Go with the flow; Take each day as it comes; Trust; Live in the moment; Be here now; Let go.

Here are just a few of the words of wisdom I’ve attempted to heed in the course of my life and my endeavour to be at peace with myself and the world.

I’d hazard a guess that ‘laid back’ isn’t a phrase that people who know me would choose to use to describe me.  And unfortunately, they’d be right. How I’d love to be laid back; it’s just not in my makeup.

If you were being nice about me, you might describe me as being focussed, driven and confident. If you weren’t, you may add erratic, inconsistent and extreme. And both would be right. As much as I’d love to be zen and exude love, peace and be balanced the whole time, I happen to be someone else. And if lives had themes, and mine seems to, mine would all be about flow. And going with it (or battling against it, depending on the phase of the moon and the perceived challenge at hand).

My biggest lesson in life (so far) is about letting go. I’ve tried so hard to stay in control of my life (and the lives of others) and it’s jolly hard work. In fact it’s nigh on impossible. It’s such a relief to let go and realise that I am but a small cog in a much bigger and very beautiful show. That doesn’t mean I don’t value myself, it doesn’t mean I won’t realise my full potential and it doesn’t mean that I’ll stay in a situation that’s not healthy for me. It just means that I’m wise enough now to know that life is what life is and sometimes it brings loveliness and other times it brings things that are hard to deal with at the time.

But everything is always okay – because life just flows, regardless of whether you flow with it. It just flows. It just so happens to be a damn site easier if you stop behaving like a salmon in mating season, and turn around and go with it.

So why this post? Well, so many things in my life at the moment point to this. As much as I’d like the world to be black and white, it isn’t. And I’ve started to acknowledge the grey areas that exist. And that it’s quite okay for them to be there and for me to accept them just as they are without knowing whether they’ll eventually be black or white. Or just stay grey for the rest of their life, and possibly mine.

I’m heading up our System Rebuild Project and wow have things changed over the course of the project. Our vision remains the same, to create an agile, intuitive and robust application and introduce the new features and functionality that we’re so excited about. But how we’re getting there and what is being created changes all the time. I started out the project wanting everything to go according to our plan. Now I’m okay with things going a different way. Often when things change, they change for the better. I’m glad I’ve realised this, because what we’re now creating, as a result of working with our internal project team and our project team at John Henry, is far, far better than anything I could ever have imagined.

So if you find yourself in a situation where you want to change your plans, or change your mind or change your course. That’s fine. In the words of the sometimes controversial Kanye West “Let me know, do I still got time to grow? Things ain’t always set in stone”.