Multicourse feasts, bubbly from morning to night, a blur of socialising - none of these Christmas "traditions" factored for Cathy Veninga last year. Instead, she spent 10 days in silence at Auckland's Vipassana Meditation Retreat, aiming "for time out in a quiet structured environment to re-calibrate".
"My role as CEO is very much about networking, communication and relationship building - in other words, talking. On the retreat it was easy and felt natural to be silent. You realise how much we disturb others and are so easily distracted. We miss the subtleties in our daily 'mind noisy' lives."
Veninga has been with the not-for-profit organisation The Designers Institute of New Zealand since 1998 and became the first CEO in 2005. "I live and breathe my job because of my passionate and enduring respect for the contribution designers make to our lives on so many levels. The young emerging talent I see coming out of design schools is awesome and our future is in good hands."
Her team is working on a case to put to the Government on the value of design, and continuing to build international relationships that highlight New Zealand design. There is also the big task of organising the annual Best Design Awards, now the largest awards programme in New Zealand.
"To be honest, there is no average day, nor average hours I might work ... that's the life in a not for profit," she laments, explaining that she relies on strength training, a healthy diet and mindfulness practices to balance this workload. "I expect a lot from myself as CEO so I need to know that my energy and health is up to the heavy schedule of the year."
