Finding Your Element

A lot of the time, ‘success’ is either measured in material things or in career status: Mainstream rhetoric tells us that to be called successful, you either have to have made tons of money, or be a big-time bosswoman/man, or ideally both.  

We think success is a lot broader than that. It’s about feeling confident in yourself and confident in your abilities. It’s about finding your unique purpose and applying it in your everyday life. If you feel good, you are automatically making a success of things. Sure, it wouldn’t hurt to be making the £$€ at the end of it all, but what’s crucial is having the emotional stability to feel like you can make a success of things.

We’ve been trying to articulate this for a while now, and then came upon a realisation: this can all be explained through the idea of finding your element and then being in your element.

To our minds, finding your element means finding what makes you tick, what motivates you, what you care about, what your strengths are; which is to say, what makes you you. Then there’s another level, which is once these things are established, to implement them as a structure in your everyday life that facilitates you being in your element. Both of these can take a bit of work: investing time in self-reflection and discovery; putting your thoughts and ideas out there; committing to setting realistic and achievable goals for yourself.

We’ve just started a project with Kensington and Chelsea care leavers, with the focussed aim of facilitating exactly this journey. We’re hugely excited about the session content, and so far have had very positive feedback from our participants and volunteers, calling the sessions ‘focussed’, ‘useful and creative at the same time’ and ‘well worth coming back for’ (oh, and we’ve taken on board the qualifier after this last piece of feedback - ‘don’t go getting too big for your boots though’. Duly noted).

In fact, we’re so excited about this new focus, that to complement our website re-brand we have decided to change our name - to (you guessed it) ELEMENT. We’ll be switching website names and twitter handles and everything else in the next couple of weeks - so watch this space. Special thanks to our incredible collaborators Tom Bowers at Forward3D and Ellie Pritchard for their dazzling designs and optimisations!