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The Cult Of The Working Dead (And How To Escape It)

Christine — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:00:17 +0000

It’s easily done.

Start out in life so energetic and full of great ideas.

Then find yourself in a career, a job, a way of life to which you’ve given over your ability to think.

Hard to say how or when it happened. And if you look back it was probably not just one event but a process of clever and subtle brainwashing techniques that knocked you out. Whatever, the orthodoxy of the normal life became so compelling that you sacrificed yourself to it, heart and mind.

Now, days, weeks, months pass by, almost without you really noticing.

It alarms you, in your brief moments of lucidity, to consider that you may be under the spell of something that’s not working for you. And you’d rather brush off the feelings of doubt you have about some of the rituals the cult demands you practice.

Tolerating Vampire Bosses because you need them to remind you of your place in the great cult order of things.
Sitting through brain-numbing meetings all day long and beginning your day-job at 6pm, even though it means missing out on family time, friendships and hobbies.
Knowing that a business decision is crazy but implementing it anyway, because you want to see your stock option vest, or your bonus paid out, or your retirement plan come to fruition.

For the most part you don’t question. You can’t. You are so entangled in the cult that it’s hard to know where you’d start to get clear without unraveling, or creating career suicide. All your friends are cult members. You understand life through its teachings. You’ve even begun to channel its ethos to your children and anyone else who will listen to you.

The Hazards

But at times you know that it’s not a life at all. That it’s a death. And you feel the exhaustion in yourself.

Sure, it may be okay for you that the cult has your soul. But if you’re not careful, it’ll take more from you than that.

It can take your psychological well-being.

One person I worked with was so ritualistically diminished by her boss that in the end she had a breakdown and quit her job. Unable to work for some time, she lost considerable income. Her lifestyle was impacted big time. When she did get back in the saddle of looking for something else, she then faced the challenge of recruiters being suspicious about the circumstances that had led to her leaving her old firm. Which in turn affected her self-confidence in a tough recruitment market.

It can kill your relationship.

Consider the guy I worked with some years ago. 42 going on 62 and morbidly obese, he was putting in 18 hour days with no regard for anything other than work. He may have continued indefinitely, but it was the shock of his wife’s decision to move out of their family home that cracked him.

Only then did he understand the impact of his lack of consciousness. But it was too late to save his marriage.

Or, it can kill you.

For another high-flier an aggressive tumour brought her to a choice point. To wake up to the damage that cult working was doing to her, or die? Choosing the former, she breathed new life into dreams, hopes and plans she’d shelved years before, and transformed her working style. She remains well, but the threat of the cancer returning keeps her alert.

Knowing Who You Are

So much of waking up, and deciding to have a life, begins with choosing to understand who you are and honoring yourself.

A good starting point is to consider your values.

You may hear the cult talk about values – the term is bandied about enough in business. But do you really know what values are? And do you know what they are for you?

Think about it.

What are the things that, when you support and allow them, make you feel most alive?

What things, when ignored, make you feel angry, sad, disappointed or crushed?

These are your personal values. They say a lot about who you are. Not who the cult tells you you should be. They talk to the essence of you.

(And, by the way, this is something I’m talking about more in my forthcoming eBook, to be shared exclusively with folks on my mailing list. If you’re not already on it, sign up here to make sure you don’t miss out.)

Knowing your values can help guide your actions and decisions, big and small.

If RESULTS is a key value and the cult wants you just to keep plodding on, doing what you’re doing, watch out.
If FREEDOM is one of your values and the cult insists that you follow a set process of doing things, you are in danger.
And, if INTEGRITY is one of yours, and the cult wants you to go along with unethical practices, well….

Choice

Recovering from the cult of the working dead means choosing to act more and more in a way that’s congruent with your values. The more you do this, the more clued up you’ll get about what’s right and wrong for you.

You’ll begin to notice that, when the cult would rather you did things that conflict with your values, you feel a tightening in your chest, or the onset of boredom, or the desire to punch someone.

Next time that happens, don’t swallow your anger, reach for a burger, or wait and explode at your other half when you get home. See it as a piece of information from your strengthening psyche.

And decide that you will or won’t act. Either way, just realising that you have decision-making power allows you to gain ground on the mindlessness around you.

One of the most insidious aspects of the cult of the working dead is the infiltration of the belief that there’s no choice in the matter.

But there is always choice. Live or die. Which one are you choosing?

photo credit: gabrielsaldana

How To Swing An Internal Job Move When Your Boss Really Wants You To Stay Put

Christine — Fri, 08 Apr 2011 10:35:22 +0000

Hats off to you.

You’ve managed to hold on to your job through countless rounds of redundancies and reorganisations. And what you’re doing has become so much more mission critical to your boss as a result.

But you’ve got other ideas.

As relieved and flattered as you are, you just don’t want to keep doing the same thing. You’re ready to learn new stuff and take on new challenges. Everything you’ve ever understood leads you to believe that should be possible by making an internal move in your current firm.

Good bosses and good HR will take account of your personal development plans in the whole staffing mix.

But the reality is that most bosses aren’t that good. Many don’t think big picture. Or see that supporting your development reflects well on them. Or recognize that helping you move to another internal job, is a way of keeping you engaged with the business. Instead, they prefer to cling on to their own good resource.

And many HR departments lack the power or influence to make it different.

So, if you want to stay with your current firm, but move to another area, you’re going to have to adopt a little cunning in making it happen for yourself.

Networks

You may be brilliant at what you do and feel that you’ve given so much to your company that they should now play fair with you.

But, as Nick Clegg’s gaff yesterday highlighted, so much professional mobility is less about having success conferred upon you, and more about who you know. Or, more importantly, who knows you.

Think about it. Where do you want to move to? Who are the decision makers in that area?And how well do they know you?

If a job came up in their area, would they be soliciting HR’s opinion about how to get you released from your current area?

That’s kind of the situation you want to be aiming to engender.

How you do so is to find legitimate ways to network with them. And with the people who in turn influence them.

Advocacy

Notice that I said “legitimate” ways to interact.

What that doesn’t mean is approaching prospective bosses out of the blue and asking if they’ve got a job in their team. They get approaches for jobs every day and if you’re an unknown name or entity to them, they’re just going to brush you off. And you’ll have lost your chance.

Instead, you have to take to their table something that simultaneously show-cases you, and is of great value to them.

Volunteer yourself to be the member of a project they are leading and knock their socks off with your content knowledge, sparkling point of view, and action list follow through.

Find something that is mission critical to their business, and go share it with them. A leading edge piece of technical content that you’ve helped to craft. A game-changing piece of information on a client you both provide a service to.

But be yourself in the process too. Don’t make it look like you’re trying. Engage socially. You want to build real relationships with these folk whose radar screen you’re intent on crashing. After all, if one of them becomes a new boss, you want to have a good connection, right?

Transparency

Of course, the last thing you want to do is to be subversive or be seen as having gone behind your current bosses back in these things.

I always adopt the ethos that it’s always better to beg forgiveness than ask permission. So, tell her what you’re up to for information sharing purposes.

You might rattle her cage, but you’re sure going to rattle it anyway if an internal offer comes without her suspecting anything about it. Or you get so fed up with her blocking you that you leave. So, a little controlled rattling can be a useful part of the process.

This kind of approach takes time and involves a lot of work from you. But if you’re determined to support your own development, you can make it work for you.

What about you?

Are you being blocked by a clingy boss? What have you tried doing to escape? What has and hasn’t worked? Share your experiences here!

photo credit: TheChinaMan

5 Warning Signs That You’re Accepting The Wrong Job (And How Not To)

Christine — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 10:51:47 +0000

It’s tempting.

That call out of the blue seems to promise so much. Just the kind of thing you’ve been dreaming of. Prestigious company for someone in your profession. Signs that they’re going places and could take you with them.

It’s like the unexpected date after months of romantic drought. And you’re feeling pretty proud of your interview performance and how you’ve navigated your way through successive stages of the recruitment process.

So, when the offer comes, should you accept it?

Here are 5 warning signs to wrestle with:

You’re feeling flattered. Recruiters can boost your ego. It’s part of the recruitment game, after all. If people want you to come join them, they’ll often flirt you into accepting. Some degree of flattery is normal. But does the flatterer have the depth to deliver a lasting relationship after the contract has been signed?
You’re imagining how jealous your friends will be. You’re buoyed up by the job title, the benefits and the salary level. You think about how your peers will turn green with envy when you tell them what you’ve just landed. But does the job enable the conditions that make it happy to live in ten or more hours a day?
You’re figuring how impressed your family will be. You’re reckoning how delighted your partner, or parents will be when you tell them you’ve got the job. But, are you doing it for them or you, and does the content of the job have enough to feed your own soul in the long term?
You’re investing a lot in the job’s security. Maybe times have been tough in your current job. Or maybe you’ve had a spell of being out of work. It’s so tempting to feel that a job – any job – will help you feel more settled. But can this one really give you that?
You’re discounting things that jarred with you at interview. The boss who was 20 minutes late in interviewing you; the talk of the work hard, play hard culture; the fact that the commute took half an hour longer than you’d imagined – and that wasn’t at rush hour. What do these signs mean for how the job and it’s people will gel with you long term?

The dating analogy is a good one because, as with love relationships, you need to be sure that you’re doing as much selecting of your suitors as they of you. Otherwise, you’re not setting things up for happiness and success.

Here are a couple of things to ensure you play a powerful part of your own decision making process.

Ask yourself what YOU need

Step back from the recruitment flirting that’s going on and figure what outcomes you want to deliver from your next job? What does good and healthy need to look like?

Maybe it’s to make a certain amount of money over a particular period of time?

Maybe it’s the opportunity to take your work in a different direction?

Maybe it’s a chance to build on and develop further skills you already have?

Is the job that’s on the table going to deliver any or all of your “success factors”?

Revisit your values

For a job offer to have integrity with who you are, and for you to feel good about it long after the recruitment stage, you need it to resonate with your personal values. So, take a moment and list these out for yourself.

What are they? Family? Wealth? Results? Excellence? Health? And how does the job offer on the table allow you to honor these – or not?

Is there any negotiating you can do to close any values gaps?

If you’re lucky, sometimes you’ll do this kind of analysis and find that, after all the job offer is a good fit with you.

Maybe it’s not. In which case the challenge is to understand something of why you were hooked in this instance. And what you can learn from the experience to carry with you positively into the next recruiting scenario.

Either way, the best decision about that job offer, will come when you use a smart integration of head and heart.

How about you? Can you think of other warning signs? Or other powerful ways to check out that you’re not conning yourself into the career equivalent of a bad marriage?

photo credit: pheezy

Hero Or Failure: You Decide

Christine — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:36:47 +0000

Last Friday I was writing about working on purpose. And over the weekend, I was asking myself what makes the difference between times when I am really able to do that versus those when I’m not.

I got to figuring that it all came down to what I was telling myself about the likely outcome of things at different points in time.

If you’ve worked with me or have met me, you’ll know that for most of the time I’m a pretty upbeat, buoyant person. In that frame of mind, I’m unstoppable. I’ll have an intuition of what it is I need to achieve and I’ll just go for it.

But there are other times when my sunny disposition gets caught in a down beat, and realizing my mission feels more remote.

Hero or failure – so much of it is down to how I’m believing the story will end.

And that’s the way it is for all of us.

We’re all actors in our own stories, each with our own purpose, irrespective of how fully baked or not that is. And like the key characters in our favourite novels, films or soaps, whether we achieve our mission – no matter the scale of the difficulty in doing so – is largely down to us.

You think the story metaphor here is a little far-fetched?

Well, just think about it. We’re all meaning makers. Things in our lives have their own logic; their own intrinsic cohesion. We make sense of what we meet when we come into the world: how our parents relate to us, or not; how we fit in relative to everyone else; what things our cultures influence in us. From all of that we develop the schema for the plots and sub-plots, the characters and conflicts, that will keep our personal dramas intact. We start to think and behave in ways that protect the integrity of it all.

Along the way we learn whether our character part is more naturally a hero or a failure. And this has a huge influence on how we relate to our sense of purpose.

Hero

If the meaning you’ve made of things early on is that you’re mostly set up to win, that’s the sense of things you’ll continue to expect as life unfolds for you.

Dealing with a tough situation in your career where your sense of purpose is in conflict with something you’re being asked to do? Wondering whether you dare take the next intuitive step in your solopreneur business, even though it means breaking the mould of how you’ve so far presented yourself publicly?

If you’re hard-wired for a good ending, even in the face of significant sacrifice and adversity, that’s what you’re likely to have. It’s not that you are fearless or without doubt; it is that your story has laid down for you the lines that make it possible for you to move beyond these.

Failure

If, on the other hand, your story has an unhappy or unsuccessful ending, that’s what you’ll constellate.

Attempts to push past a career block just land you back where you started. Ideas for taking your business to the next level die on the vine. Somewhere along the line you’ve learned that people like you don’t win. Or, more strongly, that people like you fail. Doesn’t mean your sense of purpose isn’t there; just means it’s not being allowed to manifest.

Becoming The Hero In Your Story

Some experts will tell you that, if you want to switch from your losing story, you just need to understand what made it compelling for you in the beginning.

Others will go to the opposite extreme, and teach you affirmations for overcoming your shortfalls.

Both of these have their place, but they overlook something that the story metaphor can help with.

Because, seeing your life and work through that lens allows you to choose to fundamentally rewrite your story. You can decide that in your story you will be a hero, and that you will get on board with your mission even if you don’t yet know all that that entails. You can choose to slay your own dragons and move past your character flaws, even if at times, like me, they sometimes ensnare you.

For sure, this takes work and vigilance, but I figure it’s worth it.

What about you? What’s your story? Does it help propel you forward in realising your purpose, or does it stunt your growth? What different choices and changes can you make?

photo credit: ssoosay

How To Re-Engage With Your Job (Even When You’d Really Rather Not)

Christine — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:27:30 +0000

You didn’t imagine you’d be sat there much longer. But the uncertainties in the marketplace are making your job search or longed for promotion take more time than you’d hoped.

One of the most soul-destroying things is turning up for a job every day when you outgrew it some time ago, but need to stick with it so that you can make the money that pays the rent or mortgage. Time drags, you feel exhausted, and the whole thing can feel pointless.

You might tell yourself that this is okay for you. But is it really? On the one hand, life’s too short to be miserable for a considerable chunk of it. On the other, if you let your disengagement run, you take the risk of under-performing at a time when your career – and your employer – need you to be working well.

So much of re-engaging, even if you’d rather not, comes down to breathing some positive energy into yourself. Here are five ideas to help kick-start your enthusiasm:

Choose What This Time Will Mean. If you allow it, the current scenario can seem both endless and meaningless. But you can take back some power by deciding what this time will mean for you. For some it might be about making sure you stay in a good financial place; for others it could be about developing some quality or skill in yourself. Find the positive opportunity and go after it.
Avoid the news. If you watch too much news at the moment, you’d be forgiven for feeling beyond depressed. It can have the effect of taking us beyond our sphere of influence to things that are black, but which we can do little to influence. Maintain a healthy curiosity in what’s going on by all means, but make sure your focus stays on the things in your life and work that you can control.
Set short term goals for yourself. When one week merges into the next, it’s easy to feel that you’re not achieving much. You can give yourself another experience by becoming ruthless about setting yourself weekly and daily goals. Things you’ve been putting off? Things you’d really rather not? Get them on the list and confront them. Then watch your spirits grow as you tick off each item.
Lean on your professional networks. Connect with some of your peers on- or offline and see how things are going for them. Reaching out beyond yourself and your current role can be both normalizing and inspiring.
Invest in life. If work at the office is tedious, help yourself to keep your energy bank topped up by making sure you have good things to engage with in other parts of your life: your partner, family, friends and hobbies. And manage your work/life boundaries too. You might think you should struggle into the office even if you’re ill, or sit there into the wee hours in case a client calls. But you’re almost certainly doing yourself more long term harm than good in the process. Don’t neglect your self care in tough times. At the end of the day, you are all that you have.

These are five things that work for me and for folks I work with. How about you? What stands out from this list? And what haven’t I thought of that you’d add?

photo credit: Dennis Wong

How I Recovered From The Evil Grip Of A Vampire Boss

Christine — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 11:34:17 +0000

Maybe it’s because it’s spring and they can smell the sap rising. But after a dormant winter, news of a plague of vampire boss attacks has reached my real and virtual office again this week.

How can you tell if your boss is a vampire? Well, if you’re constantly feeling exhausted, that nothing you do is good enough, that you must go along with their view of the world, even if you disagree, and that you must stay on tenterhooks around them for fear they’ll go for you, there’s a fair chance you’re in a vampire boss’s grip.

Hearing and working through my people’s challenges this week brought back to mind my own struggles with a vampire some years ago, and indeed, what I learned from the journey to recovery.

Because, you can nod along here, even smile, as you recognize the phenomenon I’m writing about. And you can imagine that that’s just the way things are, and that you have to put up with it. But you don’t.

Getting your groove back takes guts and courage for sure. But it’s far from impossible when you figure how to.

Beguiling vampire charm

In my case the vampire was a hard-nosed New Yorker. Incredibly smart, with books to her credit on leadership and strategic organization design. The internet talks about authority figures. In her field, she was an authority figure sine qua non.

When I first met her, she was charming. Later when I hated her guts because of how miserable I was feeling around her, I could nevertheless see how she used her apparent charisma to woo folks into her very sticky spider’s web. And I had immense respect for the cleverness that sat alongside the insanity.

Because underneath the mask she had no interpersonal skills. She was quite devoid of any concern for anyone other than herself. It was this ruthlessness I figure allowed her to propel herself from one tenuous success to another.

And I don’t exaggerate. When I first confided in my HR person about it, he diagnosed the issue as being a problem with our relationship. One that could be fixed. And he organized a team coach to help.

The coach had us do a battery of psychometrics to help us better understand, and broker, the diversity in our personalities. One of the questionnaire was FiroB. It looks at and helps compare preferences in interpersonal behavior. From it, our coach told us that whereas I scored highly on areas of inclusion and affection, she scored low to zero. Where I scored moderately to high on confidence, her score was more distorted, indicating a high need for control.

The intervention dissolved with no resolution. But it gave me the most phenomenal insight into the vampire’s mind. It made me realize that she had neither the need, nor the vocabulary for understanding or relating to me. While I was being profoundly affected by her behavior, she was untouched by mine. I didn’t want to be in a working partnership that was purely transactional and where I would not be valued or understood for me.

There were five stages in kicking ass and in recovering.

1. Permission To Be Okay

For a long time, and with her breathing down my neck, micro-managing and criticizing my every move, I’d felt so not okay. Which was weird, because I’d gone into this consulting job from having been an HR Director and a good one at that. To get to a point where I felt so unable to think, or to make my own decisions, was beyond debilitating.

If she was so right, I had to be wrong. Right?!

So, the first step I took was to give myself permission to be okay. I may have had a different perspective from her. That didn’t mean I was less than.

That thinking allowed me to feel more resourceful again, and put the brakes on the psychically draining effect of the vampire.

2. Leaning on community support

For a while I’d felt alone and isolated in my experience. But then I noticed other people having a not dissimilar time of things and, although there was a sense of taboo about it, we began to talk and compare notes. And indeed support one another.

There can be something so normalizing in having a good old gossip!

Knowing that I had that support, even at times when I was not actively leaning on it, was strengthening.

3. Experimenting

Feeling somewhat more buoyed up, I began to be able to listen to my own good intuition again and to act on it more. I started noticing, rather than being affected by, the games she played with me. There was one where, in joint client meetings, I’d recommend a course of action to a client and she’d sit, shake her head and laugh as I was saying it.

I just started to see her as rude.

And I’d trust too the response of my client, and the result my client got by taking my advice. When, on the whole, my world view began to reassert itself and pay dividends again, my confidence in my own abilities grew.

Then, I could even find her funny.

It was at that point that I found the courage to trust in my own value enough to raise my concerns about her to a more senior audience. I knew that I took a huge gamble when I said to my managing partner, “I cannot continue to work on your team if she remains here. It’s your choice, reassign her or me. Either way, I’m fine.”

To my huge delight they took her, not me, off the team.

4. Exhaustion

The relief of “outing” what was going on for me was huge. But I was suddenly beyond exhausted and for a good few weeks I slept all the non-working hours I could. At a level, I had made myself ill by being around her. I’d got so used to being in stress adapted response mode the whole time that I couldn’t see the damage it was doing. But I started to understand that getting better was going to be more than just a psychological thing.

It wasn’t easy, because I don’t like admitting to not being on form, but I gave into it, pulled back from lots of non-essential work and social things for a while, and treated myself kindly.

5. Deep contentment

Even before the exhaustion lifted, a real sense of happiness began to coalesce around me. I started to be able to enjoy life again, to find pleasure in things. To enjoy my work in a way I hadn’t for months. To start feeling natural and in flow with it again. That was so delicious.

I did ultimately leave the consulting company to work for myself. But the vampire experience taught me much, and has served me well for the coaching and counseling work I now do.

Bad people?

In my experience, most vampires don’t consciously intend to be bad people. They behave from the place of their own original wounding, and we get attracted to them from ours. Of course they can change if they want to. But if we’re caught in the effects of their mind-numbing energy, it’s us that have to do the recovery work on ourselves. And that doesn’t make us bad people either. Just powerfully human for being able to work with and learn to master ourselves.

This phenomenon is becoming more and more understood and empathized with. If you’re in its grips, take permission from me that you are okay, find your community and use its power to revitalize you. You’ll get your groove back before you know it.

photo credit: Tomi Kukkonen

5 Golden Career Rules Your Parents Taught You (And Why You Should Ditch Them)

Christine — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 09:41:26 +0000

Maybe you were one of those lucky kids whose parents were pretty sorted, and supported your self-actualization growing up?

I wasn’t, and neither were most of the people I work with.

It’s not that our folks were bad (okay, actually some were awful). Sometimes they just taught us too well how to fit into the world, and particularly to the world of work.

Here are 5 career rules I hear, their positive intention, and the dangers of swallowing them down whole.

You’ll never get on without qualifications

Mum and Dad knew from their own experience of either having qualifications or not that most businesses favor them. Of course they do. Qualifications say something of your general ability, your willingness to knuckle down and put yourself to the test. And, when starting out in your professional life they allow you to show that you have what it takes to stand out from the crowd. For many lines of work, you simply won’t be considered without them.

But the fixation for qualifications like university degrees has marginalized more artisan and maverick career routes. It can also stop in its tracks a natural talent to do a particular line of work without prior study. I think about some folks I know who have a raw talent for coaching, but who get put off by the hype that you have to have studied. My advice to them? Pay for the best supervision and start coaching anyway. Sure, you can get qualifications down the track. But for some things talent and badges of study should not be confused as the same thing.

Don’t job jump

Here, your parents were trying to protect you from giving the impression that you’re not reliable, committed and loyal. It’s true that recruiters look at the length of time you’ve stayed in any one job. For more professional roles, you have to give a job time in order to bring about sustainable results. If you’ve moved quickly from one role to another while claiming to have changed the world, hirers may be suspicious.

The downside of this rule is that you can feel obliged to stick at a job that you know in your heart of hearts isn’t for you. It’s one thing to create the brilliant career on paper, quite another to live it out day by day. There comes a point where hanging in there for the sake of following a rule can at best dent your confidence, and at worst make you ill. You need to protect your well-being. Without it, there is no career. Sure, if you quit a job quickly you’ll be challenged. The key is to be very clear and very positive about why moving on was the correct professional decision for you.

Don’t have gaps on your CV

It’s related to the point about job jumping and indeed is held up as a reason for not quitting something you dislike. Again, in teaching you this rule, your seniors were making sure that a pile of judgments weren’t heading in your direction about being lazy or unemployable.

However, it’s a myth these days that people work from cradle to grave. Increasingly, people switch track, have times of personal review and evolution, have years where they put parenting or other interests ahead of careers. The point is not to play these down or disguise them. The point is to know the cohesion and integrity in your own story and to be clear about what you offer now.

Put your career before everything else

What your parents were trying to instil here was the sense that doing well in anything requires focus and discipline. Again, of course that’s true.

The danger comes when that message gets interpreted as meaning you should be so single minded that you forever put anything other than work aside. What gets forgotten in this position is that there are not limitless opportunities on when we can enjoy things.

Take the example of a guy I spoke with recently. A board member of a highly successful firm, he had spent his entire life putting work first, in the misguided belief that he could have “life” at some point down the track. Now, a couple of years from retiring early and enjoying the fruits of his efforts with his family, his wife has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Amazingly, when we began talking at first, his first concern was how he could make arrangements for her to be cared for in order that he keep working.

You can’t make money doing what you love

The old dears were trying to save you years of wasted effort with this one; didn’t want you to go down a route that would leave you miserable and penniless. (And them without a successful son or daughter through which to be successful themselves.)

The danger here is that you instead spend years solvent, but miserable for other reasons. Locked into avenues of work and study you don’t care for; not allowing yourself to imagine how things could be different. Of course, we all live in a society where money is the collateral with which we fund life. But the challenge is how to do what you love and be financially viable. For a lucky few, both these things will be incorporated in their day-to-day work. But if that’s not you, don’t believe that you have to put your burning interest aside. Make sure to feed your soul by finding a way to do it as a sideline or hobby. It’ll enrich the side of you that works to ensure your cash flow.

Some of the career rules we get socialized to live out serve us well enough. But many serve our governments, societies, and the very institution of work better than they serve us. The trick is to be savvy, make conscious what rules you’re living under, and decide which ones you’ll keep. And, which you, frankly, need to kick into touch.
photo credit: BoonLeeFamPhotography

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How Not To Give Feedback At Work: Part Two

Christine — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:05:29 +0000

Have you ever wondered about the source of poor management behaviour?

I’ve always believed it comes from the top. The board or its equivalent. Set a bad example and you give your more junior people leaders licence to copy you. On the weekend, I witnessed a sad but true endorsing example.

You may recall that last November I was talking about an experience in my local coffee shop of the store manager belittling a member of her staff in front of a client. Me.

Well, yesterday, in the same shop, I stood at the counter, ordering a couple of Americanos, as the franchise owner questioned one of the store’s supervisors on something she hadn’t done.

“Why is the sign board not out on the pavement?”

“I tried to put it up when I put the tables and chairs out first thing, but it kept blowing down.”

If you live in the South East of England, you’ll appreciate it was both windy and rainy yesterday morning. Understatement.

“The sign board should be out.”

“I know that, Paul, but I reckoned it was a safety hazard. It’s blowing a gale out there.”

Paul harrumphs, marches to the front of the shop, and puts the offending board out on the pavement anyway. The supervisor meets my eyes in a WTF kind of way and gets on with making my coffee.

I take my coffee and me and my man sit and watch as the board gets blown down several times, being rescued by kindly passers by. We wonder whose insurance is going to pay out if the board blows into one of the cars parked on the road right beside it.

Paul disappears as the Sunday morning coffee traffic picks up. Eventually the supervisor reasserts her own good judgement and brings the board inside the shop.

I did giggle about this. But I do think it’s just a little crazy.

What do you think?

photo credit: KelseaGroves

Are Your Colleagues Like The Paparazzi? 3 Ways to Escape

El Edwards — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 00:16:53 +0000

Image: graur razvan ionut / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s 8pm on a Friday and your mobile rings.

You look at the screen. It’s Sam from work. You sigh, but answer the phone with a cheery hello before moving into another room, leaving your significant other to continue watching the film alone.

Admit it. This isn’t the first time that this has happened.

Four days ago you were playing football with your little boy. It was your day off and the two of you were enjoying some quality time together when you got a text message from one of the guys in the office.

They’d just scored a major success and wanted to share bragging rights with you.

Did you need to know about it on your day off? How about the phone call you took from your boss during your fortnight in France with the kids?

You’ve thought about telling them to leave you alone when you’re not in work. But be honest. Sometimes you enjoy hearing the gossip. It’s nice to be kept in the loop.

Well you can’t have it both ways sugar.

Cry “privacy” and “space” and you’re in danger of looking like the publicity starved celebrity snapped putting out the bins. Three days later they’ll be flouncing up the red carpet whispering, “photograph me darling!”

So what’s a girl to do?

Fear not sweetie. There is a solution. And it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3.

1. Boundaries darling, boundaries

Are your work colleagues also your friends? Do you go out drinking with the people you share the water cooler with? Are there times when that work related contact is really just a friend from work who wants to have a gossip?

Blurring the lines between work and play can make it tricky to switch off when you step through your front door. If you’re in any sort of managerial position then this is especially true. If your friends are people you’re required to manage when you’re in the work environment, you both need to know how the friendship works in the office.

If they constantly play the friends card to get you on side, it’s time to talk about your friendship and how best to nurture it in a way that sees you both smiling.

2. Set some ground rules

You’re not indispensable. You don’t have to receive phone calls about work on your day off. But the rules of physics state that objects move along the path of least resistance. Put a ball on a level surface and it will stay still. Lift up the end and things change.

Same with you. You are that surface. Carry on as you are and nothing will change. Shake things up a bit by telling people that you’d rather not be contacted out of hours except under certain conditions and you’ll get a different result.

3. Watch your language!

If someone phones you out of hours and apologises for disturbing you on your day off, what do you say? If you’re anything like most people you’ll say “no problem” or “it’s OK” even though that’s a total lie. It is a problem for you to get phone calls on your day off and why not ask your kids if it’s OK for you to be on the phone in McDonalds? You’ll hear your answer from the mouth of babes.

By using this safe, polite language we condition the people around us into believing that it’s OK for them to send work rubbish our way, even if it’s our day off.

Stop!

Find something more honest to say.

If they apologise for ringing and offer to call you back another time but you feel that you might as well continue with the call seeing as you’re there, what do you say? How about, “You don’t need to phone back but thank you for offering.” At least it’s truthful!

If you’ve taken the time to set boundaries and ground rules, it should be easier to only take the calls that must be dealt with. Start adjusting your language and even the ‘emergency’ calls from work will be cut.

What compromises do you allow as you communicate with your colleagues in work? Are there other changes you could make that would help you switch off when you get home? Or is this all just a load of old tosh? Work-home balance, let’s talk about it in the comments.

El is the smiley face of Heaven and El and UK charity Give A Brick. She spends her days writing stuff to make you smile, inspiring people to share their awesome selves with the world and building nifty looking websites. Say hello to her on Twitter or subscribe to her RSS feed but whatever else you do, smile. It’s El’s favourite currency.

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How Being A Little Badass Will Help You Thrive In 2011

Christine — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:35:19 +0000

What mindset are you choosing to adopt as you come into this New Year? That’s the question I’m asking as we kick off the Recession Proof Your Career in 2011 series.

With the squeeze on jobs and small businesses there are two places you might be. The first is siege mentality: head down, resigned to whatever comes and feeling pretty powerless about it all.

The second is seeing yourself in the director’s seat of your own work and life, allowing the perspective and energy of that place to keep you mobile and alert to this year’s possibilities. Whatever they may be.

Assuming you’re adopting the second of these mindsets, one of the things that’s going to help you is unleashing your inner rebel.

Get badass

A lot of you professional folks have done well in the world of work and business, not because you break rules, but because you’re beyond brilliant at following them. Sometimes you censure yourself rather than risk stepping outside of safe parameters. Even when you’re breaking the rules it’s in acceptable ways.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you do anything to put yourself or anyone else in danger. On the contrary, I’m suggesting that you could help recession proof yourself by taking more of the right kind of risks.

You see, the world of work is changing. For all of us there’ll be a little bit of reinvention involved. And you need a tiny bit of rebellion to push against what needs to change.

What rules do you need to challenge or break for yourself this year? How might adding a bit of rebellion add a bit of zest to your career? How do you imagine that’s going to positively support you?

And to make sure you get first hand news of the coaching package accompanying this series, make sure you’re on my VIP list by subscribing here.

photo credit: jk+too