How Still Waters Came About
It was my second night of disturbed sleep. I was facing the turbulence that comes with significant change. After eight years, and at the age of fifty-six, I was being made redundant. A heady cocktail of excitement and shear dread was coursing through my veins denying me the land of nod.
I had decided to set up my own small business again. I had run a one-man consultancy before for thirteen years, but had shut that down when lured to the company of others. It was called Create Waves; an identity that, in the depths of that night seemed both outdated and still relevant.
But I know the pitfalls of getting sidetracked by perception, identity, branding. I had a more pressing question. When I set up this new company, what am I actually going to do? Twenty-one years ago, at the birth of Create Waves, it all seemed straightforward - presentation skills coaching, team facilitation and enough ambiguity and waffle under the umbrella of creating waves to allow me to do whatever work I could get.
So the first half of the night was spent on where to focus my time. I am still into coaching, and team facilitation (handily now more often called team coaching). I could probably add mentor and teacher to that without breaking sweat. But what else? Three things danced around my head:
The environment and the impending societal collapse (or not)
Being adopted and the chronic lack of support and community for people like me who were fundamentally shaped by the experience
Mindfulness/new found spiritualism and some other stuff I’m kindly labelling ‘weird shit’.
How to narrow, how to combine, how to broaden, how to distinguish? An unanswerable puzzle created from within in the dead of the night. Despite innate competitiveness my mind eventually gave up on that.
Still sleep did not come.
After a brief journey round the memory of Companies House registration, tax laws, bank accounts, payroll, my mind returned to matters of identity. What to call this entity. There was an urgency to this. I needed to set something up in the next few weeks. Sod it, I’ll just resurrect Create Waves - that’s the easy choice. Perhaps use it as a holdings umbrella identity for billing purposes and then have some more relevant domain names for the fragmented, odd-shaped bits and pieces that make up my life experience and interest.
Create Waves was too easy and I was being too lazy. Never go back! That’s the mantra. So on I went round and round a bewildering array of unsatisfying candidates.
And then it arrived. Still Waters. Was it the universe, my child-self, some spiritual being? It just arrived and I knew this is what my work is going to be.
A quick audit followed:
Climate - it’s got nature in it so yes
Adoption - my birth name was Stephen Waters, how clever
Meditation - stillness, good enough
Then the bonus points came tumbling:
Honours the past (and creates an oxymoron, happy days) - still waters create waves
Catchy
Ambiguous enough to give me freedom in the work
The word still has at least three meanings that resonate personally
The deal was done. Still Waters it is. (As I write this I am keeping everything crossed that the name is available both as a company and a domain…)