What If You’re Already Doing It?

One of the things that stayed with me from my conversation with Patricia Karugaba was how often she returned to her desire to teach. Patricia is the Managing Director of Nina Interiors. She has built a remarkable career in business, yet when we talked about what might still be calling her, she spoke about wanting to teach and perhaps one day having her own school.

And I found myself thinking, but Patricia, you’re already teaching! Patricia teaches Sabbath School, is a great storyteller and speaks at conferences, shares her experiences and engages with people every day. Teaching seems to find its way into so many aspects of her life, though it is not the same as establishing a school.

But it made me wonder how often we search for our What Next? somewhere ahead of us, when part of it may already be present in our lives. I have been thinking about this in relation to my own experience of creating KaraSpace. When I started developing the space, I knew the kind of place I wanted to create. I could imagine the feeling, the atmosphere and how people might experience it but I struggled to translate that vision into something tangible. For quite some time, I kept looking for an interior designer or someone who could help me articulate what I had in mind, then at some point, I decided to trust my own sense of what I wanted to create, and designed it myself. I moved things around. Tried different arrangements. Experimented with colours, furniture and how the spaces could be used. Some things worked. Others didn’t. Looking back, I realise that the creative instinct was already there, and I had been using it in other aspects of my work for years: bringing ideas together, creating experiences and helping people see what might be possible through strategy. I just hadn’t necessarily recognised how that same instinct could express itself through a physical space.

I’ve been thinking about an idea from Jim Collins’s work in ‘What to Make of a Life’ on what he calls encodings: the enduring patterns, inclinations and capacities that shape what we are naturally drawn towards. One aspect of his thinking that interests me is the importance of the frame: the circumstances or context in which those capacities find expression. Something may already be present in us, but we might not recognise it until we encounter a different opportunity or environment. Perhaps that’s what I was experiencing at KaraSpace.

I don’t know whether Patricia will eventually establish a school, however, I wonder whether her next chapter in teaching might begin by looking more closely at the teacher she already is.

Maybe finding our What Next? doesn’t always begin by looking further ahead, but by paying closer attention to what is already here.

Keep noticing.

Ashanut