Category Archives: Karens Notes

Who do you want to be when this is over?

KLR notes #coronavirus

Okay so, the world has gone a bit mad. I had some fears too, and they’ve gone up and down a bit as shown by this handy graph.  Here’s the things I’ve been telling myself, my team, and pretty much anyone I ended up talking to this week about the coronavirus (so, everyone). On levels

What do you do when your plans are changed for you?

quickbooks cancelled

This week (as you’ll know unless you were living under a rock or not using the internet), QBC London was cancelled out of “an over abundance of caution” with the current #coronavirus situation. Protecting people, just in case. Making that kind of decision in the first place has to be really hard. I’m sure they were discussing

Values: Have them AND live them

values, sketchnote, Karen's notes, team

Last year I was asked to sketchnote the five values for a company called Diagnostax. I got to know them through one of the owners, Gwil, who I met at an accounting conference. I was walking through the hordes of people and Gwil literally stopped me and said “You’re Karen Reyburn, right? The one who

Dare to Lead: hard-but-good reading

brene brown dare to lead sketchnote KLR

Recently in an Insta story I mentioned I was reading the book “Dare to Lead” by Brene Brown, and said it was “hard but good”. I had several messages almost instantly from a variety of people asking, Why is it hard?  Whenever that happens it’s an indicator to me that I’ve hit on something that

I will not let the dark days (of winter) bring me down

It’s winter, and that means darkness. I live in Scotland, and in the summer it’s almost never dark at all. The sun comes up so early (and so calmly) that you hardly even notice – even if you stay up or get up to watch it, there’s just sort of a general lightening of the

It’s a nice problem to have…but it’s still a problem.

KLR note Nice problem

Has this ever been said to you? When you tell someone about a problem you’re facing right now, something like…. …you’ve got too many prospects to follow up on, and they’re all good. …your offices are getting too small, because you’ve been growing so fast and there are too many team members now. …you’ve been

Deep work: it’s hard (and I didn’t even do very much of it)

karen reyburn sketchnotes go deep

When I buy a book, I do this very odd thing where for a good few months (or even a year or more) I talk about the concept as if I know what I’m talking about….before I read the book. I’m not sure why I do that. Maybe it’s preparing my mind to read. No

You don’t need everyone to love you. Just a few good people

greatest showman dont need everyone

The Greatest Showman is one of my favourite films. It’s got catchy music, a great cast, and a solid message about not letting business and money take over.  And it’s got some good solid quotes that made me stop and think, especially this one when Hugh Jackman’s character is rushing off to yet another round

But what if you could? Or what if you did know?

Sometimes you just don’t know. Or you feel like you can’t. What moves you from that, to exploring whether you could? Or to a place of knowing you can, and doing it? Earlier this week my sister and I were hiking Lookout Mountain in Phoenix, at sunrise. I’m in Arizona in between conferences in the

The travel list: how to get things done when you’re out of pattern

karens sketchnotes

I do enjoy travel, and sometimes get a good bit of work done when doing so. But I used to find there were all these things i wanted to get done…but I wasn’t at my iMac with the nice Yeti microphone and the webcam and the camtasia video editing software and the faster speeds and