Category: Well-being

Finding Love, Well-being

Finding Love: Part One – Loving What You Do

As part of my commitment to supporting people in finding more freedom and joy in their work and moving away from the slavery and toil many have experienced in their corporate lives, I constantly encourage them to look at their choices through the lens of love.  Loving what you do is a crucial perspective.  Inevitably, in a Portfolio Executive work style, some tasks may not always bring joy, but you can make intentional choices, which allows for doing more of what you love and less of what you don’t.   

Finding Joy, Well-being

Finding Joy: Part One – Knowing Your Toil

One of the most potent barriers to finding joy in our work is the amount of toil we endure. 

What do I mean by toil?  In any work, there are tasks you simply must do because they make everything else possible.  But too often, as senior professionals, you can spend more time on tasks well below your pay grade.  This contradicts the values you aspire to and fails to reflect your hard-won skills, knowledge, and experience. 

Responding to Crisis, Well-being

Responding to Crisis: Part Three – Avoidance  

In retrospect, too often, we can see that a potential crisis has been building over an extended period.  The warning signs were there; the rats started fleeing the sinking ship.  The smouldering had been noticed.  The red flags had been raised.  Whatever metaphor you want to use, few crises come out of nowhere.  Avoiding a situation is often about seeing trends and identifying that there will be a crisis if you continue in the direction you expect. 

Enjoying your work after seventy, Find more freedom and joy in my work, Making your future work, Well-being

Enjoying your work after 70: How do you deliver the optimum value whilst having the most pleasure?

I remember a very, very experienced professional who’d had some big corporate jobs and as he got older and more elderly, I would meet with him regularly.  He told me that now, as he moved into his mid-seventies, all he believe he should do was watch and pray.  To acknowledge this, he had a lapel badge with a heron.  This is a bird that stands very still watching and then goes in and makes a brief intervention to catch a fish.

Enjoying your work after seventy, Find more freedom and joy in my work, Making your future work, Well-being

Enjoying your work after seventy: How much responsibility do you want?

I remember a very, very experienced professional who’d had some big corporate jobs and as he got older and more elderly, I would meet with him regularly.  He told me that now, as he moved into his mid-seventies, all he believe he should do was watch and pray.  To acknowledge this, he had a lapel badge with a heron.  This is a bird that stands very still watching and then goes in and makes a brief intervention to catch a fish.

Attitudes for Success, Well-being

12 Key Attitudes for Success: Attitudes to Habit

So much of lasting change that we can embed in our lives comes through establishing habits, our attitude to habits is crucial to our long-term success.  We can go out and do a big push to make something happen but the change you can create by doing 1% better every day for 90 days is almost 2.5 times.  Habits are the key, once you’ve established a habit it’s a foundation on which you can build.

Find more freedom and joy in my work, The Portfolio Executive workstyle, Well-being

Mental Health – Psychotic or Self-managing?

It’s hard to miss the increasing call for us to talk about our mental health.  The guilty secret of mental illness that has haunted individuals and families is giving way to increasing openness and recognition that mental health is an issue for us all.  If this was 25 years ago, I’d be very reluctant to share my experience of a very severe manic episode that I had in my late teens.

Building my current portfolio, Overcome disappointments, The Portfolio Executive workstyle, Transition from a corporate career to working for myself, Understand how to position and price myself, Well-being

Turning disappointment into positivity as a Portfolio Executive

A man looking wistfully out of a window with blinds casting shadows on his face

One of the toughest things to deal with when you are setting out as a Portfolio Executive is disappointment. You may have felt less sensitive to it when you were in your previous corporate life because you could always tell yourself that the ‘no’ wasn’t really about you – it was because of the organisation.