Introducing The Messy Middle

Exploring Nuance in Humanity and Leadership

Welcome to The Messy Middle - the new update for Potential Psychology. I’m thrilled that you’re here. Having a community of readers makes the challenge of putting words and ideas on a page a little more enticing, a little less daunting. Sharing those thoughts and words with like-minded souls I hope, connects my thinking with yours, inspires and motivates. 

If you’re new to Potential Psychology, I’m Ellen. I’m a workplace psychologist, leadership coach, writer, and podcaster. I’m 50 years old and live in regional Victoria (Ballarat). I arrived here 10 years ago, from Melbourne, via Sydney.  Right now it’s cold and I’m wintering. More on that later.

My professional life has been an adventure of academic psychology training and business consulting across the eastern seaboard of Australia. Psychometric testing in Sydney to assessing psychological injury in country NSW. Mergers and acquisitions in Melbourne to a stint as Acting Director of HR for a prison in regional Queensland. There has been writing (a book, a blog, magazines and online), leadership coaching, and for the past five years, podcasting. It’s been online and offline. If I was to describe my career path, I’d say that I’ve followed my curiosity. It’s not been linear but it has been fun.

Recently a pandemic pivot led me to developing leadership capability in Ballarat through Future Shapers - a regional community leadership program delivered by Committee for Ballarat. It’s a shift from 20 years of self-employment to a salaried gig and while I love it, it’s just one contributor to the messy middle I find myself in.

So what is the messy middle? And how does this missive play a part?

‘The Messy Middle’ is a model that Google developed and released to describe how consumers make decisions. The process is not linear. It’s chaotic, messy, and ongoing. It keeps repeating in response to both evaluation and fresh stimuli, like a feedback loop.

As a psychologist this model appeals because I lean towards systems psychology to understand behaviour, particularly in workplaces. You can think of a system like a flock of birds. The birds in the flock are constantly interacting with each other and adjusting to each others’ movement. Their behavior is not always predictable. However, the flock is able to adapt to change and it’s resilient to disturbances.

Organisations are systems. So are teams and workplaces. We as humans are also systems, made up of systems.

Now I can’t speak for birds flying in formation, but I know that for humans the constant adjustments we make adapting to those around us, our experiences, our thoughts and the contexts we function in - our systems - can be exhausting. It can be chaotic and messy. This is made worse when we expect facets of life to be linear - like a career path - and yet they are not. We expect this…

When much of life looks like this…

Right now I find myself in the messy middle. Mid-life, mid-parenting, mid-career.

I don’t know what comes next but I know that not-knowing takes a bit of getting used to. It’s messy and uncomfortable and I have to unravel the expectation that it should be anything different.

That’s how this newsletter has come to be.

Ten years ago I found myself in a similarly messy middle. I started a blog because writing has always helped me to make sense of my world. I wrote and connected with others. I read their writing and wrote some more. With writing came clarity and a sense of community. Then the machine took hold.

Blogging became business. Community became conferences. Writing became content marketing. Sharing morphed into social media. Social media took on a life of its own.

Somewhere, somehow the writing was lost. I had a team. I ‘generated content.’ I birthed a podcast. I love the podcast dearly but it now sits, along with words and thought, like a tiny beating heart concealed deep within layers of obligation. The machine needs constant feeding and ten years on, I’m done.

Going back to where it all began.

This Messy Middle is about reconnecting to my writing roots. I’m excited to bring my insights as a psychologist, experience in leadership development and love for words to this community. To make sense of my world in the hope that it also brings some sense to yours.

The Messy Middle is also about exploring the ‘grey areas’ in leadership and humanity. So much of today’s narrative is binary - good or bad, right or wrong, ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ - yet life isn’t binary. It is shifting, moving and adapting. It’s nuance. It’s grey.

Truth is somewhere between ‘this’ and ‘that,’ hiding in plain sight, there in the middle. Yet so often we eschew moderation for extremes and get angry with each other and ourselves when we can’t connect. There is too much of that in the world.

In this newsletter, which I will produce as regularly as life will allow, I will explore some of these nuances; topics that pique my interest through my day-to-day as a workplace psychologist and coach.

My insights often come from clients, or podcast guests. Sometimes I’m curious about a topic in the news, or an article I've read. Frequently it's our response to an issue, topic or idea that's most interesting. The behaviour it triggers rather than the issue itself.

Whatever the topic, my goal is always to share practical advice, to get you thinking and, I hope, inspire personal and professional growth.

If you’ve read this far, thank you. We’ve made it through this first post together. Here’s to us.

If you’re not already a subscriber and you’d like to stay in this little loop, you can subscribe here…

Thank you again for connecting with me; for reading and for sharing. I want this to be a two-way conversation. Let me know if you too are somewhere in a messy middle. I’d love to hear if something I’ve said is meaningful to you.

Or maybe you have questions about human behaviour at work or leading others? If so, drop a comment below. I’ll endeavour to write about it but if I don’t manage that, we can certainly have a chat about it.

Until next time, here’s some fun stuff..

I’m currently listening to: Don’t Leave Me This Way by The Communards (because I’m old school -but not as old as the original)

I’m watching: Alone Australia on SBS On Demand (don’t tell me who won, although I think I know.)'

I’m wondering: How the worms got into my compost tumbler? (Not unhappy about it.)

Onwards and upwards,