Harvest, rest and celebrate…

… and possibly take some writing pause

The last weeks were just crazily filled with learning, travelling, conferences, more people work, studying… and living. The little space inbetween I tried to use for resting – even if that meant breaking my rhythm to blog at least once a month.

Harvest!

As I really want to keep all the experiences and also share with you, I decided for this harvesting blog post which is kind of a summary of:

  1. Travelling to Heidelberg to work for the Herbstcampus conference
  2. Learn more about mindfulness, emotional intelligence and leadership in Zurich
  3. Travelling to Budapest, speaking at Agile Budapest & Stretchcon Meetup and participating in Craft Conf 2018
  4. Travelling to Graz to speak and participate in Agile Austria 2018
  5. Thinking of Berlin and Agile Testing Days

Celebrate!

As I am still really bad in celebrating, this is also kind of a celebrating post. ‘Why celebration?’ you might ask. Actually I want to practise celebrating for my own’s growth and also for the people and systems I work with so that I can better support their growth.

Heidelberg and Herbstcampus

Let’s start the celebrating with Heidelberg and early April. I was proud to be able to join the program committee for this year’s Herbstcampus. Reviewing of the proposals was done remotely and as we all are at different locations working in different companies, the whole team travelled to Heidelberg to discuss and decide on the conference’s schedule together.
I enjoyed working with those people leveraging all the diverse views and strengths of each team member. Also I had the chance to spend some hours of vacation in the beautiful city of Heidelberg enjoying really nice weather.

Search Inside Yourself (SIY) in Zurich

Mid of April I had the chance to participate in a two-day SIY training on Mindfulness, Emotional Intelligence (EI) and Leadership in Zurich. Its abbreviation SIY is related to the Search Inside Yourself (SIY) book and program developed at Google.
At first I did not consider attending this training at all because I already read the SIY book years ago, I do know quite a lot about mindfulness and I do informal practise regularly. Luckily a colleague inspired me with his enthusiasm after he booked his SIY training. And so the training fit perfectly for me because it turned out to be like a retreat. And I finally managed to build a regular formal mindfulness practise in the weeks after the training.
Here are my impressions from the time in Zurich, the sketchnotes I made and some impressions of my first steps of practise in the weeks after the training.

CraftConf in Budapest

Go craft it! was the motto… and it was just the most awesome and diverse software conference I’ve attended so far.
As those three days in Hungary – a completely new-for-me country – were so intense, the impressions on the conference so various and the learnings so many, I decided for a separate blog post. (edit: which I never created so there’s only the MVP, a twitter moment)

Agile Austria in Graz

For those inspiring days in Graz dealing with ‘The Future of Agile’ at Agile Austria, I already wrote a separate blog post.

Berlin and Agile Testing Days

I started with a celebration and I am closing with a celebration: One of my goals for this years is to leverage knowledge from studying psychology even more for the public and also challenge myself in showing up more. As a means I decided to come up with a workshop on servant leadership focussing on ‘leadership as an activity’ and making it accessible to people of all kind of roles – from crafter to manager. The first step is made: my workshop proposal for Agile Testing Days got accepted! Yeah! So I am already looking forward to the people at ATD in November.

More resting?!

What’s next…

With this blog post it might get even a bit more quiet on this blog regarding my cadence of writing until September. The reason for this is that I decided to add an exciting last module for my studies: health psychology. And this exam will be in early September – and it has topmost priority because I want to be serious with “(stop starting,) start finishing”.

See you, read you… and take care out there!