A pandemic book launch. An MS diagnosis. Power of attorney for parents abroad.

Four years is a long time to stay quiet, and it wasn't because I ran out of things to say.

Less than a month after my soft book launch and final in person keynote before Covid, my latest: The Con Job: Getting Ahead for Competence in a World Obsessed with Confidence, went to print. It launched into the exact moment no one wanted to think about career development.

Like so many of us, I had to pivot, and quickly. I completely re-engineered talks I'd given to thousands of people, live, in rooms, over many years, for an audience that now only existed on a screen.

I'd have to make it interactive, yet also couldn't read their reactions the way I'd historically done. Boy, did I make good use of the chat box to make it engaging!

Then, as we were all still getting our heads around working from home, I got a diagnosis I didn't want, but which explained a year of deteriorating vision I'd been blaming on screen time. For me at least, it wasn't the screens. It was Multiple Sclerosis.

Soon after I barely got a handle on that, I took on power of attorney for my parents. It's not straightforward at the best of times when you live in a different country, and considerably less so once my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Trying to keep a business going through that, in a field broadly labelled DE&I that has since become genuinely fraught, was never going to be simple.

So I leaned towards the thing my own clients had been teaching me for years without either of us quite naming it: resilience. After all, I knew their stories, of battles painfully won. Women who'd faced real setbacks and come out the other side.

I decided to build on that, deliberately, rather than go around it.

I didn't speak in front of a live group again until this year.

And when I finally did, I raised the bar higher for myself personally, rather than simply "easing" back in.

I spoke to seven people, at the Cocoa Tree, a café a friend had lent me for the evening. Three of them were from my book club and running group, people I already knew well.

The other four were strangers, invited along by those same friends, women I'd never met but who, this being the East Neuk, I was bound to bump into at the village shop before the year was out.

None of the seven had heard me talk about my actual specialism before, and I doubt half of them knew or cared that I had one.

This new topic was going to reflect the conversations I was hearing more widely from women, and it wasn't wrapped up solely in earning a promotion, the historic win I'd offered my clients.

To seek out that new audience felt far more exposing than speaking to three hundred actual strangers ever did. With conference strangers, there's a kind of safety in anonymity: if it goes badly, you go home, lick your wounds, make adjustments, and rarely see them again.

In the East Neuk of Fife, that anonymity doesn't really exist. Even the four women I'd never met before that evening would be women I'd recognise in the Co-op within the month.

This year, I gave up whatever was left of that safety net, on purpose.

After all, I'd also got honest about something else: I no longer wanted to traipse to London for a single keynote, exhausting, and demanding a level of in-person networking I no longer had capacity for.

What actually fascinated me were the women I was meeting locally, professional women who'd also lived away from home for years and now wanted something less demanding of their time and bodies, and far more intimate than a hotel conference room.

They wanted to turn up the volume on personal meaning, beyond being a mother, a carer or a senior leader.

They'd done both, and still wanted more.

So I thought about what I actually wanted.

A place to go, and people to be there with. And rather than wait for it to exist, I decided to build it.