Big Birthday Resolution

I have just had a birthday. A big one. A scary one.

I have long held that PR is an incredibly ageist profession, especially for women, but I'm beginning to see signs of change as those coming 'through the ranks' start rocking the boat a little. But it's there, and something we should be tackling.

I still enjoy my job. I still care about my profession. I've made some bad calls as well as good ones along the way. and so I've made some big decisions about where I go from here. Age comes a certain level of knowledge and wisdom. You learn to ask 'why'. You become cynical about things being 'good' or 'bad' and learn to accept grey areas. Perfection and evil mostly only exist in fairy tales, and by portraying people, in particular, as evil, we do ourselves a great disservice and miss those opportunities to ask 'why?'. Social platforms have a tendency to amplify and polarise those 'good/bad' notions.

Being where I am now, I have the luxury of caring slightly less about my words meaning I may lose valued clients, which as a freelance is frightening.

Being where I am, I no longer have a mortgage or a family to feed. I still have expenses, of course, and still need an income. But if I muck up by saying the wrong thing, the impact on those around me is less than it would have been before.

I have also been volunteering my time helping adults who have been groomed, after an event which nearly destroyed my life a few years ago. Some of it was my groomers fault, some of it was about the effect on me, and I made mistakes - I didn't know how brutal the system can be). I want to ask questions about our justice system.

Both PR and the World around me are very different to my early working days. And i have questions about how that's going. I have some fears for the future, and especially for the country I grew up in. I want to ask questions.

In sum, I have a lot of other very random things I'd like to start discussions about. Not the kind of 'pile in on Facebook' discussions, but discussions in a public, professional forum, where knowledgeable professionals might be able to contribute to not only my thinking, but those around me. Where someone might be able to create change that I can't.

Because being in PR, we are in a privileged position (even if sometimes it doesn't feel like that). If anyone can influence opinions, it's us, in all of our forms, from publicists (controversial!!) and influencers, through to campaigners and social media/WoM specialists. We are a wide camp, and if you're anything like me, every time you work with a clients you learn more about a World you knew little about before. I want to ask questions about my profession and about the World my clients inhabit..

I want to have my mind changed.

For the moment I'm going to leave these random thoughts as LinkedIn articles. If I find the time to keep it up, it may become a 'LinkedIn Newsletter' which is something I've never tried before but like the idea of.

But, working as we do with massively busy peaks, I'm not sure that I can give it the kind of consistency that people like from newsletters. My rule has always been 'client work first', which reflects in my own poor, abandoned websites, which are no reflection at all on the quality of my work for clients. I have a bad case of the Cobbler's Children!

Anyway, if you've got this far, thanks for reading my ramblings. There are other individuals who have done this kind of questioning in the real world on specific topics - I'm looking at Mike Butcher's conversations around start ups, and Lloyd Davis' 'Tuttle'. I'm looking at the numerous SEO folk, and in this I include too many kick-ass women to even start to name just one, at Designan Chinniah who never fails to surprise me by sharing his journey along the way - all these people regularly share their knowledge. I love these people. Who knows, my rambles may even call on something they've sparked.

But these people are mostly from my digital/PR world. The issues I want to ask about aren't generally ones I can find the answers to in my own fields.

I may fail to get responses or answers. I've failed before and survived. But at least I'll have tried.

I'd love you to join me for the ride, however long or short it turns out to be. And maybe, just maybe, one of the topics will be something you too have wondered about, or have a contribution to make 'for the rest of us'.

So here's to getting older, to facing it head on, and to no longer worrying about things that were never truly important anyway.