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Corporate jobs

November 4, 2016 by Christine

Keeping It Real: A Manifesto

What If Everything You Thought You Knew About Professional Success Was Wrong?

Guess What: It Is

screen-shot-2016-11-04-at-15-22-56Keeping it real?

There’s a worldwide agenda to do just the opposite.

Keeping it real is intuition, faith, trust and letting go. Keeping it real is understanding what success means on your own terms and having the courage to run after that.

Keeping it real doesn’t mean flaky, lightweight, vague or unmeasurable. And it certainly doesn’t mean dreaming at the expense of doing.

Keeping it real is getting things done informed by your biggest dreams, aspirations, goals and creative urges.

Business titans like Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos keep it real. Zen monks too.

A person who keeps it real gets things done, but does it in a way that doesn’t come at the expense of what they truly cherish and value.

Keeping it real isn’t something you accomplish. It isn’t a destination you arrive at, it’s the journey itself. It’s a practice, an art.

Keeping it real is the art of listening to the quiet, clear voice emanating from your soul and answering “Yes”. Go ahead and listen. You’ll hear it. The voice reminding you what makes YOU feel authentic, happy and free. The voice reminding you of the unique value that YOU alone can bring to this world.

Now, how will you answer that voice?

How will you start to pay attention to the way you turn up for that journey and how you keep yourself well, alive and thriving on the road? Not just in any superficial sense of that sentiment. But in a way that sets you up perfectly in mind, body and spirit?

Coming soon, I’m going to be sharing my Keeping It Real Manifesto. Regard it as the set of words that are going to shake you out of whatever current complacency you’re in and into a new conscious awareness of how you turn up for work and indeed live your life. To make sure you get first sight of it, make sure to sign up here.

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Leadership, Wellbeing

March 25, 2013 by Christine

5 Ways To Tame The Overwhelm Monster

Wha, wha, what!!??It’s everywhere.

Smart, professional people hurtling through life at break-neck speed, overwhelmed by just how much you have to do. And feeling in an almost permanent state of exhaustion.

Waiting for the weekend, or your next holiday to catch up on sleep and re-energise.

And maybe you do.

But, too often, these times get used for preparing for the next onslaught. And then there’s your constant companion, your smart phone, happy to interrupt you or to enable you to interrupt others if something “urgent” comes up.

It’s not that you don’t love your job. But that you have times of wondering whether it’s going to be this way forever.

You don’t want things to be less exciting or interesting. But you do want to feel less out of control.

You know how I know this?

Because I’m you.

My wake up call

“You are depressed.”

I sat there opposite the nice doctor and burst into tears. I was working all the hours God sent, trying to keep up with all that was demanded of me, and keeping myself afloat on a diet of chocolate, coffee and wine. I was looking like I’d aged ten years in less than twelve months, and I’d put on more than a stone in weight.

Most alarming of all was that my drinking habit was getting out of control.

I woke up one morning and had no memory of how I’d got home the night before. That’s when I knew I needed help.

I had no clue what “help” might actually look like, but I figured a good starting point was my GP.

I imagined I’d walk in and tell him I was drinking too much, in the same way I might tell him I had tonsillitis, and he’d give me some prescription or advice that would sort things out. All very business-like, and I’d go away happy.

I hadn’t anticipated he’d ask me why I was drinking so much, nor that I’d start unravelling when explaining just how out of control my work and life was.

All I could do was just sit there and go with it.

“It’s not healthy to be working the way you are,” was what he said to me. “It’s making you ill. You’re using drink as an escape. We need to get you some help.”

Back then, I’d never done any form of counselling or coaching. I was the boss. I referred staff to these services. I was aghast that I might need some myself.

But the doctor referred me to a wonderful psychologist with whose help things began to change.

How keeping yourself too busy messes you up

Truth is, when you’re a professional, your work means a lot to you, and you love being plugged into it. You love to feel it needs you; that you’re indispensable. That you make a difference to it.

All these little interactions – the email and text exchanges; the voice messages; the IMs on the intranet – they can become impulsive. And they can give you a buzz. To our brains, they can be like little alarms.

Thing is, our brains can’t discriminate between one form of alarm or another. It reacts to them all in flight or fight mode and by dumping adrenaline into our bloodstream. Adrenaline’s function is to keep us alert. We can become very “adrenal” and get caught in a vicious circle where we need lots of stimulation in order to be able to stay that way.

But too much of it over too long a period wreaks havoc with our blood sugar levels. Which in turn messes up lots of things from our ability to metabolise fats and our heart health, to our brain chemistry and our outlook on life.

Its impact on me was to cause me to become depressed.

My doctor prescribed anti-depressants, which at the time I gladly took. But I didn’t want to be a long time user and knew that I needed to sort out my experience of always being overwhelmed.

I’m going to tell you the 5 key things that have worked for me in taming that monster.

Before I do, you should know that there are 2 core principles underlying all of these.

Understand that you have choice

“I’ve got client work to do.” “I have to get back to a colleague on something.” “I just want to hear back from someone on a proposal and then I’ll stop working.”

I tell myself these things all the time.

But if you want to be feel more in control, and – dare I say it – more balanced in yourself, they’re signs that you’re, at least for the moment, hooked in.

The reality is successful people, who are also healthy, understand that they have choice and they exercise that choice consciously every day.

Yes, you have to engage with your boss, your clients and your colleagues. But who is pulling your strings? You or them?

You HAVE TO be the first person to respect your life and your choices, otherwise how can you expect others to respect them?

Get clear about your personal boundaries

Exercising your choice means getting very clear for yourself about what your boundaries are.

In other words, what is and isn’t okay for you?

How long will you work every day? What compromises are you prepared to make, and what not? What’s a “yes” for you, and what’s a “no”.

You might not yet be clear about these things. That may take some time, exploration and, frankly, getting it wrong on more than a few occasions.

You may have to open your eyes in a new way to the forces at large in you, and in your company culture, that play their part in inviting you to feel overwhelmed.

Managing your boundaries means developing a bit of personal toughness. Some assertiveness, if you will. Walking out the door at 6pm. Leaving a call unanswered to the following day, if at all.

When you do this at first, colleagues may look at you a bit oddly. Or make a bit of a joke. Don’t worry. Keep going.

Is that difficult? It can be.

But it’s the only way.

Putting that all into practice looks like this:

1. Create every day your way

This seems unimaginable when you’re on automatic pilot and fulfilling a diary full of calls and meetings that have been set up by others.

But if you want to assert choice in how you will do your work so that you calm the overwhelm, you need to find 5 or 10 minutes at the beginning of each day to decide what you want from it.

  • How do you want to turn up for yourself and for the world today?
  • What will you do today that furthers your key objectives?
  • Who will you serve today?
  • What do you need not to do today?

Leave off checking email, text or social media until you’ve done this, so that you can get ready for your day in calm, and without already being bombarded by thoughts of other things you “should” do.

2. Switch things off

One of the traps we can all fall into, me included, is to be constantly “on”. So, you’re in the middle of an important conversation, or you’re thinking through something important and there’s a ping or buzz as an email, text message, or call comes through.

You immediately get distracted and need to know both who it’s from, and whether it’s important.

Either way, you’ve succumbed to the alarm, dumped another load of adrenaline into your system, and added to whatever chaos is out there in your world.

To rein things in, switch email off in the background of your computer when you’re working on something that deserves your full presence. And your phone off, whenever you’re with someone to whom you want to give the experience of your undivided presence. You know, like your partner, friend, child, direct report…

3. Decide how much time you want to spend working

One of the great things about technology is that we don’t need to be in offices all the time in order to be working. Mobile telephony allows us to be, well, mobile and to work virtually. I love that.

But the downside is that the boundary between work and the rest of our lives can become blurred, meaning we can end up working all hours of the day or night.

When was the last time a business colleague sent you an email at midnight? Or at 5am? When was the last time you sent an email at that kind of time?

If you want to feel less overwhelmed by work, you need to create some cut-off for yourself around when it’s okay for you to work, and not. And then exercise it that way.

For example, I figured with my consulting job that I’d work late two nights a week – on the nights when there were team meetings or team dinners.

The rest of the time, I finished in good time to get myself to the gym, and still have time for a healthy dinner. I deliberately did not check email or voicemail on these evenings. Which meant I began to start feeling a lot more refreshed on a daily basis.

The fear is that you’ll get less done if you dare to take this approach. My experience, and the experience of folks I coach around this, is that the opposite is true.

4. Figure what else you want life to be about and go do it

When I ended up at my doctor’s door, and started talking to my therapist, I began to understand that work was my life and my life was work.

I was holding some big, deep-seated resentments about lots of things, from never having enough time, or energy, to get to the gym, to having no social life beyond the pub time I spent with work colleagues.

As I said above, part of my kissing overwhelm goodbye, was deciding to make the gym important and carving time out for it.

One of my clients some years ago decided that writing was important to him and found a way to create an afternoon a week where he took himself off with his Moleskin and just wrote.

Another client decided that good old family TV time was important for him and re-created his entire way of working to enable it.

5. Calm your system down

While there’s much you can do around how you behave, these things will have limited effect if you keep overloading your system with caffeine, chocolate, alcohol and other stimulants.

Once I knew that alcohol was a crutch for me, I gave it up for a while.

But the coffee thing I find much more difficult. What I do now is allow myself 2 good coffees in the morning and then that’s it for the day. You might want to take a similar approach. If you need something in the afternoon, try a green tea. Or even just one regular English Breakfast tea.

But being a bit more measured – without necessarily being perfect – on these things allows you to sleep better and for your poor old adrenals got get a bit of a rest. Which just allows you to become more resourceful and on top of your game.

The bottom line?

Do something

You know, reading this is well and good, but if you really want more balance, you have to make it happen for yourself. No-one is going to give you permission, and all the signs are that more and more people are burning out from the overwhelmingness of professional life.

It will almost certainly take you time. I put some of the key things in place immediately I confronted my own overwhelm and felt much more in control within a month. But it took a good six months after that, if not longer, to really feel that I’d cracked it and that I was still doing a good job.

But it’s worth the effort. I can still have times, as I’m sure we all can, of feeling there’s just too much to do. But for the most part, I’m calm, happy and far from overwhelmed.

What about you? When do things seem crazy for you? What do you do to tame the overwhelm monster?

 

Filed Under: Corporate jobs Tagged With: burn out, overwhelm

February 1, 2013 by Christine

How Transformation Really Works

The ModelI’m in New York this week, and last night I had supper with Jilli*, a former client, now a friend.

As we texted during the afternoon to make arrangements, she sent me a note that made me laugh.

“6pm my ravishing self will be walking through these doors, darling love.”

Not that she’s not ravishing, but that this kind of ballsy self-confidence was nowhere to be seen when I first met her almost four years ago.

And it turns out she wasn’t overdoing it on the “ravishing” front either.

I hadn’t seen her since last August, and when she really did walk through these doors at six, I had to look twice. She was glowing.

“Oh my God, Jilli!” I said to her as we hugged. “How are you, my friend? You look amazing.”

“I feel amazing,” she said. “After some really hard times, I feel like I’ve finally arrived at a wonderful place. Things are terrific. It’s my time to be happy and enjoy life and I’m just relishing it.”

“Tell me everything,” I said. “I want to know.”

And so she began.

“Can you believe,” she said, ‘that it’s a year since I arrived here?”

I couldn’t. I’d remembered having supper with her in a pub off Marylebone High Street days before she left. Her nose was taped with sticking plaster following the removal of a suspicious mole, the second or third such surgery she’d had. And my heart was in my mouth at the thought of the experience she was about to put herself through.

Putting all she could carry about work and life in a suitcase and getting on a transatlantic plane; leaving behind her things that would not, and could not make the trip.

She had had a dream for some time of coming to America, and when she dared to talk it out loud to her firm, they supported her in finding an internal job and in making the transfer work.

Such a wow thing on the one hand. It’s a fast-paced, glamorous city where you can do just about anything you want. On the other hand, if you’ve spent fourteen successful career years London, it’s tough to uproot yourself and rebuild.

She’s a shit-hot investment banker. In London Jilli was known for her business nouse, can-do attitude and strong interpersonal skills, and would be asked for by name on deals.

Here, in the beginning, she was nobody and had no-one.

Tough first days

An immediate shock was that her job was far from guaranteed. She was going to have to go through a seven-hour exam to get US Securities qualified. When I’d seen her last year during a similar trip, she was just a couple of weeks away from sitting the exam and was spending every waking moment swotting up on facts and practicing past papers. A ton of new laws, regulations and calculations to get into her muscle.

No pass, no job. No job, no working visa and no right to stay in the US.

The pass bar was high and first time around she failed by like two points. Still, she picked herself up, tried again and this time aced it.

“That must have been such a relief,” I said to her.

“I cannot tell you,” she said. “It felt like everything began to fall into place after that. Things are going really well in the firm and they’re saying I’m now in line for a promotion. And of course, right after the exam, I had Peru.”

Ah, Peru.

The trip she’d swung with a journalist and photographer whose attention she’d captured with some pictures she’d taken from her “little pastime”. In Peru she swapped her pinstripe shift dress for a more boho wardrobe, and hung out with her camera for a couple of weeks. For the first time in ages, she let her hair down.

(Literally, as it turns out. Because from having worn it in a smart, short bob for years, she began to grow it and wear it longer, looser, wilder.)

Then, after Peru she tells me, she goes to some social event in New York, gets chatting to a South African bloke who’s also there, and has been dating him ever since.

“It’s ironic” she says. “I’d tried dating websites since arriving here. It’s tough. There are so many more single women than men. I didn’t go to the party imagining I’d meet someone. And yet, there he was.”

“Is it love?” I ask her.

“It’s early days,” she says. “And yet…”

Her blue eyes sparkle as she tells me about how easy it has been to get to know this guy. How he’s been married before, yet how she has already been accepted by his children and ex. How natural it all feels. How comfortable.

“Life is indeed good,” I say. She nods.

Making work fit life

She goes on to explain how, in coming here, she’d decided that she must make the most of the city. Life in London had been a lot of work. Here she wanted more. In the past months, she has done bootcamp classes in the park, and Sunday cycle rides across the Brooklyn Bridge.

She has got fit and hard bodied like never before. And it hasn’t all been just for her own benefit. She raised over $3,000 for Bike MS, becoming one of the top 200 fundraisers.

And then when Hurricane Sandy hit, her heart went out to the folks whose homes were destroyed and she volunteered herself many times over as part of the clean up operation, being one of the people who help shovel pails full of sand out of people’s houses.

“You have such a big heart,” I tell her.

“You know what?” she says. “I am very happy with the woman I have become.”

Rounded, whole, complete are words I might add.

Our work

And this brings us full circle to how she and I got together in the first place. A bad romance with a dude that had broken her heart caused her to put her whole life under a microscope. I don’t exaggerate much when I say her life at that point had been pretty much the dude and work; work and the dude. Work was never of itself broken. Let’s be clear on that. But life was. Even her dreams were really the dude’s dreams. She woke up to the horrible realisation that she had not allowed herself to dream. Not allowed herself to own what she really needed and wanted.

Like some of the other gorgeous, capable, ambitious women I work with, her emotional intelligence in a work context was high. But in terms of her romantic relationships it was poor. She had to learn to allow that part of her to fully exist.

“I used to be quite two dimensional,” she says. “You helped me change that. You were there for me when I struggled to be there for myself. You could see the best in me even though I couldn’t see it. You never judged me, you always believed in me, even though you didn’t know me. You lit my dark journey so that I could see. You gave me faith that life could be better. In your presence, I grew.”

“Thank you,” I say. At a level, it’s true. I know that, when I’m working with my people, I have this gift for helping them listen to, trust, and leverage their personal intuition more and more. It’s that, really, that brings the unorthodox results that I talk about in my marketing stuff.

People can come with one set of goals or outcomes that they want to achieve. In Jilli’s case it was to recover from a shit relationship break-up and create a life on her own terms.

But there’s a part that she missed and that I want to make sure she, and you, really understand.

How transformation really works

What made the difference with Jilli – and indeed makes the difference with anyone I work with whose life transforms – is that she cared about herself and her life. She didn’t just want things to be different. She was ready to make them different, no matter what it took. She made coaching a priority for a significant period of her life. She turned up to sessions. She did homework in between. She didn’t make excuses to me or herself.

Last night, we didn’t talk about the really, really dark places she went through on her journey. We didn’t have to and I’m not bringing them up now. But I do want to highlight the courage she had to face her monsters, embrace them, diffuse them, and let them strengthen rather than weaken her.

She went there when others will not.

And in her heart there was always love. Love for herself and love for others. When I met her it may have been burned out, or lying dormant.

I only blew air on the embers, Jilli. That was my job. The fire was always yours.

*Name has been changed to protect identity.

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Self Development

January 21, 2013 by Christine

Becoming The Boss

leader and followersPlease welcome Sarah Fudin, from George Washington University, who today shares some lessons learned from a recent promotion to a people management role.

Upward mobility is an important part of any job. Very few people want to remain stagnant in their careers, working in the same position for years with no end in sight, becoming a member of the cult of the working dead.

People want to be acknowledged for a job well done, especially after pouring their energy and time into their work, and a promotion is the best way for senior management to convey appreciation to standout employees.

Promotions are incredibly appealing for obvious reasons (improved salary, better benefits), but they also have the potential to make your job awkward, stressful and difficult.

Simply put, it’s one thing to enter a completely new environment in a supervisory capacity with managerial experience under your belt; quite another to go from being a face in the crowd to a manager.

New duties

One of the major adjustments you have to contend with during your transition from standard employee to manager is the increased accountability that accompanies your new leadership position.

As a manager, your success in the office is no longer tied to the quality of your work; you are now responsible for the performance of your entire team. You need to adopt a new group-centric approach to work, as you must effectively motivate employees to ensure productivity.

Many new managers fall short in this aspect of managing; they place more of an emphasis on forming strong relationships with individual members and focusing on individual performance than creating an environment where the group is most likely to realize its potential.

Pay less attention to cultivating individual relationships to ensure success and pay more attention to defining and strengthening your team culture by outlining objectives, standards and any other issues of importance to the team.

Earning respect

Another challenge that many new managers face is making the power associated with their new position a reality.

Some new managers naively think that because they have a new title and formal authority over a team, they will automatically secure team members’ respect. In reality, new managers must show team members that they possess desirable leadership traits, and team members will, in turn, view the manager as a legitimate authority figure.

First and foremost, team members need to know that you’re on their side, so be sure to convey your intentions and desires as manager. By communicating honestly with team members, you’ll contribute to the development of an open team culture, which helps drive performance.

You have to demonstrate your ability to manage by striking the right balance between talking and doling out orders, and listening and giving team members space to work and explore.

You also must show that your title translates into something of note within the bigger organization. When team members see that you have some standing within the hierarchy, they’ll recognize you as an authority figure.

Greater responsibility

Lastly, new managers must recognize that with power comes responsibility. It’s a common assumption (and wish) that those in power have more control and are less beholden to the rules of the company than regular employees, especially if the previous manager at your company was well known for doing absolutely nothing.

In reality, your power means you get to peek behind the curtain, and now you’re responsible for more things than you could have possibly imagined. Not only do you have to deal with the demands facing your team; you have to address the demands coming from your boss, your peers and people outside the company.

It’s a lot of pressure, and it can be quite overwhelming. To be a great manager, you have to figure out the best way to navigate this terrain of endless, interconnected relationships, and you’ll be able to use these relationships to achieve your goals and elevate your team’s performance.

[Read more…] about Becoming The Boss

Filed Under: Corporate jobs, Thriving @ work Tagged With: internal jobs, promotion

May 3, 2012 by Christine

Is Worklife Balance Really Only For Successful Parents?

I’ve been reading an article over on Mashable about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and how she leaves the office at 5.30pm every night, and has done since having children.

She says,

”I did that when I was at Google, I did that here, and I would say it’s not until the last year, two years that I’m brave enough to talk about it publicly.”

She goes on:

“I was showing everyone I worked for that I worked just as hard. I was getting up earlier to make sure they saw my emails at 5:30, staying up later to make sure they saw my emails late. But now I’m much more confident in where I am and so I’m able to say, ‘Hey! I am leaving work at 5:30.’”

The emphases, by the way, are mine.

Now, I applaud Sheryl’s example. I think there are few visible role models of people who successfully rock the work life mix, and she’s putting herself out there as being one.

But what she said made me ponder a couple of things.

Is worklife balance really just for people who’ve made it?

Sheryl Sandberg is a successful woman by anyone’s standards.

And yet even she has had to get to a meteoric place in her career before it has been okay for her to come out about the fact that she’s managing her work around her life.

What does that say about those in less high-powered roles, or at earlier stages of their careers? Do different rules apply? Are they destined to put work before life until they’ve somehow earned the right to some kind of balance?

Is worklife balance really just for parents?

At the end of the video she says:

“And I hope that means other women and men – importantly, and men – feel comfortable going home to see their kids.”

So, worklife balance is just about children then, is it? What about the millions of single people in work who don’t have children to go home to?

How would it be for them to leave the office at 5.30 of an evening, and to have a life without having to defend it or justify it to anyone?

Who decides legitimacy?

And while we’re here, there’s a horrible habit of blaming employers for creating cultures from which there appears to be no escape. Like they make us sit there till 8pm each night.

Well maybe they do, and of course they have responsibility for creating the corporate cultures of their businesses.

But we’re part of those culture ourselves, and have a role in either fitting in and meeting the unwritten expectations.

Or in making things different for ourselves.

And it’s that bit that I think Sheryl has modelled very well. Irrespective of her level, or the fact that her main go-home driver is her children and her wish to be with them. What she has done is decide that both her life and her job are important to her, and she’s put down some boundaries for herself that allow her to achieve that.

Filed Under: Corporate jobs Tagged With: work life balance

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