People have always found me a little difficult to categorise.
Facilitator, speaker, author, artist, model, traveller, and now, apparently, a polymath – though I only recently discovered that was the word for it.
For a few years I wondered if that was a problem. The world loves a neat label, doesn’t it? A single title and one clean answer to the question, “So, what do you do?”
The pressure to pick a lane
At some point, most of us are told – directly or indirectly – to focus. Pick your thing, master it, and stay there.
And there is wisdom in that… up to a point.
But what happens when you are genuinely curious about more than one thing? When your experience in one area quietly feeds and deepens another? When the skills you built in one chapter of life turn out to be exactly what you needed in the next?
I spent a good portion of my career feeling vaguely apologetic for having too many interests. I now think that was entirely the wrong response.
What is a polymath?
A polymath is simply someone whose curiosity refuses to be contained to one discipline.
Leonardo da Vinci is the most famous example. Painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, scientist. He didn’t see these as separate pursuits. Each one informed the other. His understanding of anatomy made him a better artist. His artist’s eye made him a sharper observer of the natural world.
He didn’t choose one, he integrated them all.
What I’ve noticed in my own life
The years I spent in corporate operations taught me to read a room, understand what people truly need rather than what they say they need, and to cut through the noise to find the real issue.
Those skills didn’t disappear when I moved into facilitation and mentoring. They became the foundation of everything I do.
My art taught me patience and the courage to make something from nothing, to sit with uncertainty until the picture emerges. That, it turns out, is also what good facilitation requires.
Travelling alone to places where I didn’t speak the language taught me to communicate without words, to find connection before I found common ground. That has served me in boardrooms and on stages all over the world.
Nothing is wasted, not a single chapter.
And for you
If you have been made to feel that your range of interests is a weakness, I’d gently invite you to reconsider.
The skills you picked up in a role you left ten years ago are still inside you. The hobby you abandoned when life got busy left something behind. The path you took that seemed like a detour may turn out to have been the most direct route of all.
Your curiosity is not a distraction, it really is your greatest asset.
The question worth sitting with is this: which of your ‘separate’ interests are quietly shaping and strengthening each other right now?
I suspect the answer might surprise you!
