I don’t do the ‘word for the year’ thing. It always sounds appealing, then it’s January 10th and I haven’t chosen one, and at that point it feels both late and deeply on brand.
That said, if I were forced to name the year that just happened, I’d call it nomadic. I spent more time on the move than I have in a decade — only this time it was intentional, and largely on my own terms.
I worked with clients across multiple countries and time zones, often dealing with boggling organisational complexity. I travelled a lot. I wrote steadily: weeknotes most weeks, articles for other publications, and a book which, at the start of the year, existed mainly as some notes, a few LinkedIn DMs, and a stubborn thought that refused to go away.
There were some visible wins too. I was named on the Women in PR 40 over 40 Powerlist, picked up an award for our consultancy work, and spoke on stages in Europe, the US, and Asia. From the outside, it probably looked like a year of arrival — milestones politely lining up.
It didn’t feel like that from the inside.
Instead, it felt like a series of small recalibrations. Adjusting direction rather than planting a flag. Paying attention to what still fits — and what no longer quite does — across work, health, travel, friendships, and, at times, quite literally.
That gap between how things looked and how they felt became impossible to ignore in June. Around the same time I was publicly celebrating the Powerlist recognition, I saw the photographs from the event — and winced. Not in a poetic way. In a very immediate, who the fuck is that and when did it happen? way.
I hadn’t quite clocked how far middle age had crept in — on my energy, my habits, my waistline — until a professional photographer did it for me. The disconnect between the version of myself I was writing about and the one staring back at me from those photos was sharp enough to puncture whatever story I’d been telling myself.
It wasn’t a rock-bottom moment. There was no vow, no announcement. Just a slightly mortifying realisation that something had drifted, and that I didn’t much like where it had ended up.
So I adjusted course.
I didn’t write about it at the time — partly because not everything belongs on the blog, and partly because I wasn’t yet convinced I’d stick with it. This felt less like a transformation and more like basic maintenance. The sort that only really shows up later, once you’ve stopped pretending you didn’t notice the problem.
Momentum
Progress is easier to recognise when you put some numbers on it (also, I love measuring things).
This year I worked with nine clients — some new, some returning. Much of that work will never make it onto the blog: conversations held in confidence, decisions shaped quietly, direction nudged rather than announced. There are things I can share, and plenty I can’t. That’s the nature of advisory work — its impact often shows up later, elsewhere, and under someone else’s name and in slides that looked better before someone dicked around with them.
Jon and I planned and delivered sixteen workshops this year — still the part of the job that reminds me why I do it. Getting people in a room (or a carefully curated grid), watching a problem reveal itself, and leaving them better prepared than when they arrived. After weeks alone with a laptop, the sudden presence of alert, opinionated humans is both invigorating and deeply tiring.
But it was a quieter consulting year than the last — a relief after the bonkers intensity of 2024, but also, at times, faintly alarming. A couple of promising proposals were pulled late, and the steadiness began to look suspiciously like stagnation. That’s the psychological tax of self-employment: even good years contain their own small panics.
October provided a snapshot of what momentum looks like up close: I was in the Goto Islands, ducking out of a dinner to do a pitch. In the next room, my newly acquired nomad friends were sharing sushi and stories. Meanwhile, I was sitting on the floor, laptop balanced precariously, trying to project professional calm to a panel of six executives across three continents — while being eaten alive by mosquitos and hoping I didn’t look as sweaty as I felt.
To the people on the call, it probably looked seamless — we won the work. From the inside, it was awkward, faintly farcical, and a tidy encapsulation of the year: progress made in less-than-ideal conditions, with work and life refusing to stay neatly separated.
Alongside all of this, I wrote. Quite a lot, as it turns out. The book, which started the year as a persistent idea and a handful of notes, ended it at 83,298 words. Add to that 56,585 words of weeknotes and blog posts, plus 13 articles for other publications. Little of it was written in long, serene stretches. It was assembled in fragments — early mornings, travel days, stolen hours between calls, late nights at home.
I didn’t write to chase an audience or keep up with formats. I wrote because it’s how I work things out. In a year where much of my actual work remained trapped in Teams threads and slide decks, writing was the only place my thinking was allowed to roam freely.
That’s what momentum looked like in 2025. Not reinvention. But sustained movement across multiple fronts — work that continued, writing that accumulated, confidence that grew, while looking slightly dishevelled off-camera.
The trail wasn’t obvious day to day. I guess it rarely is.
But by the end of the year, it was there — visible enough to look back at and recognise that, even in a quieter year, things had kept moving in the right direction.
The grind
I spent a little over half the year at home in Amsterdam — a place that still manages to make me happy even on grey days when the sky seems to have called in sick. Home was the anchor. Everything else radiated out from there.
Behind the writing and the polished LinkedIn posts sat the real work. The unphotogenic bit. Researching, advising, persuading, planning. Helping people make sense of complex organisations, imperfect systems, and competing priorities. Most of it never leaves the room it was created in.
The day-to-day reality of consultancy work is thinking, reframing, and translation — work that rarely survives beyond a meeting or a deck. I share what I can here, but most of it lives on in Teams threads, PowerPoint slides, workshop notes, and the heads of the people who were part of the conversation at the time.
Much of this year’s work happened across time zones, and often in sub-optimal conditions. Fiddling with decks on trains with Wi-Fi that exists largely as a philosophical concept. Speaking notes scribbled on planes. Emails written at badly-lit hotel desks. Trying to stay present while jet-lagged, or while the Wi-Fi flickers, or while a dog offers its own commentary in the background.
Then there’s the less visible but sadly unavoidable layer of running a business: Invoicing, contracts, insurance, taxes, admin — the necessary friction of independence. I remain predictably terrible at this part, prone to putting it off until it becomes unavoidable, and then dealing with it in a flurry of irritation and relief. It’s not work I enjoy, but it’s what makes the rest possible.
One of the more useful concepts I picked up in Japan is Enjuku (円熟) — seasoned maturity. Not early promise. Not peak-performance theatrics. Just the point where skill, judgement, and restraint start to cohere.
That feels like where Lithos is right now.
Experienced enough to know what good looks like, and to spot weak thinking quickly. Trusted, but not buffered. Calm, but not complacent. The work is steady, useful, and often quietly impactful — though it rarely comes with the reassurance of novelty or the adrenaline of constant growth.
Recognition sits alongside this rather than above it. That is, it’s welcome, but it doesn’t change the day-to-day reality: a quieter year than the last, the ongoing negotiation between depth and pace, and the occasional moments of wondering whether an empty inbox is a sign of stability or something to worry about.
From the outside, consultancy can look smooth and self-directed. From the inside, it’s persistent, occasionally tiring, and often work that disappears without a trace.
Counterweights
The day job kept things moving. Outside of work, I made a conscious effort not to calcify.
The counterweights were concrete and occasionally ridiculous. I went to 26 gigs — from Little Simz to a Bosnian ska band I didn’t know I liked until I did. I finally made it to the Barrowlands to see Supergrass. Live music remains one of the quickest ways to reset me: turn up, stand in a room, let sound do the work.
Reading for pleasure took a back seat this year, crowded out by the demands of actually writing the book. I still managed around 20 books, mostly potted histories of the places I visited. I like to understand what makes a place tick, and why it is the way it is. Unfortunately, history is largely the story of bad people, which is how I ended up reading about Idi Amin, Nicolae Ceaușescu, Enver Hoxha, and a series of other deeply unpleasant men.
There were also hundreds of soporific podcasts, listened to not for insight but in the hope they’d help me drift off to sleep. Many failed, but the ritual stuck — along with a worrying amount of trivia that may yet come into its own in a pub quiz.
I’ve had a regular exercise habit for well over a decade, and it still feels slightly out-of-character to acknowledge how much of my life now revolves around it. I guess I’m… a gym person now?
103 spin classes, plus regular weights and boxing — not as a performance metric, but because I need to burn off energy and spend some of my waking hours not staring at a screen. Less optimisation, more showing up. Moving because my body seems to require it.
Travel for fun featured too, carefully ring-fenced from work. Hiking in Albania with friends. Festivals in Finland and the Netherlands. Dancing salsa in Cartagena. Boeuf bourguignon at my favourite restaurant in Paris. Playing tejo in Bogotá. Paddling in the Indian Ocean with my husband. Staring a lion in the face in Kenya. And a perfectly pointless road trip in Japan to look at fruit-shaped bus stops — undertaken simply because they exist, which felt like sufficient justification.
Losing weight meant dressing a different body, but it also prompted something more reflective. I started letting go of clothes that belonged to earlier versions of me — or to people I thought I should be. Pieces bought for roles I no longer play, or phases I’ve outgrown. In their place came experimentation: trying things on without a plan, paying attention to what I actually enjoy wearing, not just what feels acceptable.
Somewhere along the way, I also found myself — to my mild surprise — being influenced by over-40s fashion TikTok. Sensible women with strong opinions about tailoring, trainers, and the perils of clinging to clothes you no longer recognise yourself in.
I bought more earrings this year than I did in the previous ten.
Not all the counterweights were light, or playful.
There was also a trip to the Auvergne with my family, to scatter my grandmother’s ashes. Returning her to the place she was born over a century ago. Standing together, looking out at the view she had carried with her for decades, and finally understanding why it never left her. In a year defined by motion, that was a different kind of stillness — one that reached backwards as much as it did outwards, and quietly reset the scale of everything else.
None of this advanced anything.
None of it fed a framework, a deck, or a deliverable.
But it did something important. It restored proportion. It reminded me that not everything valuable needs to be useful, and that not all grounding comes from pleasure — some of it comes from perspective.
A reasonable use of my time
And then, in the autumn, there was Paris.
I took an objectively absurd trip — a return train journey to Paris, just for an evening — to attend a Sanctum class inside the Sainte-Chapelle. No meetings. No sightseeing. Just a mat, a pair of silent-disco headphones, and the decision that this, apparently, was a reasonable use of my time.
The chapel had closed to the public. Evening light poured through the ancient stained glass, saturating the space in colour — blues, reds, purples shifting almost imperceptibly as the sun dropped. Lying flat on my back on the stone floor, headphones on, I was acutely aware of how strange the situation was: lycra-clad adults stretched out in a thirteenth-century royal chapel, listening to Alan Watts talk about the nature of existence.
His words rang in my ears, set to some lo-fi beats:
“Finally, you would dream where you are now.
You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”
Without much analysis — and to my own slight embarrassment — my reaction was immediate.
Yes. Yes, I absolutely would.
This life. This place. This moment. This imperfect body. Ridiculous, privileged, but undeniably good.
Despite — or perhaps because of — the headphones, the chapel, the idea of calling this a “workout”, I recognised the life I was in. Not perfected. Not optimised. Just, well, mine.
And then, about twenty minutes later, I was somewhere else entirely — dancing like an absolute twat, arms in the air, to Florence and the Machine — feeling the same unselfconscious “fuck yes!” in a completely different register. Louder. Sweatier. Just as joyous. Just as perfect.
Different moments. Same feeling. It didn’t feel like an ending. It felt like briefly noticing — without overthinking it — that life is good.
And then just cracking on with it.
Sharon O'Dea 