From pointe shoes to project plans – life lessons from the perspective of middle age

Back in the 90’s, when I was in secondary school, I completed one of those questionnaires that somehow ascertained that I might one day become an engineer. This caused great amusement amongst my friends and family because I was at ballet school at the time. Fast forward 20 years and I found myself the proud owner of a project management qualification and a PhD in engineering, so I guess there was something in that questionnaire after all.

I feel honoured to say that I am now a Senior Project Manager in the space sector, and I often ask myself, “How on Earth did I get here?”. How I got from pirouettes to project management is a long and, somewhat, irrelevant story, but one thing that nearly 50 years of life experience has taught me is that things very rarely, if ever, go according to plan. In this fast paced digital world that gives us instant access to so called, ‘instructions for life’, refrains such as, “Chase your dreams”, “Nothing is impossible” and “You can have it all”, pop up with clockwork regularity, but in my experience, there are a great many situations in life that we have little or no control over, and to believe otherwise would lead me to a place of perpetual discontent.

For the past decade, I have managed the design, manufacture and testing of instruments and subsystems that monitor our planet and of those of our solar system, from space, including the Copernicus Sentinels, Euclid and the Rosalind Franklin Mars rover. I do so with a huge sense of pride and a ceaseless feeling of awe. My journey continues as I move into the world of active debris capture and in-orbit servicing and I cannot believe how fortunate I am to be working in this industry. The APM International Space Sector Interest Network is full of like-minded individuals who, like me, share a passion for the positive impact that we can bring to humanity and to our world. I relish the opportunity to connect with other project delivery professionals who share this sense of joy and in some cases, duty.

But becoming a project manager in the Space industry was never in my life plan. 30 years ago, I wanted to study to be a physiotherapist specialising in dance injuries. I didn’t plan to lose the A-level grades I needed to get into university, I had no plans to become an engineer, nor a project manager, nor an owner of tropical fish. I have control over some aspects of my life and the choices I make but much of the time, life just happens and I have to adapt accordingly.

Projects are no different. Project plans are a critical part of what we do but they must be adaptable. We can control so much but we cannot control everything, and that’s ok.

I invite you to stop for a moment and take a breather. Reflect on how you got to where you are. Was it all meticulously planned or were there some events over which you had little or no control? Did you have to adapt and re-plan?

Now look ahead. Can you say, for certain, what will happen next year, or next month or even in the next hour? Allow yourself the uncertainty of the future. Grant yourself the admittance of innocence. Give yourself permission for imperfection and say, “I don’t know where this is going to lead me”.

To be vulnerable is to be human and uncertainty is something we can all get through. So give yourself a break. Besides, who would want to “have it all” anyway? It sounds exhausting to me.