I haven’t posted for three months. Since starting this blog, that’s the longest I’ve gone without posting something.

The reasons are varied – the usual busyness at work, an overseas trip, lack of inspiration, wanting to do other things with my precious time etc.  All bloggers experience these things from time to time. Inspiration when it does strike though comes in many different forms.

Two weeks ago I was in the UK for a holiday visiting family and meeting up with old friends. One of the things I always try and do when I visit London is attend a #ConnectingHR event, an evening pub meeting of HR tweeters and bloggers. I’ve been to three now – and met many of the HR people I interact with online.  Although the evening always goes too quickly and there is never enough time for detailed discussions with everyone, just seeing and talking to people whose thoughts and writings inspire me each week from the other side of the world is always a highlight of my trip. This year was no exception and catching up with some I have met before and some I was meeting for the first time was great fun.  Big thanks to Amanda Arrowsmith and everyone else there for making me feel so welcome.

One of those HR types who I always try and find time for a one to one with is Perry Timms. Perry is a one man whirlwind of energy, ideas and forward thinking.  A couple of hours with Perry never fails to raise the inspiration levels and leave me with lots of new ideas. We spent a bit of time re-visiting our respective youths at the British Library’s 40th anniversary punk exhibition. A great reminder that in the days before blogs and online communities we had fanzines. Thankfully getting your message out to the world via typewriter, letraset and photocopying is long gone!

Back in NZ this week, I had the pleasure of hearing the fantastic Colin Ellis speak again about conscious leadership, and in particular conscious project management.  Colin has written a great little book called the Conscious Project Leader which I am reading at the moment. Hearing someone who is so passionate about his profession and what he does, what he knows is wrong with it and how he thinks it can be fixed is always inspirational.  Colin talks a lot of common sense and really tries to role model conscious leadership.

I don’t normally blog here about where I work. But I want to mention that HR Shop has recently been through a re-brand and we’ve become Humankind.  We wanted a brand that better reflected what our purpose is as a company. Wellington marketing blogger Nicole Williams wrote a nice post about the importance of a purpose-led company name this week which coincided with our new brand launch party!  Nicole has really nailed why we’ve changed our name, and it’s exciting to be part of a company that is moving forward with such a clear purpose about what we want to be.  Of course we invited all our clients to the party and seeing so many of them in a room together was both amazing and humbling.

Finally this week, I read Neil Morrison’s excellent post about the four characteristics that separate a high potential HR practitioner from the rest.  These are Credibility, Commerciality, Context and Creativity. Neil’s descriptions of each characteristic are really very simple.  But then HR often IS very simple.

And often it is the most simple and basic things that inspire us the most.