UK HSP Support Group AGM

Firstly, it feels like a long time ago that the AGM happened, and I apologise for taking so long to get to writing about it. My next few blog posts will be about the different presentations which we had during the day. This post is about the AGM itself.

The AGM is the official part of the day. As a charity we need to have an AGM each year. The purpose of the AGM is straightforward - to report on the years activities, to approve the accounts and reports, and to elect the trustees.

Activities as usual:

• Welcoming new members to the group
• Meetings
• Member and researcher grants
• Newsletters
• Website and social media

New activities in the year:

• New Constitution (voted in at 2018 AGM) accepted by charities commission
• New Mission Statement written
• Update to website is in progress
• Links to other groups/charities – Initial steps made
• Research – New grant application form for researchers to complete
• Starting to formalise committees to allow people to help more easily
• Group now covers regional meeting costs
• Contributed to consultation on medical cannabis
• Contributed to physical activity in rare conditions collaboration
• Contributed to EuroHSP

So, overall it has been a busy year!

I also talked to many people there about helping the group, particularly around getting people to consider becoming trustees for the group, and more generally around helping in other ways. If there are any readers who would like to help, please read this blog post: https://hspjourney.blogspot.com/2019/06/can-you-help-uk-hsp-support-group.html from a month or so ago.

Who am I?

This might seem like an odd title for a blog post, but it comes as a result of hearing an opinion about me from a friend of a friend. The opinion itself is not important, but it wasn't how I perceive myself, which got me wondering about how people interpret what they read here and build their own picture of what they think I am like.

I realise that I am fairly strict about keeping on-topic in the various aspects of my life. I have to play the demands of these different areas against each other so that I can try and steer the best course, and the complete me is a combination of all of these aspects and their prioritisation.

On this blog the key focus is obviously HSP. There is some overlap with my work being chair of the UK HSP Support Group, and various family and friends get the odd mention here and there in passing when relevant to the HSP story. On the opposite side, this blog doesn't (typically) report what I get up to at work because that isn't relevant to HSP. 

Keeping on-topic helps me to know where to go to find something I've previously said or thought, and it also should help people who are interested in what I am interested in.

In reality there are very few people who have sight of all the different aspects of my life, and actually I need to have different attitudes for different elements in order for them to work successfully, and my 'trick' is to try and borrow skills from different areas when needed, although I try and make sure that my values underlie everything which I do so that there is some reasonable degree of consistency.

In conclusion, it isn't surprising that people have different opinions about what I am like, but I hope that the underlying consistencies reduces the variation in these. I'm never going to be able to account for the more unusual opinions, but this reminds me to continue to try and write in an unambiguous style.