For someone who has never really embraced the subject of physics or thought about it in any great depth, it comes as a bit of a surprise to find myself writing about, and contemplating, a blog related to that very subject!

Newtons Law's of Motion have never really meant much to me, and I have never really given over much of my time to considering what they mean...until now. And I suppose somewhat randomly, it wasn't even the subject of physics that brought me to this point.

My PhD studies have taken much up much of my thinking time in recent weeks as I seek to rediscover a sense of momentum towards the final stages of my research. Research that has firmly embedded me within the qualitative research 'camp' and mostly captured my imagination within the area of narratives; life history stories in particular. I feel privileged to be interviewing some phenomenal individuals who are willingly sharing their personal leadership development stories with me; willingly giving me a unique insight into the experiences that have lead them to their current place in the world; and willingly helping me to build up a picture of how they have shaped their lives through the stories they tell.

And, as ever, my thinking started taking a bit of a tangent! What sparked my brain onto another tangent was the reflection from one of my participants that events in their life over the past 12 months had made a real impact on how they see the world and inevitably that this will hugely influence the choices that they will take going forward. There was a sense that really they were the same person they had always been, but that the path they were likely to take in future would be going in a very different direction than when we began our conversation.

And so I came to Newton's Laws of Motion.

Something resonated with me about these three laws in a way that I never considered before; never understood before. By thinking about them in a different context; through a different lens, these three laws suddenly seemed to make sense.

And so I offer you the Newton's Laws of Life.

So maybe I should have paid more attention to Mr Holland the physics teacher after all? Turns out you can learn something from Newton, just perhaps not in the context that he originally intended. Perhaps physics isn't so dull after all?