Advance Guardess

I promised myself that I would start this blog today and even though it is 2 am and I am listening to my husband snore at a decibel level that would precipitate divorce in 99.9% of marriages, I am sitting up in bed typing on my iPad. A fabulous invention despite what all the jealous dissenters say. I absolutely love it and I am proud to admit it. Better stop before I lose my point.

My blog is called ‘The Advance Guardess’ because I think of myself as the advance guard. Whilst I may not know much about military operations, I do have a vague memory of the advance guard being the troops who go ahead of the main body of soldiers to forge the way.  To do battle and test the strength of the opposing side. (The snoring is getting louder and soon I will be forced to give him a very hard shove. Possibly harder than required to get him to change positions, but hey, the noise make me aggressive!) As I was saying I think of myself as the advance guard.  I finally took the plunge and did it. I left local government after 23 years of service. I had been thinking about it for ages. Dreaming of a life where I did something else. Anything else- I was becoming that disillusioned. I think if I hadn’t left when I did, I would have been heading for the mad house!

Working for a local authority had sapped all my creativity over the years. I thought in regulations and spoke in policy process and the dogma of management speak. Thinking back, I can only say - gosh I must have been so boring - although at the time I didn't see it.  So what did I do for the public sector?  I was a middle manager, working in regeneration. I worked hard and unlike many of my colleagues in other departments, I had a large degree of freedom to determine my work. Perhaps I was being a little too harsh when I said it sapped all my creativity. More accurately, I would say it was boxed into a very narrow area. So yes, I had ideas but they were reactive ideas, in response to programmes defined by the political masters,  who despite the rhetoric,  only ever wanted to hear their own ideas repeated back to them. Anyway I am rambling.  I was explaining why I am calling my blog the advance guard. As you know, well I assume you know. unless you have just returned from a tour of duty on the space shuttle, George Osborne from the Con-Dems will be, in a few days, announcing to all of us lesser mortal, just how bad the cuts will be for ordinary people and in particular public sector workers. Estimates of over 600,000 put out of work are very, very scary!  Even if it's not as bad as that, there will inevitably be many thousands of people who will find themselves looking for work.

I think of myself as the first person to leave the public sector ahead of the cuts. I am forging the way ahead, learning from all the pit holes and reporting back to the soldiers following in my footsteps, how the land lies and any particular hazards to watch out for. Hence the notion of the Advance guard.

Here is my first reconnaissance.

So I've been out of work now for over 6 months. When I left I decided to take the opportunity to reinvent myself. I had started to hate the tedium of the corporate world and the office politics. I was a relatively senior manager - third tier as they say. For those not in the know this means there were two levels of management above me. In my department this meant that I was part of the senior management team.  My line manger was a really nice progressive manager who walked his talk and really took to heart the notion of interactive leadership and the stage 4 manager.  More jargon but basically it means that he was a nice bloke who sought your opinion and always had your back. Now I know, because of the prejudice about public sector workers, many reading this will interpret it to mean that we were inefficient. They maybe even assuming that he over looked poor performance and inefficiencies and let his staff get away with doing a bad job. On the contrary - he definitely was not one to suffer fools gladly, yet he trusted his mangers to do a good job and we did. So naturally having seen the way the rest of my organisation behaved (and Allan Sugar types in the private sector) I had mixed feelings about stepping into another organisation. Basically I didn't want to start to be told what to do and I didn't want to have to learn or get involved with the new office politics. I wanted to be my boss.  To run my own company. And so began my journey into the world of self employment.

To be honest it has taken about 6 months to clear my head. I am surprised at just how long it has taken me to recover (and I mean recover because I've experienced it like an illness) from the stress of my last job. Yes stress. Despite popular misconception, working in local government isn't an easy ride. One of the most striking differences that were only too apparent to me was the fact that you were never given a sole project to work on. When I left and was asked to decide my area of focus I found this very difficult to do because I've never had a single area of focus. It is usual to be given at least 3 maybe even 5 major programmes to work on with the resources allocated, sufficient only for one! All these reports you hear about people with ridiculous job titles sitting around doing nothing - who knows maybe there is some truth in it,  but in my experience anyone sitting around with a fancy job title was most likely an external consultant brought in from the private sector to tell us how to be more efficient!

Since leaving I've  being so torn between what to do, where to focus and what information I need that sometimes, not only can't I think clearly,  I rush around doing little bits of everything in a organised or disorganised chaos.   I call this my headless chicken phase. You know running around like a headless chicken. I’ve been thinking about this metaphor and I can really see how deep an analogy it really is. Until this point I had always  imagined the body darting around under the force of delayed signals from the brain. However, I now experience it is from the pot of view of the head laying some distance from the body watching in complete despair as the body darts from place to place in a complete frenzy without direction or guidance and all the time knowing that time is running out so that eventually it will be too late and as the body collapses in a heap the mind dies knowing that it was a futile struggle and nothing was accomplished. That's how it felt most of the time at work. So imagine my surprise to be experiencing the same thing now. Now that I am supposed to be living a life of freedom! Fortunately, It's not all the time. I am constantly moving from headless chicken to advance guard and vis versa. So hear is my web log - blog of my process of remaking myself as an entrepreneur, disjointed and jumbled as I experience it. I’m hoping that as order comes to my blogging, order will also come to my new freelance experience. Oh I forgot to tell you what I am actually doing. But I’ve e got to sleep now so I'll leave that to my next entry.