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Finding Love: Part Three – Loving Why You Do It

One of the great opportunities that a Portfolio Executive’s work-style offers is the freedom to reclaim your time.  When I collaborate with others, this often serves as a powerful motivator for them to become a Portfolio Executive.  However, there is a significant risk that you shift from being very busy in corporate life to being equally busy as a Portfolio Executive, which may cause you to lose the chance to free up time to create more space for love. 

What does it mean to offer more love?  What types of actions do you want to take to you provide more love? 

Love for your Clients 

One of the opportunities you have as a Portfolio Executive is to show a different kind of care for the people you work with.  As a trusted advisor to the CEO, you may occasionally find yourself engaging in conversations that extend beyond work.  They may choose to share with you stuff about aspects of their lives outside of work, and you may be able to offer them care by providing the benefit of your wisdom or introducing them to connections and support systems that you know and trust. 

Then there are the other people you engage with as a Portfolio Executive at the client, including those who work for you and various stakeholders in the business you’re collaborating with. 

Like many Portfolio Executives, you may love the opportunity to grow and develop the team that works for you, showing a different kind of care through coaching and mentoring them.    

Relying on a corporate culture of controlling people through direction, ruling them with must-dos, should-dos, and ought-to-dos while using the power of your position to exercise fear doesn’t work.  You lack sufficient time to get people to work on this basis. You must draw on influence instead.  You need to focus on building your followers.  Striving to offer authentic leadership is essential.  In doing so, you can change how you interact with those who work for you. 

The second aspect is the opportunity to offer more love to your peers.  For many of the Portfolio Executives I work with, their role as senior executives requires them to engage effectively with other members of the executive team.  Often, in your corporate life, you have had to engage in a spirit of competition, finger-pointing, blame, and internal politics to protect your position and maximise your opportunity to advance to the next level. 

As a Portfolio Executive, you hold a unique position that exists both within and outside the organisation.  Your entire working life does not depend on a single role, allowing you to engage with others not as enemies or competitors, but as individuals you wish to support and help succeed — in other words, to offer them more love. 

Love outside Work 

Another reason people love the idea of a Portfolio Executive work-style is that you can match your previous income with just 12 fee-earning days a month.  With those days available during the working week, you have several opportunities to show more love to the people and causes you care about most. 

One of my earliest clients discovered that, as a Portfolio Executive, she had the opportunity to establish a new life with a long-term partner and find time to support her elderly mother, who lived in Europe. 

With a more flexible work-style, you can, if you wish, pick the children up from school, go home, cook them a meal, and then wait for your spouse to return from work later in the day. 

If your spouse has already retired and you want to enjoy leisurely lunches together, extended holidays, or more travel, you can certainly do that. As a Portfolio Executive, there are typically minimal hours in a week when you need to be available at a particular place at a specific time, whether that’s on Zoom or in person. 

Digital Nomad 

Now, you can adopt a significantly different mode of working.  You can become a digital nomad and go anywhere, any place, anytime. 

I’ve had the opportunity to develop a rhythm where two weeks every other the month I’m on the East Coast of America — partly to build the business there but mainly to collaborate with my wife on a project we’ve been developing together for seven or eight years, which is not directly related to work.  As a nomad, I can continue to provide the services my clients need and remain available for our shared activities during the day by strategically napping. 

One way to utilise the extra time you have is to show more love to your family.  It might be for ageing parents, transitioning children, the joy of being a grandparent, or the opportunity to support your spouse through a significant life change. 

Causes 

You may choose to engage with a cause that you care about.  It could be as simple as being a governor at your local school.  It could also involve serving as a visiting professor at a university, where you can support the education and development of others.  Alternatively, it might involve participating in a campaign.  I once worked with someone who took the opportunity to become highly involved in the campaign against HS2, the high-speed rail link between London and Birmingham. 

Or it could be that you want to be the trustee of a charity or become involved in political life.  Indeed, some of the Portfolio Executives I’ve worked with relish the opportunity to develop a role as a local councillor or even lay the groundwork for becoming a parliamentarian.  It can also be an exciting way for members of the House of Lords to generate income that’s compatible with their obligations to attend the House. 

Self-Care 

And finally, it may be that the person you need to offer more love to is yourself.  You realise that, for too long, you’ve poured yourself out to the corporation that owned you, and you’ve had little for you to become everything you were created to be. 

You may have heard the phrase, “love your neighbour as yourself.” What does it mean to love yourself? 

Sometimes, it means taking care of your physical health, moving away from poor eating habits, lack of exercise, and poor sleep, while rebuilding something that gives you a more realistic prospect for enjoying your later years — extending them from a potentially catastrophic retirement event that leads to death two or three years after you retire to a fruitful and enjoyable life into your seventies and eighties, and sometimes even beyond. 

The other aspect of loving yourself involves revisiting some of your initial passions.  What are the things you’ve always wanted to do but have set aside to focus on your work-style? 

For me, I have always wanted to try kite surfing, but I never really believed I could do it. For you, perhaps, you’ve always wanted to make furniture, become a painter, write a book, or travel the world—things deeply within you that you’ve never had the opportunity to express. 

And then, for others, you want to engage in that internal work that enriches you spiritually, emotionally, and through developing your character, allowing you to become more of the person you aspire to be in all of your relationships. Perhaps it involves addressing significant trauma, dealing with hidden issues of self-worth, tackling anger management challenges, or finding strategies to cope with the clouds of depression that may occasionally attack you — that inner work prepares you spiritually, mentally, and emotionally to thrive throughout the rest of your life. 

Conclusion 

As you are released to offer more love, think about how you can do so. 

Charles McLachlan is the founder of FuturePerfect and on a mission to transform the future of work and business. The Portfolio Executive programme is a new initiative to help executives build a sustainable and impactful second-half-career. Creating an alternative future takes imagination, design, organisation and many other thinking skills. Charles is happy to lend them to you.