Sailing upwind: How learning to kitesurf prepared me for the challenges of a new career

Adele is the Customer Marketing Manager at Geckoboard. Here, she talks about her love of learning and how she went from corporate cog to creative marketer at a growing startup.

I’ve always loved learning new things, but I’ve never been driven by some burning desire to be The Best. Instead, it’s the process of stepping (way) out of my comfort zone that I seem to be coming back for over and over again.

To give you an idea, here are some of the things I’ve thrown myself into over the past decade: Snowboarding, Spanish, knitting, kite surfing, pottery, yoga, yoga teaching, stained glass window making, ukulele, silversmithing, DJing, and digital marketing. At least three of those have caused physical injury — I’ll let you guess which ones.

In school, all my friends were really smart, which partly gave me confidence issues but also pushed me to do better than I thought I could. I took this behavior with me into my working life — the feeling of faking it, even though I wasn’t. It’s apparently called Impostor Syndrome.

I got into print publishing as a film journalist just before the industry started deflating. Working for a large company that only paid lip service to training and career development meant I was put firmly inside a box and never allowed to explore any other skills or career avenues. My brain was soon turning to mush. So in my spare time, I trained to become a yoga and pilates teacher, studied Spanish, and even ended up teaching yoga in Spanish to a large group of very enthusiastic Latin American seniors.

I eventually had enough of the corporate quagmire and left to become self-employed as a full-time yoga and pilates teacher. I lasted a year and came dangerously close to burn-out twice in that time. For my mental, physical, and financial well-being, I decided to seek employment again.

Teaching is a surprisingly lonely job. Sure, you’re in a room full of people but you talk at them, then they leave and you transport yourself to the next room of silent people. I wanted to belong again — belong to a team, a cause, a mission. I wanted something new, unknown, uncomfortable! Escape the City were just the right people to help me make that change. Through them, I came across Geckoboard — a then startup of 20 highly motivated, dedicated, and genuinely lovely people who desperately needed their first ever office manager.

To me, being organized is not so much a skill as a personality trait so turning office chaos into order is very much within my comfort zone. I had an open and friendly interview with the CEO and explained that my priority was finding the right company fit rather than the perfect role and that I saw the office manager job as a stepping stone. With the assurance that Geckoboard would genuinely encourage and support my career development, I joined the team and quickly realized it was a perfect fit.

That time I sold all the old office furniture…

Once I got the office organized, I turned my focus to marketing since I had plenty of transferable skills from journalism. The company paid for an excellent, intensive course in digital marketing at General Assembly, which gave me a solid platform to continue learning from.

Alongside my office management duties, I started spending more and more time working with the marketing team. The great thing when you come in with no specific job title is that you’re open to solving any problem that needs to be solved at that time.

At Geckoboard, with its flat structure, I was encouraged to explore, experiment, and take ownership. Not knowing how to do something is never frowned upon as long as you make an effort to figure it out and you learn from any mistakes along the way. This was a huge, positive adjustment for me coming from a corporate environment where I was expected to fully know what I was doing within my role and expected to stick to it. I get to play outside the box at Geckoboard.

The marketing team here works in short sprints. In the last eight months alone, I’ve learned more than I learned in eight years of publishing. I find it challenging and uncomfortable almost all the time, but also exciting and rewarding. The whole experience has been surprisingly similar to when I took up kitesurfing.

My kitesurfing learning curve.

Learning is never a straight trajectory towards proficiency (top right-hand corner). It’s called a learning curve for a reason. One day you feel super confident, the next like you’re faking it, on the third you’re drowning, and on the fourth day you learn something pivotal (like going upwind) and get completely unstuck. It’s emotional, quite exhausting, and totally worth it when you hit those highs.

In yoga, you follow a teacher and learn everything you can from that person. Eventually, you outgrow them and move on to find a new teacher. This is a completely natural and positive thing. I’ve been that teacher. I’ve been that student.

A great employer should see it as their task to bring out the absolute best in you, to support your development and nurture that rising talent until you outgrow them, at which point it should be a celebration that you’re moving on to new challenges.

Geckoboard is still growing (hey, we’re hiring!) and I’m still growing with Geckoboard. I know because a colleague told me: ‘You say you feel stupid all the time, Adele? Good!! That means you’re learning’. I’m now a fully integrated member of the most awesome, clever and collaborative marketing team but, yes, I am still learning and damned happy about it too.

Here’s to everyone out there who feels like they’re being dragged onto a coral reef. Hang in there because tomorrow you’ll be surfing upwind.