Coalesce: Learnings from 2025

For the last few years, I've used the turn of the calendar year as an opportunity to reflect as many do, and consider a guiding word for the year ahead.

Last year my word was 'Coalesce', which after a little etymological digging, I considered as "grow together" - a nod to the big changes in my life and the re-enlivening work of the previous years.

This post is a reminder to myself, as well as a reflection on how stories can help and hinder in life. Here's 5 learnings from the year...

1: Build diverse effort around common structures

Coalescence in 2025 wasn't about things merging into a single mass.

Instead it was more like trying to build a central structure or story which had the capacity to hold the diversity of work and community initiatives (a Relational Infrastructure perhaps), and still hold space for my personal life. In this regard, it was somewhat like a Trellis for many vines.

I didn't always get it right - I made a lot of compromises at work as my role was still in transition. I was over capacity, and whilst I saw the common story, the BAU of many organisations is to want to separate rather than coalesce effort.

My learning was that "growing together" requires a guiding structure to prevent a tangled mess. To this end, I've been trying to coalesce different initiative threads into a University Living Lab.

2: Aim for symbiosis

Energy invested in one part of my life system doesn't necessarily mean energy away from another part. In fact, it can be the opposite - creating value by investing energy in one part can riplle to other parts in unexpected ways.

For example, by investing in my personal reflection and writing, I found that I was building the clarity and networks to help me articulate and grow impact work at the University. By investing energy in my community initiatives (like our solar project as phase 1 of a resilience hub), I was actually able to have new and important conversations with my kids about their futures.

Seeing an interconnected and dynamic whole, and being alive to the ripples my invested effort was creating, both on my own energy, my family, my community, my professional work, and in other places around the world - helped me recognise I have been cultivating an ecology and multiple ecotones for impact work, as well as growing and nurturing my own purpose and motivation, and fending off burnout.

3: Recognise the power of disentangling, pruning & shedding

Coalescence required a dedication to deciding what no longer fit the version of my life I was growing, and letting go, disentangling, and shedding what was no longer serving.

From habits to implicit agreements, responsibilities at work to stories of self - coalescing demanded not just bringing everything along for the ride. Whether it's work or personal life - it's very easy to tiramasu 'all of the things' but instead we need to consciously re-negotiate, re-form, and re-story to more healthily integrate and coalesce.

4. Cultivating shared soil

Coalescence happens most naturally when disparate roles or initiatives begin to share a common "Why", and are enabled by a common relational context and culture.

Whether it was developing a research & education engagement program around Campus Electrification at Monash, exploring community foundations in the Upper Yarra, or supporting the development of an impact network initiative - I realised my commonality was using the same "internal software" rooted in systems change and relational approaches.

Again, this wasn't always the case - at times I was forced to pragmatic, transactional modes, just to get something delivered. But these force me to wear a mask, to work from different values, and deploy my skills for a fraction of the difference I can make.

Continuity of values and skills across more initiatives helps to reduces the friction of 'code-switching', allowing life and work to feel more like operating from a flow state than operating lots of different levers and buttons.

5. Reclaiming self: interbeing as a foundation

Balancing the dynamics of coalescence of different "parts" of myself and my work, with recognising my deep belief that we are not individuals, but intertwined with others, was an interesting dance.

Integration started as an act of survival as much as anything - holding together many different strands of life was feeling deeply dissonant. I felt like I wasn't turning up particularly well for any of the threads. So bringing things together felt like it was an act of liberation - combining the streams of the river rather than opening up into an ever bigger delta.

Writing served as one important practice, but so too was actively looking at who I was surrounding myself with, what I was saying yes to, and how I was spending my 'down time'. I picked up a banjo, did more photography, spent time in a sit spot, talked to the river, read from different genres, listening to the birds, travelled locally and internationally. I sought out people who made me a better human, and reminded what it was like just to be a friend to someone when they needed it. I sought out interbeing, and it enriched my coalescence.

Final reflections

2025 felt massive.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to stop and reflect, to see and make sense of the patterns in a year of 'coalesce' intention.

I certainly don't think I got it right the whole year - there were definitely times I opened up new channels in the river when I should have been saying no - but that said, I felt like I could see a bigger whole I was moving towards, I just sometimes struggled to communicate that effectively to others.

I am finding that my intention words both help me orient for the new year, but also teach me what I need to learn through the year. They've been a windfall, and they are increasingly becoming lessons which are part of my forward learning and growth.

This year I took on learnings about:

• Common structures for diverse effort
• Ecologies and symbiotic effort
• Disentangling & shedding
• Cultivating shared context
• Foundations of interbeing