If there’s one thing I hate most in this world, I think it’s probably airports. I didn’t grow up flying, because we have reliably gone on holiday every year to the beach where my parents met. Very sweet - until you realise that we live in South Devon, and my parents, very conveniently, met in southern South Devon. They were lovely holidays, but admittedly not much global exploring happened until I went travelling in Europe when I was 19, pre-2020 Brexit deal, pre-blue passport. The idea of international travel, customs and visas is confusing and stressful for me and I spent a lot of time before my departure to Colombia going on long bike rides, going surfing, and basically doing anything that didn’t involve my flight, or putting clothes in suitcases, or printing out customs documents.

The morning before I was due to travel to Gatwick, I sat on a call with my programme manager, Beccy, and told her that I was feeling pretty apathetic about the whole thing.

‘I want to go’, I said, ‘but I also don’t want to. I’m going to go, because the flight is really expensive, and I’ve wanted to go to Colombia for years, and I want to challenge myself, but part of me just can’t be bothered with it. It’s six weeks, and I won’t know anyone, and I just can’t be bothered to deal with not knowing anyone. And I’m so tired’.

Two days after a ‘you’re-going-to-get-on-that-flight-so-help-me-god’* response, I found myself, slightly dazed, very sleep deprived, landing in Medellin, clutching a passport, a pair of dead AirPods and my very heavy backpack. The first night, I sent a ‘landed! :)’ teams message to Beccy, then fell asleep, still feeling apathetic and irritated and bored.

In the week after (and cinematic beginning aside, sorry), I’ve genuinely learnt a lot about myself, and a lot more than the person who sat on that call would have expected. The number one is – I quite like cooperation and teamwork. Shocker! I’ve learnt that there’s a lot of progress to be found in living and working with other people, and it’s changed my perspective hugely on what I think teamwork and leadership actually is. I’m learning to listen to people and to their ideas much more effectively, which was a clearly identifiable goal for me to work on from the beginning. In return, the culture of openness has meant that I’m more comfortable sharing my own ideas, because I don’t feel like they have to be perfect to matter to the team.

I’ve also learnt that self-care, within a leadership context, is not necessarily just me spending time on my own – that forms of self-care within teams can also include things like sharing a joke and having lunch together, or talking about things that aren’t project work. These are lessons that my past self would have thought overly sentimental, but what I’ve realised forms the backbone of effective teams, especially on such a tight deadline. And from the perspective of someone writing this two weeks on, a sense of humour and a collaborative spirit within the team has been a lifesaver when problems have cropped up.

Ultimately, though I can hear pre-trip Ella sighing loudly, I'm looking forward to more collaborative work, and to navigating problems and successes as a team instead of on my own. In my Notion log I have a single note on one of the leadership sections, which says 'people will show you who they are if you really listen'. Far from trying to navigate a foreign country and a huge project alone, I've found that listening to people and finding out why they act how they do has been a key learning moment from this week, and one that I'm looking forward to building on as the project continues. 

*not verbatim, but that very much felt like the subtext. The actual response was much more empathetic. Thank you, Beccy, you're a godsend.