Take Bob who was living in the grip of one such “truth” when I began working with him.

A young, talented and ambitious accountant, he’d recently been disappointed to find that he hadn’t even been nominated for the promotion process that would eventually allow him to apply for partnership. But the icing on the cake was the following advice dished out to him by his HR Director:

“You can’t have a career and a good work life balance,”

When I asked him to help me understand, he shared that he wanted to have a life, as much as he wanted to have a career. He was no slouch. He’d work the hours to finish audits on time, and he’d conduct after-hours client review meetings no problem. But when the pressure was off, he’d leave work at six and spend his evenings with his wife and two children, instead of doing the politically required thing of staying at his desk.

This went against the grain for his firm. So, if he wanted a career there he was going to have to choose between two parts of him that he did not want to experience as ever being in conflict.

Reframe The Belief

The first step in our coaching work was to challenge the assumption in the belief.

“Is it true that one cannot have a career and a rich life beyond it?” I asked.

As we talked it through, it became obvious that, while it was true of his company, he could think of lots of other people in his life and in the public eye who had good lives and good careers.

Take Back The Power

Next up was for Bob to consider whose picture of a professional life he was going to follow: his own or his firm’s.

In the former, Bob himself could set goals for himself and decide what was and wasn’t okay for him. In the latter, he’d hand over much of his power to his firm. They’d decide what was appropriate, and Bob would moderate himself to fit in.

He decided that constantly measuring himself against some external standard, as he had been until that point, was no longer for him. Deciding to put himself in the driving seat of his own career allowed him to feel much more confident and resourceful.

Can You Get What You Want Here?

He decided to test out his current firm by having a further conversation with the HRD about how much latitude there actually was on worklife issues. But he returned to me disappointed.

“The partnership is a club,” the HRD had said. “It may say it values worklife balance, but really it expects complete loyalty. Either you’re happy to play by the rules or you’re not.”

We looked at the kind of club this partnership actually was and whether it was one of which Bob really wanted to be a member. He reflected on the phenomenal professionalism on the one hand; on the other he spoke of the failed marriages, the confirmed singletons, the relationships that appeared to exist purely on convenience. He started to square up to the possibility that this was not a club to which he would willingly belong.

Where Can You Get It?

With my support, he then went off and began having tentative chats with people in his professional network. He was trying to get a feel for how life was in other accountancy and professional service firms. Many of them seemed to have similar cultures. But some of the mid-sized, more entrepreneurial ones appeared more open to the possibility that their people might want to have more in their lives than work.

Finally, he was offered and accepted a senior management role for a smaller firm, with a fast-track route to partnership based on how things mutually worked out.

The last time I spoke to him he’d just been promoted, and was delighted.

Bob’s is just one example of how career rules can work against individuals, and how it’s possible, by getting clear of what’s true for you, to find a better fit.

What career rules might you be unduly struggling against? How might using Bob’s example free you up?

photo credit: Aerokev

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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.

Related posts:

1. Looking At Life Through The Eyes Of A Child
2. Split Work-Life Personality? Join The Club!
3. Deviation From The Norm – My Different Kind Of Work

Corporate Concept

The term emerged in the 1990s, coined by corporations responding to the challenge of increasing workplace stress on the one hand, and greater social need on the other. “Talent”, as they label the smart folks whose skills keep the company productive, were looking not just to have careers, but to be able to be parents and carers too. Heck, some of that “talent” even wanted to spend some of their lives completely away from work.

And so benefits like flexible working arrangements, childcare, and sabbaticals became more prevalent, alongside in-house initiatives like gyms and stress management training.

These undoubtedly help make a lot of people’s lives better. But it’s important as an individual to know that whether they help you or not, their primary motive is not your welfare, but the protection of the bottom line.

Work vs Life

Implicit in the corporate concept is that work and life are different and separate. Worse, they stand against one another as two values – the only two values – competing for your time and energy.

If you find yourself going a little crazy juggling your workload with all you have to do outside, there’s no concept that the picture could be wrong. Or that things within it could need a fundamental rethink. Including how liveable your job actually is.

It all boils down to these two simple, logical and therefore hypothetically manageable parts: work and life.

Your Whole Life

Coaching and writing for people around work life balance, I have a different picture. Because my interest is in you, I want to work with and talk to all of who you are.

Of course work is a key part of your life and of helping give a sense of identity. But it needs to be seen as an integral part of you. Just as your family, friends, special relationship, sports and hobbies, and spirituality are not things you should leave at the office reception desk.

What Do You Need?

My intention in writing this is not to make you more cynical of corporations. They are important in the whole, bigger work life picture.

What I am suggesting is that you don’t get sucked into framing something in a way that doesn’t jive with your nature.

Take your power back. Ask yourself what’s important from the perspective of your whole life. Can your company’s work life balance ethos and programs support you? If they can, brilliant. Either way, simply avoid being cast in a mould that is not of your making.

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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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1. The 10 smartest things you can do to get the most from your next team building off-site
2. How to tackle a workaholic boss and come out winning
3. What Employers Need To Know Now

On top of that, the bogey man of today’s employment market can be the all pervading fear factor, threatening to annihilate you if you dare reassert some control.

Fortunately, there are some simple, yet effective, reframes you can do that allow you to see things in a more self-supporting way.

The following paragraphs give you a step-by-step process to getting your career back on track.

1. Step away from the victim role

   Unfair things shouldn’t happen to good people. But they do.

   I see it all the time at the moment. Talented professionals falling foul of politics around promotion processes; loyal workers expected to put up with unilateral changes to their employment conditions; team stars becoming scapegoats because they chose to speak out against unhealthy dynamics.

   A degree of positive venting about whatever happened is normal and healthy. But guard against ongoing bitching to anyone in your professional network. The sad truth is that it does you more harm than the company that has wronged you.

   You absolutely must decide to take your power back from the situation and move on.

   That mindset switch of itself jolts you from being victim, to being resourceful.

2. Challenge your assumptions about the situation

   A guy I coached recently was distraught when he not only failed a partnership board but was told never to darken its doors again. And, yes, his bosses had been entirely remiss in putting him forward without having supported and mentored him. But he’d naively gone through the process believing he’d get a coveted share in the company purely on merit. He hadn’t considered the need to show an ability to understand company politics, or to have networked with the decision makers ahead of the board.

   Companies are not fair places. They are business institutions, and play by business rules. You are completely dispensable to them, whether they want you to believe that or not.

   Look yourself in the mirror and ask what faulty beliefs you’ve been holding about the situation in which you find yourself. See how hanging onto those assumptions is keeping you stuck. Decide what you need to believe instead.

3. Ask yourself how okay things are for you

   Once you’ve got yourself into a more rational mindset about things, it’s time to confront whether – or not – you’re prepared to accommodate the injustice that’s been served up to you. Instead of imagining that you have to put up and shut up,  see instead the choice you have.

   How okay is it really for you to accept what’s been left with you? If you’re happy to live with the situation – if you can see it opportunity in it and make it work for you – that’s one thing. But, if it has crossed a fundamental boundary for you, you need to acknowledge that to yourself.

   You are not obliged to make yourself crazy trying to justify to yourself that something’s okay when it is not.

4. Explore your move-forward options

   Coming to this choice point has allowed you to get considerable energy back. The next step then is around how you direct that into action that allows you to move on positively.

   What do you want for yourself now? How are you going to achieve that?

   If you’ve decided that for now you’re going to see the lesson in what’s happened and stick around where you are, what’s in that for you? With that in mind, how are you going to re-engage?

   If you’ve chosen that what’s happened is insurmountable, what are you going to do to take yourself positively out of your current situation? What scenarios are open and fruitful that are obvious? What are the more blue sky and out there opportunities that excite you? What small experiments can you make that allow you to test things out while keeping your options open?

Use these four steps to get your passion for your career back on track

There’s no doubting the enthusiasm for work and life you can get from thinking of yourself as a new work pioneer. But sometimes the wheels come off the track. The way back is through seeing the opportunity in the situation using the steps above. Follow them and you’re work life will once more be rocking.

So, where will these steps take you? What has resonated with you most here, and how can you use this thinking to up the ante on your working life?

photo credit: woodleywonderworks

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1. The Opportunity In The Silence
2. What If There IS No Work?
3. How to stay in your current job AND enjoy it!

The other day I was doing a thorough review of the analytics of my site with Marketing Coach, Jim Connolly.

We discovered an interesting thing.

Lots of people are reading my stuff at 2am.

There could be two reasons for this:

Either you’re so passionate about what you’re doing that you’re burning the candle on social media searches. Or some problem is keeping you awake, enticing you online in search of solutions.

My writing and outlook on life can be very upbeat. Sometimes I struggle to get across that I know what it’s like to see no solution to your problems. But the truth is I’ve been there myself in spades. Which means I’m not just well equipped, but also delighted to support you find your way through whatever challenges you’re currently facing.

You’re unlikely to disclose what’s going on for you on a post comment. But I just want you to know that I love getting emails and calls out of the blue from people who have read the blog and just want to reach out confidentially.

So, if there’s something you’d like help with, email me on christine (at) adifferentkindofwork.com, or pick the phone up to me on +44 (0) 7767 244977.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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1. 4 Reframes To Get Your Career Groove Back

The Detox In Brief

Here’s the journey we’ve been on that’s helping you get a grip on things:

• First, Set Yourself Goals gave you an exercise to help you get clear about what you really, really want from life.
• The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus challenged you to consider the key things you ought to be concentrating on if you’re serious about getting off the hamster wheel.
• How Is Time Spending You? got you confronting the realities of how you’re actually spending your energies right now. And,
• Time Shifting For Success had you figuring the difference between what you say you want and what you’re currently doing. And zeroing in on what really needs to change.

So, you’ve got lots of things that you’ve begun to put into action. But how do you keep up and build on your own momentum?

What Gets Focus Gets Results

The organising power of the brain is immense. Give something enough thought and attention and you’ll bring it to life. Consider this: all of the best works, be they artistic or entrepreneurial, began as ideas in someone’s head. It just so happens that their creators dared to put the energy and focus into manifesting them.

Those goals and plans you’ve just spent the last two weeks hatching now need similar commitment and belief from you. They need to be nurtured. They need you to have an active system of planning, doing and reviewing that turns them into hardcore reality.

Today’s challenge is for you to decide how to do just that.

What works for me is to hand write my goals in a beautiful notebook and review them regularly. 5 minutes a day is all it takes. I’ve got a routine of taking myself to my local coffee shop, treating myself to a good strong coffee, and checking in on myself. Every day, I figure out one or two key things that, if I do them, are going to help me progress my life plans.

Morning coffee might not be your cup of tea, if you’ll excuse the pun. But find your own routine. Your own positive habit that’s going to make an ongoing difference. And don’t just take my word for it that this kind of process works. Check out fellow blogger Karen Ruby’s view on it too.

Whatever works.

The point is to bring what you want to the forefront of your mind even if briefly every day. And if you can build in a longer weekly or monthly review so much the better. If that feels like a chore, find ways to put fun into the equation. Go somewhere quirky to think and write. Use funky pens or your favourite note-making tools. Put your favourite music on and rock it.

Make the decision to do it, and watch day by day as your life and work change.

So, that’s the end of the series, folks. Thanks for being here with me. I look forward to hearing how things are changing for you!

Related posts:

1. Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox Series
2. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus
3. How Is Time Spending You?

In fact, if you take a look at the ideal week you created in the third post, with the 24 hour snapshot you made in the fourth, chances are you see quite a mismatch.

So, today your answers to three questions will help you zero in on what really needs to change.

What needs to stay in your life?

What’s already good that just needs to remain as is? Remember that change doesn’t mean throwing the baby out with the bath water.

What needs to go?

What are all the things you’re doing that have reached their sell-by date? What are the attitudes you’re holding onto, implicit in what you’re currently focusing on, that need to be ditched?

What one thing can you do right now to begin the process of moving away from these things?

What needs to be added to your life?

What’s missing that you need to start doing? How are you going to add these things? What’s the action you can take right now, today, that will get the ball rolling on this?

As you work through all three questions, think too about who can help you, and what resources you can lean on.

So, off you go and make some changes, not forgetting of course to share some of your decisions and insights with me.

Join me again on Friday, for a wrap-up discussion talking about how you keep your good intentions alive over the longer term. If you want to be sure not to miss it, sign up here to get it by email!

Earlier posts in the series

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox

First, Set Yourself Goals

The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

How Is Time Spending You?

photo credit: nnes

Related posts:

1. First, Set Yourself Goals
2. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus
3. How Is Time Spending You?

But what are you currently focussing on?

You’ll get the answer to this question by looking at how you’re spending your time. Bottom line, if you’ve been feeling that work and life need a bit of a sort out, the chances are there’s a mismatch between what you should be focused on, and what you’re actually doing.

I take some of my coaching clients through this process in detail, and the occasional one says, “yes, but there are lots of things I have to do.” The thing is we don’t have to do anything. You may imagine that you have little choice about how you spend your time. That, my friend, is mistake number one. That, indeed, is allowing time to spend you. It’s giving over your focus to things that are not in keeping with who you are and what you say you want.

We’ll get into more detail about the whole mismatch thing in the next post.

But today’s exercise is all about getting to grips with what an average day in your life actually looks like.

A Day In The Life Of…

Over the next 24 hour, what I’d like you do, is step back and review your moment by moment activities. Set a half-hourly, recurring alarm using the timer on your computer, phone, watch or whatever. And when the buzzer goes, make a note of just how you’ve spent the last 30 minutes.

No need to analyse. No need to change what you do. Just observe and make notes.

Bring them back here on Wednesday, ready for the next stage in the process. If you want to be sure not to miss it, sign up here to get it by email!

What occurs to you as you set yourself the task of doing this exercise?

Earlier posts from the series:

Introducing The Two-Week Work Detox

First, Set Yourself Goals

The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus

photo credit: Robert von Bangert

Related posts:

1. Time Shifting For Success
2. How To Maintain Your Work Detox In 5 Minutes A Day
3. The Critical Few Activities That Need Your Focus