On Growth: Linda Baines

Growth: From a Sunflower's Perspective

Linda Baines

As you may realise from the picture, I like to think of myself as a blooming sunflower (à la the film “Calendar Girls”), still interested in “personal growth” (which sounds rather “New Ageish” but isn’t meant to be).  For me, “personal growth” means that I relish new ideas and opportunities.  And I realise that I’m quite surprised (and pleased) that I am, and don’t even realise that I’m doing it or that it’s happening to me.

Without giving anything away, when I was 20 or so years old, I thought that you when reached 25 or even the big 40, that was it; you became and were a “grown up” forever, and ever.  Nothing would ever change; you’d be immutable as a person, sort of set in aspic, in how you were, your likes and dislikes, even the kind of person you were, and that nothing would ever change or happen to you, that would be it.  And I thought that I wouldn’t be able to go on the swings in the playground again.

But contrary to what I expected, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.  Life does still happen; it happens around you and to you.  You do still have feelings and emotions, and you can change; nothing is set in stone.  

So what has this meant or does it mean for me?  Well, it seems that I am developing several things in parallel: sustaining the day job, going back to academia long after I thought that I’d left it and developing my writing voice as part of this. 

The academia thing was triggered by my employer offering to sponsor me to undertake a part-time Masters, which was related to my job, on a distance learning basis.  That proved to be a wake-up call; going back to exams, revising and cramming, with all the nerves and panic that I’d thought I’d done with forever was a big shock to the system.  And writing assignments, where you had to justify every statement you made or opinion you expressed with a reference was very difficult and constraining.  Originality didn’t seem to be encouraged either.  But it became more interesting when we moved on to the dissertation stage.  As we were free to choose what we wanted to explore and research, it meant that we could follow our own interests.  This made learning and doing the work much more interesting and self-motivating.

So there must be something about this academic lark as I’m finding myself going on to a part-time PhD, which means working on my own and places the entire responsibility for getting on with and delivering down to me.  I must be crackers.

My reasons for doing so are that I’m nosey, curious about why certain things are done in the fields in which I work, and I want to carve out my own niche to try to answer some questions (although I’m still trying to work out what these are).  And depending on how I get on, I could be a more mature, blooming sunflower by the time I get to the end of this. 

However, getting to the end of it isn’t necessarily the main thing; the journey counts as well, the people I meet and the new experiences I have.  All of these enrich me and motivate me and shows the younger me, how wrong I was.

So if you see me skipping down the road or on the swings in the playground, don’t be surprised; come and join me.

----------

Linda is head of corporate development at Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), involved in strategic and business planning and development, policy development and providing briefing and information to RCUK and BIS (Department for Business Innovation and Skills) as STFC's primary liaison point with its sponsor department.

Outside of this, she is researching the nature of the interactions between organisations and individuals involved in KE (via a just completed MSc at Manchester and a PhD at Southampton, which begins September 2011). Linda has significant trustee experience and is a mentor with Reach and UnLtd. She is also devoted to her Kindle, reading books, tries to knit and pottering kind of walking.