Keep your sanity and stay positive with Dr Estelle King at Networkshop

When you got to work this morning, how did you start your day? There's currently a lot of doom and gloom in our sector. Lots of stuff in the press, with recurring themes around financial pressures for HE and FE providers.

Unfortunately, it's not just a bad press period this time. It's a real reflection of where we are and what we're facing on an everyday basis.

That’s why it’s more important than ever to vaccinate yourself against the doom and gloom, and make sure you can see the bright side. As head of returns governance at Nottingham Trent University, I have to make sure I’m okay and that my team are okay.

My breakout session at Networkshop 2025 is full of practical tips and methods to help you find this positive focus. I’ve approached it with curiosity, and with a desire to help my colleagues across the sector.

Maybe not everything I talk about will work for everyone, I’m just hoping to share what I’ve learned over the past 15 years or so. If you're joining us, then hopefully you'll come back home with something useful to reflect on.

Toxic success vs brilliant failure

Some of those negative feelings I’ve mentioned come from an unbalanced impression of other people’s success. You might feel overwhelmed by all these people achieving so much when you compare it to your own achievements (I feel it too).

In the part of our society that exists online, our personas, we don’t tend to show a lot of failures.

It’s human nature to focus on your good news. But if it’s just good news, success after success, going up and up and up... eventually there’s no space for any kind of failure.

We can help others more if we brag about our failures: 'Look at this, look how I failed! Please don’t do it this way, because I wouldn’t want you to fail as well.'

At Digifest this year, there was a very inspiring speaker, Professor Paul Iske, who talked all about how to ‘fail brilliantly’. He’s founded an Institute for Brilliant Failures – one of their most useful outputs is a failure classification system, with 16 archetypes of failure.

I believe we can learn a lot from our failures. My team at Nottingham Trent keeps a log of our failures. Everything we try that doesn’t work, we log it. Sometimes it’s very technical (a lot of our work is data analytics) but we also track more general failures that we need to pay attention to.

Practical strategies for the overwhelm

I’m really looking forward to sharing my practical tips and methods with IT experts from education and research in the breakout session at Networkshop. I’ve got strategies for teams as well as individuals, and some things you can try in specific contexts like meetings, to help everyone feel well and positively connected to one another.

Most of these strategies are rooted in one basic concept - the most important thing is to listen. Listen carefully to yourself and your needs, and to your colleagues, peers, managers, leaders.

Something we do at Nottingham Trent that’s very useful is a regular open question session with the vice chancellor. We can talk about anything we want with them on a live Q&A. I really enjoy seeing those sessions. There are some difficult questions being asked, and it creates a lot of transparency and open, honest assessment.

Regardless of the role you play in your institution, we’re all human beings. By listening, being open and truly present, you can help to reduce other people’s anxieties.

Taking back your sanity

It’s everybody’s business to develop those open environments, though you can’t sit back and wait for leadership to do it. It doesn’t matter about your grade, it doesn’t matter about your salary. It matters about you. Grab yourself that space.

Talk to your line manager, work with them to agree times when you can work on your growth, or experiment with new ideas. You have to take action towards the things you want to grow into. You want to experiment? You want to take risk? Then do it.

Further information

Networkshop 2025 is taking place 24-25 June 2025. Book your ticket to attend either in person and online.

Attend Dr Estelle King's breakout session 'Keep your sanity' at 11:50 on Wednesday 25 June.