authentic noise. But what is exciting for me, especially having once taught Media Studies, is that our ability to make our lives public, instantly, can help us unpick and understand how others are putting themselves across in this world feed too.

The process of framing what we post or tweet or instagram or tumbl allows us to experience first-hand the ability to choose how we want to present ourselves and represent ourselves. It can make all of us more savvy when faced with big brands and their photoshopped products, with politicians and their tweet-friendly policies, with megastars and their tilt-shifted lives. There’s the potential for something hugely empowering about all of us being able to choose what to put out there, and what to leave out. But there still needs to be a lot of education around this—from the basics of privacy settings to a working knowledge of what big data means for us little guys.

I want to make sense of it for myself, and I also want to make sense of it so I can discuss it with the young people we work with through Spark+Mettle. The older generations (sadly, I’m now in there too) often say how young people these days don’t professionalise and screen their online identities enough. Like Paris Brown (see below). But maybe us oldies are a bit too uptight about delineating between the two. You have to be either a professional confessor (like many great mum bloggers, such as Pass the Gin), or a professional, full-stop.

BBC Paris Brown article

So how do you challenge the ‘form’, and be authentic, without becoming some solipsistic hyper-sharer? I’m so far from having the answer. I don’t know where the sweet spot is for all this stuff, but I do know that it’s moving. Just as we now talk about the work-life blend, I think it’s a ripe time to look afresh at the professional-personal blend of the identities we have and the way we present them. And however we put ourselves across—either online or in the real world—I feel that the social and cultural sense of ‘form’ is shifting, albeit slowly. And I for one am excited about that. IMHO, the fewer invisible walls there are between each of us or within us ourselves, the better.

I’m off to add ‘parent’ to my LinkedIn profile. But I still might leave out any mention of chin hair. Once in a week was more than enough.

Eugenie Teasley LinkedIn

The worn out truth

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[With an addendum added 18 May 2013]

This week I was asked, very kindly, to write a short bio about myself that might be pitched to a national paper’s blog. (Thank you, Naomi Kerbel.)

Here’s what I wrote:

Eugenie Teasley is founder and CEO of Spark+Mettle, a youth aspirations agency that builds character strengths, soft skills and networks for marginalised young people. She holds degrees from Oxford University and UC Berkeley. She has taught in south London and has lived and worked in San Francisco. Now aged 32, she lives in Brighton with her husband, son and two dogs. She speaks and writes on topics that centre around flourishing,  entrepreneurship, feminism and youth development. Her blog (www.eugenieteasley.com) is written from the perspective of a young(ish) woman candidly reflecting on her daily thoughts and experiences as she learns to lead an organisation and find a way to balance it with her personal life.

She was sweet about it. But then I realised that I was just putting out the shiny version. Best face and all that. So much for ‘candid’.

Here’s the real version:

kitchen_floor

Eugenie Teasley persuaded some (admittedly pretty hotshot) buddies to become trustees to a fledgling idea in 2011. She’s run it mostly from her kitchen. The floor of which is as worn out as she quite often feels. She sends a lot of emails, but can regularly still be found in her pyjamas well after lunch time. For no apparent reason she tends to avoid phone conversations and only listens to voicemail about once a week. She has two dogs and even after her #Flourish40 experiment still barely walks them. She hasn’t cooked anything this month, yet feels disproportionately proud that she folded two baskets’ worth of washing a week ago. Her kid spends so much time with the childminder that he now mimics her facial expressions. She’s just discovered that there is a word for people who refer to themselves in the third person: illeist. She should have know that because her BA was in Classics, but she didn’t because she has forgotten everything she ever learned. Except that ‘education’ means to ‘bring out’ rather than to ‘indoctrinate’. But then again a lot of non-Classicists can figure that out. 

Update, May 18

A wonderful friend just sent me an email with her own ‘unpolished’ bio. It was so brilliant it made me want to ply her with cocktails. It was also so candid it made me realise that my ability to be genuinely candid is clearly more gradated than I first reckoned.

Here’s my Candid 2.0 addendum:

I’m actually a generalist in the disguise of a professional. I tried to create some neat, impressive narrative arc for my life but really it works because a lot is left out—such as I quit my teaching job halfway through the year and moved to San Francisco, primarily for love and only secondarily for a Masters. I love coming up with ideas which means that old ones tend to get replaced by new ones a little bit too often. And although I’m more into date nights than I have previously been, I can be regularly found alone on the sofa looking at my Twitter feed and reading Grazia. What does that magazine choice say about my purported feminism? I mean, I don’t just pick up old ones in hairdressers, I actually buy them with my own cold hard cash. I’m still not comfortable talking about my facial hair management routines. This is the first time I’ve said ‘chin hair’, ever. I run out of money two weeks before the next pay cheque.  I only run a lot because I like to eat at least one chocolate bar a day. And when I say chocolate bar, I mean one of those big Cadbury ones.

Leading women

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San Francisco panorama

I’ve just been in San Francisco to talk to people working in the ed-tech space, to figure out where Spark+Mettle should go next and to drink insanely delicious cold-pressed coffee.

I was staying in a “Hacker House”, a first-stop, loft-style hostel for people working—or looking to work—in Silicon Valley. The sort of people who have briefcases rather than backpacks, more into bench-pressing than bong-smoking. So that was good. Less good? There were sixteen people staying there; I was the only woman. Twelve of us slept in an airless dorm. Bunk beds. I haven’t slept in one for about fifteen years. On the third night a nice guy gave me some earplugs so I didn’t have to hear the nocturnal male chorus of farts and snores.

Only one of the sixteen was an out-and-out chauvinist git. He threw out a couple of comments about whether or not I’d be making breakfast for everyone, which I chose to ignore. (He also asked if people in the Czech Republic speak “Czech Republic” and believed it when an Australian jokingly told him New Zealand was part of Australia. He had a hypoallergenic dog and a penchant for pedicures. Hashtag lost cause.)

And asides from a couple of other requests for “a pretty cleaner” to come and tidy the place, the rest of the guys were super cool and respectful. Then again, they were not, in the main, the alpha male type. More like beta males: the engineers and developers, glued to their screens for eight hour stretches, drumming up a new website in a day or two. I learned a lot from them. In fact, they inspired me to sign up for a Rails Girls course asap.

Beyond the four walls of the Hacker House, the entrepreneurs and investors of Silicon Valley were different. Alpha. The few women I met were alpha too: ballsy and sharp. I’d love to meet a female leader who bucks the trend and makes it work.

Many of the conversations I had involved men sitting with their muscled thighs far apart, showing off how big their balls were. That’s metaphorical. Mostly. There were a few good guys I met, including the immensely cool and un-douche-bally Sam Chaudary, founder of the brilliant ClassDojo.  But the residual sensation I was left with was that Silicon Valley—perhaps like other entrepreneur and tech conurbations—was full of a lot of big talk and sly one-upmanship. These are the guys who have nailed the art of the humblebrag. It’s cool that it’s cool to fail round there, I’d like that except it’s pretty dementing that it’s now part of the schtick. Every pitch seems to pivot around the first missteps, and that downgrades their integrity and humility, or so it seemed to me.

iterativeAnd for all its talk of disruptive innovation, the tech start up world is made up of a lot of identikit folk. The relentless jargon, the slacker uniform, the upside-down work schedule: it all smacks of a new take on a traditional old boy’s club or fraternity.  You might not need the tie or a basic knowledge of the Greek alphabet, but you most likely need some biceps and a good line in big talk to get accepted. If you’re not into that—guy or girl— then it does a good job of making you feel excluded, small, un-ambitious, un-exciting.

I went out there with the hope of figuring out where to take Spark+Mettle next, what to focus on, and how to grow. Thanks to a lot of illuminating conversations and a good chunk of time to reflect, I’ve been able to figure out how to kick the organisation into the next gear. It’s pretty exciting. The big new vision: to put Spark+Mettle’s online offer front and centre, to reimagine ourselves as an ed-tech organisation. As we shift our focus, we will continue to provide a pipeline of opportunities for marginalised young people to develop the personal and professional competencies needed to flourish, including paid traineeships. You can find out more in our latest report.

But I also came back with some other things I learned around what it means to be a female leader—and specifically a female entrepreneur in the ball-dragging world of tech start-ups.

  1. I am so lucky to live in a house of my own with a (silent-sleeping, clean-smelling) husband and kid.
  2. I am so grateful to have as a partner a man who is all man and at the same time 100% supportive of what I do, with no gendered view about who of us should be doing what at home or outside of it. He’s smart and insanely hard-working and progressive and liberal, and the more men I meet, the more I realise what a cool catch I caught.
  3. Investors and funders invest in the team. Their eyes also light up at growth curves that make a half pipe look tame. But it’s the team they want to know about. Are you ready to bust their balls to make it work? Are you smart? Are you hungry? Those are their questions. The business model, the market—they’ll change. But the team will stay. So it’s vital as a female leader or founder to be able to pitch yourself with confidence and without apology.
  4. There’s a lot of innovation in the tech space, and there’s a ton of interest in emerging ed-tech companies. But the boot-strapping, fast-failing business plans haven’t proved themselves yet. And the competitive, big-balls-club climate means that the  chest-beaters are the ones who get the funding to make their stuff, leaving other neat solutions made by quieter folk to fall by the wayside. So it’s important to find a way to sound loud, however that best suits you.
  5. If you want to be a power player, or just a player, in tech or enterprise or innovation, you can just pick up the rules and play the game. (Albeit in heels. Or not.) But for anyone, like me, who wants to take a more collaborative, complementary approach to solving social problems with tech-based solutions, we have to remember that we’re going against the grain. To disrupt the disrupter scene, we have to spend time forming compelling arguments that will resonate not just with the likeminded, but also with the kind of guys who like to kiss their guns.
Dolores Park, San Francisco

Blue sky thinking

 

Laying fallow

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Barn-and-Fallow-FieldRight at the start of my #Flourish40 experiment, a pressing concern was that I shouldn’t turn into a douchebag. The reason? If I were to bang on too much about flourishy-flourishy stuff and become Little Miss Self-Improvement, then I am in clear danger of becoming boring, earnest and perhaps a little bit psycho.

I also remembered, somewhere along the way, that humans are the creatures who are best at habituating themselves of all. In other words we are highly adaptable.* So highly adaptable that what is for a short while a novelty soon turns into something just mundane and ordinary—we go from ‘whoah!’ to ‘meh’ surprisingly easily.

And it’s when we get to ‘meh’ that stuff starts slipping. And, for me, earlier this year, that was a moment for me to go ‘uh?’. I’ll stop with all that ‘meh’, ‘uh’ ‘whoah’ stuff now. It was a moment for me to galvanise myself to take stock, to spring clean.

But now, now I realise that actually to do what Franklin tried to do and have a clean sheet of virtues on repeat week after week for ever is INSANE and most likely deeply depressing. In fact, we humans are cyclical beings**, and what would be much more sensible is to acknowledge, honour and maximise those cycles of productivity/sloppiness or flourishing/languishing.

A regimen a bit like the one I adopted for six weeks is a good idea [well done me], but it can’t last forever. It shouldn’t. It should be a temporary, stop-gap thing. A time to do a slightly drastic realignment, with the expectation that it will need to happen again at another point. Maybe in a month. Maybe in a year.

Here’s how I see my cycle:

  1. TRUNDLE AND BUMBLE. I’m just mooching along, doing what I’m doing, not really thinking, getting most stuff done and feeling okay. I’m picking up a few bad habits, and they’re sticking because I’m not really mindful of them because I’m really pretty busy right now, okay?
  2. LANGUISH AND FADE.The mooching gives way to the mounting stress and doom of too much to do, too little time. I’m not burned out just yet, but I’m conscious that it’s not that far away. So I have a choice: continue trundling along, doing too much and getting stretched or—
  3. GO FALLOW. Deliberately shut down and do just the bare minimum that’s required to function in key elements of life, such as, um, my job or being a parent/wife/friend. Maybe after a few days, I’ll throw a pity party for myself; put on some Annie Lennox, find a box of Kleenex and read through Forbes’ 30 under 30 knowing that I’ll never make that list, while piles in my inbox and laundry basket mount on up.
  4. CRITICISE AND LOAF. Write out all the things I wish I did differently. Then figure out which ones would make the most impact, right now, if I were to change them. At the same time do utterly unproductive, inane and possibly morally/ethically dubious stuff (buy Company AND InStyle AND Grazia, buy scarily cheap clothes, eat three hamburgers and a burrito in a week, plug my child into an iPad for 24 hours) until I get to the sweet spot of functional self-loathing. And this is the moment to devise the regimen, the six-week or forty day boot camp to restore order and move up.
  5. BEGIN THE REGIMEN. Make a small number of hard rules and try to stick with them for a short amount of time. Note down what works and what doesn’t and reflect on the process. Keep going. Stay strict on myself, but reward myself when I do well. Probably with chocolate. This is the time to aim higher than where I ever expect to land, in the expectation that I’ll land somewhere higher than I if I had expected to land somewhere lower. (Victor Frankl says that better.)
  6. DITCH THE REGIMEN. And go to guidelines. If I stay on the regimen too long that’s when I have the potential of really going psycho. Instead, at the end, ditch the rules, and develop just a few guidelines on what I’d now mostly like to be doing. Keep going until it falls back into the trundle and bumble stage and then start all over again.

*This is one of those posts where I’m not fact-checking; so go on the assumption that all claims I’m making are spurious.

**As above.

The Last Stretch

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I’m coming to the end of my #Flourish40 experiment—forty days of doing things differently. Or trying to. And then failing, confessing my failures publicly, moving on and trying some more. I’m going to try to gather my thoughts together in a way that will help me streamline and refine the #Flourish40 framework ahead of when I lead a workshop on it during Oxford Jam next month—I want it to be a whole lot more achievable than what I’ve done, or not done. But right now I want to reflect on what I’ve enjoyed, what I’ve benefitted, and what I’d change.

breadThings I’ve loved:

  • The whole going veggie thing. It’s the one thing, out of everything that I set myself, that I’ve actually consisted achieved, so that feels good. And I’ve loved it as an excuse to get back into eating a lot of bread and cheese. Those things are good for the soul.
  • I loved my weekly actions list—such as going someplace new or cooking food for someone else or reading a book. Even if I didn’t achieve all of them, it made me much more clear about what I wanted to be doing.

Things I’ve learned:

  • I take on too much in one go. Not necessary. I didn’t abandon any of my intentions officially, but there was a certain mission drift. 
  • I seek a lot of feedback. Especially when it comes to any food I’ve made. It maybe spoils the taste a little.

Things that may change permanently, or at least for a little while longer:

  • Less screen time when others are around. That means me not staring at my phone over cornflakes, and the kid not in front of the TV when he comes home in the afternoon. But I love watching great movies.
  • Making a lot more bread.
  • Eating a lot less meat.
  • Meet people and speak to people rather than email people.
  • Be generous and open with my time, but ruthless and quick with my email.
  • Seek out new places.
  • Start a new book each month. If it isn’t gripping, ditch it.
  • Honour, silently, the positive and mindful choices I make.
  • Write more. But not at 10:30pm.