Building Brand Me: How Taking All the NABS Workshops Helped Me Refocus for What’s Next

As someone who has built their career within HR leading recruitment teams for global businesses and merging commercial goals with culture-focussed people priorities, I did something last year I hadn’t done for a long time.

To set the scene, I love this industry. I love the hustle, bustle, the brands and the work, and have deep rooted experience working with leaders to help them attract, hire and grow their talent. Best of all - I’ve helped a range of people kickstart and further their career.

True story, after I delivered my ‘Guess What, I’ve Just Been Made Redundant’ workshop at the inaugural UN//SCENE festival this year, I was networking afterwards and an individual came up to me and thanked me. Turns out, I was speaking to her about an opportunity within one of my previous positions, and although it didn’t lead to a job offer, she thanked me for my skill and kindness throughout the process. Beyond the great fuzzy feeling that gave me, for me it’s the recognition that you can never fully understand the ripple effect that results from leading with positive values, and that is something I’ve demonstrated, not just personally, but professionally.

So, I made a decision I hadn’t made in a long time: to invest in myself. Not in a new qualification or another project, but in time - to pause, reflect, and reset. And then re-do every NABS workshop.

I’ve been a NABS supporter for a while and remember at different points in my career attending various workshops ranging from Resilience to Pressure to Building Rapport and Influence and Confidence and Gravitas. I remember learning about the circle of influence, spanning things you can control such as your actions and reactions, and things you cannot – such as train delays, which I actively practise during my commute.

Last year when I was thinking about what I wanted to achieve, I made a commitment to myself to prioritise learning and increase my reflection time. My role at the time involved heading up a business, with all the responsibility that comes with that. The huge scope of my role, paired with the ever-changing nature of our industry, made me want to learn, lead and deliver as effectively as I could. So, I booked myself onto every available NABS workshop to help me do just that. When building a business for the first time, there are so many learning points you discover. While my previous experience stood me in good stead, I was simply doing things I’d never done before. Aldand is a fast-paced industry, building business propositions, refining creds decks, pitching and learning from every single pitch, plus networking and speaking externally are all exciting thing to do, but I also needed to invest back into myself and look after Adele the person and the brand.

Interestingly I started off with the ‘Debrief, De-Stress and Decompress’ workshop, which explores self-reflection, psychological flexibility and taking valued action. The ‘Leading Influential Conversations’ workshop was another important one for me, as I was at the stage of my career and in life where I was seeing the effects of what it meant to lead authentically and to align my inner self with my outward behaviour. But the workshop that really got me to pause, think and take decisive action was the ‘Brand You’ workshop. During that time I completed a values audit, thought about my ‘why’, ‘how’ and ‘what,’ and spent time thinking beyond my current reality at that time, to my future self and goals.

Without taking the time to prioritise learning and self-reflection and making it a priority, I wouldn’t be where I am now, which is working with clients and talent to help them grow. The industry is in a huge period of change, and for talent, developing a range of hard and soft skills has never mattered more. I regularly talk to individuals about how to build their brand and target decision-makers, versus trusting the algorithm, and in these conversations I encourage people to do things that fuel their soul. This could be meeting a friend for coffee, going to a networking event, or making use of training and development resources, like NABS, to help them realise that things aren’t linear and that with the right support, everyone can learn, take control and rewrite their story.