Hello from Naomi

28 July 2020

Launching my own consultancy with one of my greatest colleagues and friends wasn’t on my to do list at the start of 2020… fast forward a few months and what we’ve now created together feels exactly where I’m meant to be.

I’ve spent my entire career in communications. I’m one of the rare few that actually started my career with a First-Class Honours degree in public relations (PR) and I’ve spent my career working in agency, in-house and contracting. It didn’t take me long post-degree to move from all things PR into the world of internal communications and change. And it’s the change side that’s really fascinated me – that is, our potential for change as human beings.

A few years ago I became a Prosci certified change management practitioner so I could fully shape the people side of change in transformation programmes. But the more work I’ve done over the years, the bigger my belief that it’s not simply about the tools and training we give people to embed change, it’s about how we equip people, on the inside, to embrace change.

I’ve got personal experience of that. In 2012 I dived into my first intense meditation retreat. 11 nights, 12 hours of meditation a day, complete silence and a really, really sore bum, knee and back that I just had to ‘breathe’ through. But it started me on my love of connection. Connection to our ‘self’. Connection to our potential for change. And as I’ve evolved over the years my personal and professional interests have begun to blur. I’m so passionate about connecting people to their potential. We should all live a life to our greatest capabilities and it makes for better business. It’s why I’m currently training as a teacher with Deepak Chopra and The Chopra Center to learn techniques to build employees’ inner resilience and increase their potential for change. It’s part of what we’ll be offering under the-thread too; we’re focused on connecting your people to your business’s potential.

My passion for change is just one of the many reasons I’m so excited to launch the-thread. Another is because it’s with Laura! We met at H+K Strategies in 2010 and we’ve continued to work together at every opportunity since. On the face of it, we’re really different people, but we think the same things are important. Ultimately, we trust each other to deliver. And we have the same silly sense of humour, which really helps when you’re starting a business in a pandemic. But more importantly, we’re great friends. I can’t stress enough how much I value her and her fab family being in my life! I mean… her adorable son made me a bar of handmade soap the other day, her husband cooks THE BEST food and he tolerates our (occasional) cocktail-induced escapades. There’s no-one I’d rather partner with. 

We spent some time deciding what we wanted our purpose to be and ‘creating happiness through more meaningful experiences’ just made sense. It’s what we both always strive to achieve every day; from quality time with friends and family to the teams we lead to the service we give our clients. A lot of the projects we do with teams come about from business-critical issues, but just because it’s serious, doesn’t mean people can’t enjoy the experience along the way. So, if we get the opportunity to work together in the future, yes, we’ll deliver s**t hot work, but we also want to make sure that it’s purposeful too.

Want to chat? Get in touch at naomig@the-thread.com.

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