Yes, it’s the English Bank Holiday weekend, where we dream of balmy evenings and relaxed barbecues, and normally end up with torrential rain, family arguments, and re-runs of Pirates Of The Caribbean.

As I write and schedule this a few days in advance, and as much as I love Johnny Depp, I fear the latter.

Which is a little worrying, as I’m supposed to be going to the village fête. First year in the country and all that, so should show willing.

But I don’t own wellingtons or Barbour jackets or any of that country living uniform. You can take the girl out of the city, but you can’t take the city out of the girl.

A Twitter friend suggested I invest in a pair of Jimmy Choo hunters. I saw a pair for £285 on eBay. As much as I love the brand, if I was spending that kind of money on footwear I’d prefer to see heels.

So, I’ll leave you with my style dilemma. But, if you’re reading from the UK, hope you’re having a good break.

And, if you’re tuning in from elsewhere expecting to see some serious career coaching advice today, this is just a fun way of telling you that I’m having a day off!
photo credit: Zabowski

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That stuff that you love doing? The stuff that makes you smile? Can you do more of it and still get paid? This might seem like a really stupid question, especially if the thing you love doing is something like Christine’s eating chocolate cake. How can Christine get paid for eating cake?

My first reaction to El’s challenge was to say, “don’t be ridiculous, eating chocolate cake is my Saturday treat, and what has it got to do with making money?”

But, since I like both chocolate cake and making money, and I’m always up for learning things about myself, even in completely wacky ways, I thought I’d stick with the question and see where it took me.

I don’t actually need much of an excuse to spend time in my local coffee shop but I thought a chocolate cake fieldtrip was called for, so off I headed this morning in search of whatever magic I could find.

Sure enough it came in the form of childhood memories.

It’s probably no surprise to know I loved chocolate anything as a child. My mum was a terrific baker and I ate pretty much everything she produced. Often before it actually made it to the oven.

These were terrific days. When I wasn’t eating, and sometimes even when I was, I was often holed up behind the sofa with pens, papers, crayons, paints, gripped by my creative project of the moment. See, I had the biggest fun as a kid writing stories, and doing all the illustrations for them. Sometimes the stories were serious; sometimes they were satirical and witty. Whatever, I just loved putting stuff together that people would both read and be affected by.

I should have been a writer. That was after all my dream. The child in me had visions of living in a beautiful old cottage, with my dream husband, and a brood of cute kids. When I wasn’t keeping house and feeding my family chocolate cake, I’d be producing block buster books. Stuff that seemed light and frothy on the surface, but captured people’s hearts and so made a difference to their lives.

My father’s death more than took the edge off of things.

But the killer blow was delivered by my guidance teacher who simply sneered as she met with me and my mother to decide what subjects I do for exams.

“Nobody makes money from anything arty in Glasgow, Christine” she said. “You need to focus your efforts on academic subjects and think about a commercial career instead.”

With my dad gone, and us living off my mum’s widow’s pension, what I heard that night, whether it was implied or not, was that I couldn’t do things I loved and make money from them. That I needed to stop thinking like a child and grow up.

I’d always thought that the creative kid had died at that point. But looking back I see that’s not true. What happened was she just got clever and did what she had to do to survive. She took her story in a different direction, and created a new leading role for herself: the business woman. And she played it impeccably. It was what got her through school subjects in which she had no interest; pushed her to do things that felt incongruous; and propelled her to levels she would not otherwise have chosen.

Neither of my parents were around to see me become an HR Director, or to launch my own business. If they had, they’d have been beyond proud. Such achievement was beyond their wildest dreams. So, the career girl certainly did good.

And, make no mistake: it was a part in which I came to feel very at home. It gave me lots of fun challenges, allowed me to meet lots of wonderful people, and enabled me to do lots of international traveling.

But it wasn’t sustainable in the long term.

Curiously when the persona began to crack, and I needed to find out who I was beyond it, how I was going to live and work without it, I intuitively turned to writing as a form of therapy. It allowed me to express myself in ways I may otherwise have not. It was through writing that I could articulate my passion for coaching and counseling, the things I’ve focused on in the last years, that I completely adore and that pay my way in life. But having retrieved the artist in me, I’m not letting her go.

My best writing has always been done in coffee shops, and often with some form of cake or other. Perhaps it’s just the caffeine and sugar buzz. Perhaps too there’s something of the warmth and busyness I find there that invokes happy memories of my family living room and stimulates my creativity.

And, sure, I’m not making money from eating chocolate cake.

But, I am marketing my business almost exclusively through my writing now.

Here’s the big, circle-completing part of the picture, and I only just saw it this way myself. So much of the work I do with clients is about story. When they come to me, although they never use this language, it’s because something of their story doesn’t fit, or is difficult to deal with. They’ve lost their way in the plot. An old script needs to change.  A new storyboard needs creating. Partnering with others as they share their own cliff-hangers, romances and heartaches is privileged creative work indeed. Can you imagine what it feels like to work with someone who becomes truly gripped by your story; who can hold all the sub plots together; who can help you emerge from your own self-created mask and carry your true self forward in life?

Now that I’ve had this massive insight about story, will I do more with it? Will I write more? Will I start producing block busters?

You’ll just have to wait for the next chapter! But meantime I’d love to know in what direction you’d take this story next.

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photo credit: DaveBleasdale

According to a recent survey, 40% of professionals are considering going in search of a new job when they get back from their summer vacation. They’re battle weary after months of slogging it out in positions where their promotion prospects are disappearing, their bosses aren’t living espoused company values, and their bonuses are being cut.

It’s not surprising news. I’m hearing all the time from clients and friends just how much they want to quit. I’ve written elsewhere about being careful about not rushing to escape.

But how do you know when it really is time to go? Here are 7 signs that indicate the end is, indeed, in sight.

• You dislike what you’re doing. You’ve got to the point where you’re more than just bored, or not enjoying what you do. It’s becoming an active hatred. You can feel it sitting on you like a lead weight on your heart. It’s affecting your whole outlook on life.
• You feel no connection with your boss or colleagues. If you ever trusted your boss, that’s gone never to return. And, there’s no-one at work you can really call your friend.
• You’d really rather stay in bed. You’re struggling to get up in the morning, and it’s an effort to get yourself together for your day.
• You can never get on top of your workload. No matter how hard you try, you never feel that you’re getting on top of things. You might just about get there when the goal posts change again and you’re back to square one.
• You’re constantly ill. Despite whatever you do to de-stress, you’ve always got some kind of minor health problem going on. Whether it’s a cold, flu, whatever, you also notice these things becoming more difficult to shrug off and recover from.
• You’re living for weekends and holidays. The benefits of them, however, last only a few days before you feel that you’ve never been away.
• You’ve tried your damnedest to make things better. You’re a pro. You’ve read all the advice in this and other blogs about how to hack your career and you’ve applied it all religiously. Without success. You’re done with trying.

Sometimes the best thing to do is walk away. Some companies are just not for you. Don’t waste your energy and make yourself chronically ill trying to force fit yourself to a scenario that was never for you.

Sure, there are pragmatic considerations around how you get yourself out, what you subsequently do, and how you finance yourself in the process. It may take you time, but if it’s right to go, do yourself a favor and make that a firm decision. That’s step one. The rest will follow. And you’ll wonder why you slogged it out for so long!

If you’re a professional looking to have a much more fulfilling relationship with your work, sign up for our RSS updates and never miss an article again.

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As I wrote elsewhere, James has the smartest way of looking at the world of anybody I know. I’ve been paying attention to the things that define him in the hope I can learn a thing or two.

Excitement

The term “zest for life” sounds like a cliché around this wee guy. He whoops and whirls and has this take-your-breath-away enthusiasm for things that’s just so compelling. We’ll be chilling in the garden, or walking along our little countryside pathways, when he’ll spot something. A kite flying directly overhead. A rabbit darting into a hedge. The wild ponies on the hill. His entire being lights up as he sees it and stops in his tracks mesmerised.

His sense of wonder in things is so refreshing.

And it makes me consider how much we take for granted in our adult world. How retrieving a sense of awe would feed the child in us.

Fun

My living room currently resembles an art studio. I’ve got quirky hand drawn posters of my village in one corner and a cast of toys lined up in another. My iPhone, Mac and music library have been commandeered for video making purposes. Not kidding, but this child is teaching me how to use iMovie

He squeals out loud when he finds something funny. There’s no self-judgement or monitoring.

And he causes me to think about how much – or, indeed, how little – we allow ourselves to unreservedly indulge our playfulness. How we sometimes just need to relax and allow a belly-laugh to knock something crazy into shape.

Spontaneity

Can’t do something we imagined we might? No problem for James, there’s always some other exciting possibility of where to direct his attention. Can’t do that walking route you’d mapped out because it’s raining? Let’s make another video, or even go into town and watch Toy Story 3.

“Holidays are for chilling,” he told me the other day as I was obviously getting a little too structured in my planning of things to do. So I backed off and let him chill.

His approach made me reflect on how often, when things don’t work out as we imagined, we get caught up in our disappointment, instead of putting our attention where things can work out for us.

“Are you having fun?” I asked him today.

“Yes,” he said.

“More so than when you’re at school?” I asked. Perhaps I was looking for admiration. Perhaps putting onto him my expectations that school would be boring, holidays not. Whatever, his reply surprised me.

“No,” he said. Huh.

“So, you like school and holidays equally?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“You’re pretty happy with life in general, whatever you’re doing?” I said.

“Uh-huh.”

“What is it about life that you so enjoy, then?” I said.

He gave this question some serious thought. A flash of inspiration suddenly caught his face.

“Basically, I enjoy anything you can get yourself stuck into,” he said, smiling widely.

Flippin’ ten year old wisdom. You’ve got to love it!

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How sad is that?

Still, it echoes a lot of what I hear and see around me: people completely frazzled ahead of the school holidays, bouyed up by the prospect of a couple of weeks in the sun and putting off any big decisions about life till the autumn.

photo credit: beamillion

All of which has got me thinking about what that says about how much – or rather, how little – we value ourselves and our lives.

How we tend to see work and holidays in a very black and white, all and nothing kind of way.

The extent to which we adapt ourselves to fit our society in ways that don’t suit us.

And how it might be if we took holidays, less as a recovery from some punishing schedule, and more as a welcome pause to refresh and recharge our generally happy existences?

In my coaching work, people learn to free themselves from the tyranny of loving only to hate their work. They come to understand the interconnections of their work as an aspect of their whole lives. They begin to find their own way of being in a society that would prefer them to conform. To live authentic lives and to feel the sense of peace and happiness that brings. In that scenario, they’ll find their own rhythm about what effort versus what rest they need and what that looks like. Whether they take rest in big blocks, or they weave it into their daily lives. How time off feeds them and how they can hold on to its nourishment when they resume their endeavours.

They take lovely holiday, for sure. But they rarely need them.

And, yes, it’s hard work to get to this place, but breaking out of the vicious cycle of work and holidays is entirely possible.

What about you? What do holidays mean in your life? What single thing could you do differently that would allow the benefit of holidays to have a more lasting effect for you?

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I don’t know about you, but for me the last three months have been pretty full-on. It has been a long and hard winter here in the UK, and I’ve felt as if I’ve been in a dark, if fun and productive, little cocoon.

It’s still biting cold. But driving back from the farmers’ market this morning, I could tell that spring is undeniably in the air. There are buds appearing on trees, lambs skipping in fields, and daffodils carpeting grass verges.

I’ve been looking forward to this UK Bank Holiday weekend as a chance to push back a little and have some well-earned rest. At the same time, I want to use the turning of the seasons as an opportunity both to acknowledge my gratitude for the one just leaving, and to anticipate the possibility in the one ahead. To experience things coming into being for me after a winter’s gestation. To feel myself at a point of further growth and potential. In short, to use it as a way of fostering my own and my business’s development.

The last months have been awesome and I feel really grateful for what they’ve given me. A chance to settle better into country life; the space to do the hard work to diversify my business so that it has more of a social media slant to it; the opportunity to form such incredible connections with people online who are making all of this such a joy.

At the same time I feel excited about what’s ahead. I have the prospect of building The Manifesto for New Work Pioneers, in collaboration with you, beginning just next week. And there are other irons in the fire too about possible speaking and other engagements that are going to help me connect on this and other themes that matter to professional people who are choosing to take a conscious approach to their working lives.

To flesh this out further, and get the full benefit of the spirit of the seasons’ handover, I’ve written myself a handful of self-coaching questions I’m going to be reflecting on over the weekend. As I haven’t yet come across virtual chocolate, I’d also like to offer them as my Easter gift to you. They won’t make you fat and they may even help you get yourself in a good mindset for the months ahead!

• What has been gestating for you over the last three months?
• What shoots of growth and change are you seeing in your life and in yourself as a result?
• What has enabled this, and for what are you grateful?
• How do you want things to grow and change for you from here?
• What do you need to do, think and  feel to ensure that you give yourself the best chance of manifesting your picture in the way you want and deserve?

I’d love to hear whatever you have to share. Meantime, have a good Easter.

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That’s not to mention the Fox’s Special Christmas chocolate biscuit box that has mysteriously been opened earlier than planned. Or the mince pies we seem to have started eating because we had visitors the other night who fancied them.

So the holiday spirit has taken over and the wise-word Christmas blog post has never got written. And rather than force myself to just do something because of my weekly schedule and not wanting to be seen as a less than committed blogger, or work late tonight to crank one out and upset my family in the process, I decided to do this brief post instead.

I figured that giving myself and you a break was being true to what my business is about. And if I can’t do that, what kind of role model about work and life am I being for you?

Right?

So I’m going to be downplaying things a bit over the holidays. I’m not leaving the planet or anything and you’ll still see me popping up from time to time on Twitter. But for now I’m just not pretending to be working when really I’m not.

Here’s wishing you all happy holidays!

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There’s no bodyweight index to measure yourself against with this one, no trouser belt digging into you warning you it’s time to take action. But the signs are there if you want to look at them. The most obvious one is the hours you’re putting in: sixteen, maybe eighteen hour days aren’t unheard of for the work obese. Maybe you’re spending them in your office, or maybe you’re one of the world’s Road Runners, constantly travelling at home or internationally. One of my friends knew it was time to quit consulting when the people he saw most of were the cabin crew on his regular international flights. You long for the weekend, only for it to pass in a fog of sleep, chores and arguments with your other half.

“Sixteen, maybe eighteen hour days aren’t unheard of for the work obese.”

Your BlackBerry is never off. If you still have a social life, you’re checking for e-mails, texts and calls – and indeed responding to them – as your friends and family watch on resignedly. Most of the time, however, you probably avoid planning social things – they just get in the way. Or if you do arrange a coffee or a drink with that friend who’s been persistently trying to get in your diary, the chances are you’ll call or text at the last minute and call-off. “Something’s come up at work,” you say, even though the “something” is probably just more of the same. Home or away, you’re in the office early most days to get a head start on things before your back-to-back meetings begin, and you stay late at night to keep abreast of what’s happened when you’ve been away from your desk. You fuel your body with a mixture of pastries, cakes, sandwiches, pizza and chocolate snacks, washed down by as much caffeine as you need to keep you alert. And the chances are that the only form of exercise you do is, indeed, that blitz you give your body right before the summer holidays.

But it doesn’t have to be like that and the power is in your hands to change it. So, how do you? Well, for starters, here are five questions to get you thinking.

1. What are your work goals?

Every diet or exercise coach will ask you, right at the beginning of a new programme, ‘what do you want to achieve by embarking on this regime?’ Goals bring focus to our intentions and attract into our lives what we consciously or otherwise desire. If our intentions are unclear and our goals along with them, what we attract to our life and work is equally unclear.

Goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timebound.  “To weigh 58kg by 14th August 2009”, you might tell your personal trainer. It’s really obvious what that goal is. As that date is six weeks away and you weigh 64kg at present, it should be achievable with a bit of work. But if that date is next week, or you weigh 80kg, you’re setting yourself up to fail.

So, if work is feeling a bit lardy to you at the moment, find some time to stand back from all your activity and ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve in the work that you do. Perhaps you’ve got goals that have been set by, or in conjunction with, someone you work for. Maybe you’re self-employed and have goals that you’ve set yourself for this business year. Have a look at them now. Are they the right goals? Do they encourage the right things in you? Do they inspire you? Are they clear? Do you feel clear in your role in trying to achieve them?

2. What things should you be doing to achieve your goals?

With a beach fitness campaign, there’ll be a number of things that you’ll think of doing in order to achieve your goal. They might be: follow the Patrick Holford GL diet; follow my personal trainer’s programme; do one detox massage a week between now and when I go on holiday.

What tactics will best help you achieve your work goals?

3. What are you currently doing?

You might find it useful, before you begin your diet and exercise campaign, to take stock of current habits and rituals. After all, if you’re going to follow Patrick Holford’s fabulous and healthful diet, but your fridge is empty and you’re currently living off caffeine and sugar, you’re going to have to make a few changes.

Here’s a little “habits and rituals” review for the work detoxers amongst you. It’s easy but takes some discipline. Get yourself a notebook, and find a watch or clock that’ll prompt you on the hour every hour you’re awake (you might find that your mobile phone will do it for you). The thing to do is, when the alarm beeps, write down briefly what you’re doing, the purpose of what you’re doing, and how you feel about it. For that last point, it’s helpful to have a scale, where, for example, 0=”depressed”; 5=”ambivalent”, and 10=”ecstatic”, and you just write a number rather than words. The point is that for a week, including at weekends, you keep a personal record of how you’re spending your time. At the end of the week, look at your data and see what it’s telling you.

• How are you spending most of your time?
• How does that reconcile with your goals?
• What patterns do you see in how you feel about things? What do they say to you?
• What starts to stand out as needing to be different?

4. What needs to change?

What, for example, do you need to do more of? To get the beach body you want, sticking with the Holford plan, you’ll need to eat more slow burning carbohydrates, for example, along with more fruit and vegetables, good sources of protein and good oils. What’s your work equivalent? More thinking and planning time, maybe? More delegating? More cutting to the chase in all your communications? How are you going to achieve that?

What do you need to do less of? Less coffee, way less alcohol, and less bad fats might translate to less hanging around the office because your boss does, less picking up tasks, or interfering with tasks that are strictly other people’s, less challenging of things that you should entrust to your direct reports. And how are you going to achieve these things?

And what do you need to stop doing all together? Back to Patrick, if you decide to follow him, you’d be ditching sweets and cakes for a few weeks whilst your blood sugar balances itself out. Again, what’s the work equivalent and how are you going to achieve it?

Whether you’re doing more, less or stopping things all together, there are a number of things you can do to stay on track. As with diet and exercise, self-discipline plays a part, as does asking for other people’s support. A lot of it is about creating boundaries for yourself. Deciding what is and isn’t okay for you in the context of meeting your revised, appropriate goals. If it makes no sense to be hanging around the office at 8pm, engaged in doing a piece of work that one of your direct reports would bite your hand off for, leave and decide to brief him or her first thing in the morning. Put appointments with yourself in your diary and keep them. Block out time during the day to do some of the thinking tasks you normally save for the evening. Put in dates with yourself in the evening, even to go to the gym or watch something you fancy at the cinema or on TV. If anyone quips, “Off early tonight?”, simply say, “Yes, I have a social engagement.”

5. What beliefs do you need to change in order that your detox is successful?

For a fitness campaign to be successful in the long term, you have to fundamentally change some of the ways you think about yourself. For example, you have to know that you’re OK as a person, fat or thin – making your confidence and happiness dependent on what the scales say is a recipe for making yourself miserable. Waiting to be thin to wear the kind of clothes you want, or live the life you dream of is an equally flawed strategy.

What assumptions do you make about yourself in relation to the work you do? Perhaps you’ve allowed yourself to believe that you’re indispensable to your company? That you need to be involved in lots of different things if the company is going to get things right? Maybe you think you can only do a good job if everything you do or put out there is perfect? Or that, unless you work in the same crazy way that everyone else works in your organisation, you’ll lose respect, or fail to get the approval of people around you. What importance have you given the organisation if this is the case? What if you were OK irrespective of the hours you work or whether the organisation seems to esteem you on any given day or not? How would that change things?

So, if you’ve woken up this morning feeling that work is weighing just a bit too heavily on your life, it’s time to take action to slim it down to size. Check the symptoms. Do they describe you? If so, decide to carve out the time and space to ask yourself the five coaching questions above. It’s a small investment that yields big payoff.

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