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OUTSIDE THOUGHT

Reflecting on Doing | Simply Being



Hello and welcome to Outside Thought.  Thank you for visiting. I’m Karen Smith.

Outside Thought brings together my experience and professional practices of
mindfulness, reflection, facilitation, coaching, walking, outdoors and
creativity, to work with you.

I FACILITATE YOU TO REFLECT ON YOUR PRACTICE, YOUR CREATIVE HEALTH, AND YOUR
WELLBEING. INDIVIDUALLY OR AS A TEAM.

Work with me to reflect, celebrate, explore, develop, plan, consider, meditate,
or simply be.

This is a fledgling website, a work in progress. Please do look on its
imperfections gently and generously.

I integrate walking with reflection on your practice, your creative health, and
your wellbeing

Since 1987 I have walked, talked, listened, coached, reflected, meditated,
researched, conjectured, created, and facilitated work outside, in many places
and spaces.

I am curious as to how paying attention through reflection allows us to find
pathways towards our hopes and dreams and to explore our challenges,
expectations, and assumptions, and what might be holding us back. Sometimes we
need to work through challenges, sometimes we need to take a pause and celebrate
and simply be. Sometimes having an external person who is totally focused on
your development and practice can create momentum and transformation which is so
difficult to achieve on one’s own. 

By creating moments of collaboration with the land and living beings around us,
the mental and physical moves we make can become a place of possibility, for
deepening understanding, of ourselves, of our connections, of other beings, of
our work. We can also become more grounded and achieve spaciousness in our
exploration of ourselves and our thinking.

I believe human beings have great expressive capacity, and that is important for
self discovery. How do we think about ourselves through a kinder lens, and allow
that to infuse our challenges in our work and in our lives? 

I believe working outside brings us back into being with the world. I am curious
as to how nature work, embodying our thoughts, dreams, expectations, paying
attention, offers up a different proposition for exploration and curiosity and
sometimes just simply being.   

Work with me
My experience


TESTIMONIALS

> Karen is very skilled. I loved our outside thinking session. It was
> stimulating, supportive, challenging, very helpful. And good fun too.
> 
> N, Project Developer

> A huge thank you for facilitating the away day so brilliantly. You led us
> through the day with care, and a gentle way of propelling us forwards through
> some really important conversations. It was a really important moment for
> Middle Child, in reaffirming the way the company will work moving forwards.
> People had lots of fun and it was so good for us all to be together, and
> facilitated by you!! Huge huge thanks!! I know we asked for a lot, and you
> really did deliver.
> 
> Amanda Smethurst, Chair of Board of Trustees, Middle Child Theatre, Autumn
> 2023



> My experience in an Outside Thought session with Karen was exquisite. Being in
> and above the woods, meant there was so much around us to help me think. The
> river, the valley bottom, the deer that we encountered, the bluebells and the
> hawthorn trees helped me piece together what I needed to focus on for my own
> ongoing wellbeing. I felt totally safe with and deeply heard by Karen, who
> asked just the right questions at the right time. I left feeling that my
> senses were buzzing, and my head was clear and the images from that session
> stay with me. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
> 
> Sara Robinson

> I wanted to say again a huge thank you from all of us here at The Reader for
> your care and thought during our coaching and ‘thinking’ day(s) with you over
> the past few weeks. Everyone has said how much they’ve gained, that they have
> a new sense of clarity on next steps and felt really supported in their
> one-to-one sessions with you. All of this I can feel we’ve taken into our work
> since, coming together as a team in a renewed way.
> 
> Head of Shared Reading Programmes, The Reader, 2022

> Karen’s questions were spot on. She picked out some of the real crucial things
> I was struggling with. I had a strong realisation about what was missing which
> Karen spotted really well and pushed me a couple of times, not too hard
> though, out of my comfort zone. Karen’s reflections back were also very useful
> and she signposted me to techniques and tools to further my own enquiry.
> 
> C, Coaching Client, Spring 2022.

> I began walking with Karen to support the work I was doing to develop a new
> project and make sense of some conflicting tensions in my work. Going
> exploring with Karen has provided a welcome opportunity to draw creatively on
> all my capacities to notice and to learn. Sometimes our work together has been
> analytical and critically-engaged, sometimes intuitive and playful, sometimes
> embodied and wordless. Every part of it has been valuable in enabling me to
> reach a key decision point with clarity about how I arrived here and with
> confidence in my next steps moving forward.
> 
> E, Artist Maker

> I have worked with Karen several times in her capacity as facilitator, trainer
> and business development guru, from the perspective of being a participant in
> a local authority planning day, recipient of training about going freelance
> and, most recently, as initiator of a visioning day for an independent
> creative business. I know when Karen is leading the session, it will be
> creative, inspiring and fun, as well as practical, thorough and grounded in
> reality. She helps those present to get a handle on the thorny issues, dream,
> push forward and make plans. Working with her is always a sound investment.’ 
> 
> Naomi Wilds, Producer, Adverse Camber