A Chapter Closes for Boo – 5 Things We are Taking with Us into the Next One

This month we left our offices in the beautiful Little Bolton Town Hall. This has been our HQ since April 2019, and I joined Boo just a couple of weeks later. As we look forward to starting a new season in our new basecamp, I’m looking back to my first day on the job.

During a recent clear out, I found my very first notebook from joining Boo and read the first few pages with interest. I’d arrived fresh (stale) from maternity leave and at the time I estimated that at least half my brain had remained back home with my six-month-old.

However, looking at my first day’s fragmented notes and bullet points with six years of hindsight, I realise I captured quite a bit of what it is to be a Boo- it almost reads like an abstract poem of people and things we care about.

1^st May 2019

pigeon hole for chocolate
Mini Figs (of each team member)
inspirational quotes, get yours on a mug
jar of gratitude
homemade muffins
rescue pack
office dog
caring for yourself handbook

HPMA – “No one is back office”/Lindsey Paper Catwalk/Scruffy Monkey/Social Business Collective/Kay/The Bolton Family 2030 Social Value Challenge/Maura/Donations to our Beauty Bank/A Small Good Thing/“Caring for Your Business”/Local female-run businesses in Bolton/The Smiling Face of Boo/Unlimited Paid Time Off Policy/Wellbeing/Flexible Working/Be comfortable in who you are/Accredited CMI Centre/Strengths Finder

Choose inspirational quote for your mug
Tell me when your holidays are
Give me your bank details

GM Moving Conference/Mental Health Awareness Day/Coaching and Wellbeing Retreat/What awards to apply for?

“Love, Reciprocity and Knowledge are not bank accounts that get smaller as you use them”

– Keith Ferrazzi

Caring for Yourself Programme/We are a mentally healthy workplace/Mental Health Week/Blog about inner critic. Things bodies can do. Things my body has done.

“Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will at least be a little bit different for our having passed through.”

-Rabbi Harold Kushner

The last thing I wrote that day was this:

“Every second our senses are able to receive 12 million pieces of information. We filter this down to between 5-12 pieces of information.”

Of all the information my brain received on that, my very first day of work, I think I can summarise it down to these 5 points:

Boo Coaching & Consulting was unlike any other workplace I’d known
Becci and her organisation cared about our local community and did things to actively support it
Mental Health and Wellbeing was central to our ways of working
I was going to be valued for who I was and what I was good at
I was gonna like being a Boo

And I was right…

A Chapter Closes for Boo – 5 Things We are Taking with Us into the Next One