Swick Learning: Where from? Where to next?

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Where does Swick Learning come from?

Two years ago, I started Swick Learning on a beaten-up laptop, in a hotel room, with a twelve-week-old baby on my knee. We were there because our home – which we had finally bought after a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice – had flooded with black water (sewerage), destroying half our possessions and making it unliveable. We left with one carload of essentials, not knowing if we would be gone for a week, a month, or longer. It ended up being five months.

If you have cared for a newborn, you know they need a lot of stuff. There wasn't room for much else. Perhaps we overloaded the car that day, because not long after, it broke down completely.

But at least I still had a job, right? Our single-income family would need it to gradually rebuild from these setbacks. Sadly not. My job had become so isolating, relentlessly hard, and in the end, degrading, that it was safer to leave than to stay.

I remember the day I quit. It was the day before the Easter four-day weekend. I had nothing planned for the holiday except finding enough time between newborn care and my exhaustion to try and catch up on my impossible to-do list. I had set myself a goal of working about 40 hours that weekend (naturally, I didn't even come close to catching up)!

On that day, I had almost broken down three times before a fateful late morning meeting where the most bitterly humiliating experience of my professional life was to occur. I won't go into the details here, but I'm yet to meet a single person who thinks that my same-day decision to quit was not the right call.

I had barely noticed it was also my birthday! For years I had given so much and worked so hard to do the work I believe in, and I had asked for so little in return. Despite being made to feel worthless, I must have known my value just enough to make the call that day. I would later joke that I gave myself the birthday gift of self-respect – but at the time, it really felt more like self-destruction.

Not the exact moment, but not far from it.

Unfortunately, that's not even the turning point in this story. Things kept getting worse. The childcare I had just secured a place at (which I could no longer afford anyway) suddenly shut down. The rebuild of our house had stalled. Interest rates were climbing (an average of 25 basis points per month for 11 straight months), pushing our mortgage – on a house we could neither live in nor rent out – even further out of reach. I judiciously applied for dozens of jobs which, in my desperation to replace my income, were increasingly beneath my capabilities or the salary needed to sustain us. Despite this, I was repeatedly passed over. I started to believe I was, indeed, worthless.

My lowest point came one day in the middle of winter when the zipper on the only nice jacket I had fled our house with busted. I broke into tears, and through my sobs, I tried to block out the question "what else could go wrong?" knowing it would only invite another misery into our lives.

I had spent my adult life teaching and promoting resilience strategies, yet even after applying every trick I knew for months on end, I found myself holding that broken jacket and thinking the darkest of thoughts. I knew the ‘right’ thing to do was to take more action to improve our conditions, but in my heart I didn't believe they would.

When I fired up that laptop to secure an ABN (an Australian Business Number) and a business name (not believing my own name had any value), I had no business plan, but I did have clear business goals: survive; get somewhere stable to live; buy a car (just one) that works; and be able to afford food, childcare, and other essentials on a regular basis. Once that was achieved, perhaps I could move to being months (not weeks) away from financial ruin. Eventually, it would be nice to start changing the face of adult education – my interest, passion and vocation.

I now have the luxury to say: I have survived. I have adequate and diversified income. This morning, I drove my own car to childcare and then back to my rebuilt house. After this, I will do work that I am proud of, which my clients value, that makes a difference. Today, I am mentally strong and nimble, and I am brimming with optimism and creativity.

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Interlude – Today

I share the birth story of Swick Learning to mark an important milestone: the end of the beginning.

Reflecting on where things started and the progress I have made so far allows me to (1) give thanks, (2) re-commit to this journey, and (3) chart a clearer path forward.

(1) To every client and friend of Swick Learning – especially those early ones – when you bought services, made introductions, gave advice, or simply cheered me on, you did more than support a nascent business. You changed the course of a life. You changed the future of a family. You helped reverse a powerful downward spiral I thought would never end. Even if you thought you were just doing good business, you saw something in me that I couldn't see at the time. Thank you.

(2) This is a big reason why Swick Learning will always remain part of my life. It may vary between full- and part-time, or in a myriad of other ways, but I owe it to myself and those people who believed in me to take this as far as it can go. And while my identity and my wellbeing are no longer tied to my work in the way I allowed it to be in the past, the more that Swick grows and overcomes, the more determined, resilient and capable I become. This growth and more will be needed to take Swick Learning where I believe it should go.

(3) Now, shall we talk about where that might be?

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Where to next for Swick Learning?

Swick Learning had no roadmap at first. It had no product for sale except my time and effort – which carried the benefit of my 13 years of obsessive trial and error in trying to create completely irresistible and enthralling learning environments for adult learners. I knew this was the right thing to focus on, because one such environment had transformed my own life beyond measure (and to be honest beyond my own comprehension most of the time). I also knew that something I would never give up on, and would surely succeed at, is finding more effective and reliable ways to recreate this for other people.

So here is my personal goal:

I will not stop working on Swick Learning until I can say with total confidence that I've changed one million or more lives by the same degree that my own life was changed through the power of education (in other words, profoundly).

I want to leave this earth having paid forward my experience one million times over.

For years, I’ve felt torn between two paths: working closely with individual learners to have an immediate and direct impact; or aiming for indirect but larger-scale impact through levers like policy, strategy, and technology.

Plenty of people were bamboozled by Swick Learning's two original services: direct skills training for students, and management consulting to help organisations shape the conditions under which learning occurs. But to me, the combination made perfect sense.

In my career and in business, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been counselled to focus on one end of this spectrum – to “pick a lane.” But to me, doing so would be an acceptance of the idea that such a tradeoff exists, and in the process, would reinforce it. Personally, I prefer to work at both ends of this (imagined) spectrum in search of a way to blow it apart.

Yet, to impact a million people, it’s clear that I will need to partner with others. I need to work across many organisations, helping to reshape many learning environments. I will need the agility and creativity that comes from working for myself – but I won't get very far by myself. I will need partners, allies, and teammates.

In other words, Swick Learning will need to evolve into an organisation or network that enables great people to do their best work. I hope that, together, we can shape a company mission that’s compatible with my own goal, but one without a defined end point – something which could fuel the organisation forever.

I know that, because Swick will be trying to do things that haven't been done yet, it is going to look weird from time-to-time. Our approach, services, and techniques will diverge from what looks ‘normal’ or conventional today. If anything, it will be a problem if we aren't weird enough!

I also accept that the markets we operate in don’t always celebrate those trying something different. Many people I encounter will never know my story or my goals, and some may assume I started this company out of ambition or greed (or their assumption of choice). But these detractors won’t matter. Truly. Unless they can be one of my million learners, or teach me something useful, they can’t help me reach my goal. I doubt I’ll ever hear from most, but if I do, and they don’t meet these criteria, they will be ignored.

Similarly, I expect that not every Swick Learning engagement will turn out perfectly. None have gone poorly yet, but eventually some will. However, I am also certain of this: it will never be because we didn’t care enough, or because we didn’t put in the effort that client or their learners deserved. If it happens, we will never fail to take all the lessons from it and get better, because every engagement is a chance to get closer to the big goal of transforming a million lives.

If you've read this far, I appreciate your time and future support. If you want to work together to transform some lives through the awesome power of education, please get in touch.