For years, my daily walk came with a soundtrack. A podcast. An audiobook. Something useful.
It felt like a good idea – a kind of productivity hack. Learning about business while taking a break from business. Two birds, one walk.
And then something changed.
I’m not entirely sure when it happened. But I started to want something different on those walks. I wanted to look around me. To take in the view. To let the thoughts that had been quietly waiting beneath the surface bubble up.
Last year we sold our house and moved to Little Bollington (which is as cute as it sounds!) for that very reason. My nervous system was completely out of whack and needed space to breathe. The scenery is truly picture-postcard worthy. Fields, hedgerows, old buildings and the kind of natural beauty that nourishes your soul. The photos don’t really do it justice.
Over the years, the business audiobooks have been genuinely insightful. The last I listened to was the Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur (Christine Kane) and there were some true gems in there. But there were also times when it felt like a firm no in my body. In places it still felt driven, still pursuit orientated. And that is just not where I am any more.
In midlife, I wonder if it gets harder to find business books that match our lived experience. We’ve done the work. We’ve found our way. And perhaps no one knows our business needs better than ourselves.
I’m not knocking business books. There are many great ones that served me in a different time of life. But when we listen to a podcast or audiobook, we’re connected to someone else’s thinking. It can be inspiring but is it such a necessity in the later stages of working life? Maybe the inspiration we need now isn’t outside us, it’s within.
So, I’ve been experimenting on my daily walks. Instead of an audiobook, I put on trance music. (Yes, I spent most of the 90s at the Ministry of Sound and it’s still what gets the heart beating and inspiration flowing!)
I walked. I thought. And I started capturing those thoughts as voice notes.
I had a lovely interaction here on Substack recently with Lucy - Business of Becoming and she called them “notes from the field.” I loved it immediately. Not just because I’m literally walking fields. But there’s something so delightful about the ambiguity of it. The field out here, yes. But also something wider. My field of thoughts, the collective or even the Quantum field. The places where thinking and knowing meet.
This is what I’m learning: we do know our own business better than anyone. Not because we’ve read the right books, but because we’ve lived it. And sometimes the wisest thing we can do is stop filling our ears with someone else’s answers and give our own ideas room to breathe.
That’s what thinking walks have become for me. Not productivity. Something better.
Space to breathe. Space to think. Space to feel. Space to return to my own wisdom.
These are my notes from the field (Thank you, Lucy!)