I adore feeling “out of my depth”. In such environments I can feel myself being challenged and stretched, and learning to view that as a privilege, rather than an inconvenience was one of the best shifts I made in becoming a more reflexive leader. During my first week at the Cambridge Acorn Project this desire for challenge was satisfied, as I began researching social media strategy within the context of community mental health.

Coming from a strong academic background it was fascinating to see how concepts sprang up from the pages of textbooks and manifested themselves in real life. One of my favourite topics covered in the first year of my degree was mental health and how the reality of mental illness is often more messy than the neatly packaged diagnoses we might see in the DSM-5. While discussing the work of Cambridge Acorn Project with my supervisor, and the therapeutic team at CAP I saw this complexity in action, as the charity brings in elements from family systems, individual psychology and social work in their holistic approach to treating trauma and mental illness.

However, alongside getting to know the team at CAP I was also getting to know myself. So far, there’s always been an easy “next step” for me. Be it the next essay or problem sheet, the next step in a UCAS application, or the application to a more senior position within an organisation, things were always nicely laid out. Because of this, the idea of creating and executing my own project was somewhat daunting to me. However, in the last week at CAP I’ve learned that the key to an effective plan is an effective foundation.

To this end, throwing myself in the deep end of work at CAP, digesting large volumes of information and having conversations with professionals worlds more knowledgeable than I, was the best start to my project I could have asked for. The foundation for the plan I had from this week was built on strong introductions: to CAP, to community mental health, and most importantly to myself as a leader.