When I asked Jen Smith to write for me a few weeks ago, she could not have known that I was thinking of running an occasional series of guest posts, profiling people who are finding their own “different kind of work”. But serendipity being what it is, this is the theme that she herself chose. Read and enjoy!

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

I wanted to share with you, my own experience with “A different kind of work”. I love this website and it is great to connect with like-minded people, people who are “committed to finding the way to do what they love and to love what they do”.

For ever since I can remember, I have wondered what my purpose in life is. I used to think I was a bit strange, particularly when growing up, as other people didn’t seem to ponder these questions as much as I did. I have realised as I have got older that it isn’t the case that other people don’t think about these things. Particularly through setting up my own blog, I have met others who are on a similar journey, people questioning the status quo around ‘work’, who are committed to creating work for themselves that truly fulfils them.

Where I’m at

I am thirty four, and for the last eighteen months I have really started paving my own path. What do I mean by that? Well, I have done some great (and not so great ) jobs in my time. A lot of my jobs have been in the areas of health / psychology / coaching, but it really hit me last year that out of everything I have done, coaching and mentoring is the thing that I feel really makes a difference and is a natural expression of me (particularly one to one work). I have now trained and set up my own part time business. ‘Paving my own path’ has been about biting the bullet and setting out to do work that I truly love (coaching) and creating it how I want to (working for myself).

Discovering my purpose

For a long time I was a little bit jealous of people who had a special talent or obvious vocation in life, people that were naturally talented singers or just ‘knew’ they wanted to be a doctor, for example. Funnily enough, my passion for personal development was always there. When I was about ten I remember avidly reading my dad’s personal development books and I’ve been like that with personal development ever since. Maybe I knew my purpose all along but didn’t believe that I could actually earn money from it or had the belief in myself to believe I could. Looking back though, the path to discovering my purpose has really given me an invaluable insight into my passion and helps me when coaching other people to do the same now.

Creating my own path

My journey changed in the last eighteen months when it hit me that I probably was never going to find the ‘perfect job’ and that maybe I needed to create it myself. I always liked the idea of being self employed but, if I’m honest, I lacked confidence and self discipline. I held out for finding a job that would be ‘me’, with a steady pay-check, paid holidays and everything already set up (i.e. a bit easier than doing it myself J). I tried lots of jobs, but didn’t find the perfect one. It’s not to say it’s not out there, but that’s where I got to. I realised I need to be self employed, a) because it really appeals to be my own boss and, b) to shatter that belief that I can’t do it (after all that’s what being a coach is all about isn’t it! J). A series of soul searching, and getting in touch with what I wanted and enjoyed, led me back to one to one coaching.

Things are usually easier than they seem

One thing that has really hit me since starting my own business is that when we follow what feels right, even when there is no ‘map’, things fall into place. Since getting accredited as a coach at the beginning of 2009 I have cut my hours in my employed work nearly in half and am now consistently earning an income coaching and mentoring on a self employed basis. That’s not to say I haven’t worked hard and been consistent, but if you had told me that I would be in this position a year ago, I might not have believed you!

Each step leads to the next

I know this is probably obvious, right? But everything I have done has made me who I am today. I am not totally where I want to be with regards to work (full time self employed coach, mentor and writer) but I am definitely on my way. There are a lot of experiences that I look back on, that didn’t make sense at the time but do now.

There is a time for everything

There is a time for questioning and a time for action. I question things a lot and I really think that continual questioning about why I am here has really helped me to be stubborn and not ‘give up’ looking for my passion. We all know people that have given up and settled because they don’t know what they want to do- I have never wanted to be that person. Life is an evolving process, and just because you may not know what you want to do now, or even in ten years time, doesn’t mean you always won’t. We need to keep questioning and learning and being open to discovering our passion. Similarly, it is not a ‘destination’- finding the work we love will evolve. From needing a website for my coaching business I stumbled across blogging and have now incorporated this into my work too. I am sure this journey will look different again in a years time.

Save for your dreams

Saving, and making the most of the money you have, makes a real difference to achieving your dreams. It’s all about priorities. If you want to go back to study, maybe staying in an extra night of the week and cutting back on some non-essentials will help you achieve that? If you really want to achieve something, money isn’t everything, but it does give you freedom to do more of what you want to do.

I have learned, that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” Henry David Thoreau

Jen is a Life Coach and Personal Development blogger who can be found at Reach Our Dreams. You can connect with Jen on Twitter @reachourdreams or if you liked this article then why not subscribe to her RSS Feed?

Related posts:

1. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer
2. Upping the ante in 2010
3. The Silent Rise of the New Work Pioneer

I was asked earlier this week about what it was I actually did, and who I did it for. Not being a natural marketer, I don’t have off-pat answers for these questions. So, in an attempt to articulate them for myself, I began to write a story. Only half way through drafting, did it hit me that it might be an interesting and useful post; that not only did it give some insight into my coaching style and process, but also portrayed something of the journey of people awakening to a different kind of work.

Just for the record, Joe, who you’re about to meet, is an imaginary client, but him and his story are based on my very real experiences.

From the outside Joe’s life is the epitome of success. He’s an Associate Lawyer, working in Corporate Finance for a top law firm, earns a top salary, has a beautiful wife and cute small daughter, and owns a big house in one of London’s prestigious suburbs. But something has rocked his world.

I’d coached Helen, a former Investment Banker and one of his friends some time ago, and she tells him he should hire me to help him regain his motivation. And, indeed, that’s his key coaching goal. “I want to feel energised about work again,” he says. Fair enough. We begin to meet in person about once a fortnight; a relationship that lasts for a little over six months.

A bubble bursts

When I ask him what has happened to de-energise him, he shares that he’s recently had what is for him the crushing  news that the promise of Partnership, which has been dangled before him as a golden carrot for several years, has just evaporated. Fee revenues in his firm have slumped, and as a result he’s been told that he won’t be promoted this year and that the firm can now not guarantee that he’ll ever be promoted. To underscore the reality of this, a number of Partners are being made redundant, something that was, before now, unimaginable in his and other law firms.

He veers between anger and disbelief. “How dare they do this to me?” “What am I supposed to do now?”

“What has it all been for?”

I ask him what being a Partner has meant to him. He tells me that it has been about achieving to the highest level in his profession; that it has meant he’d be secure for life, both from an employment and financial point of view; and that he’d have more freedom to control his own work load. He has put in round-the-clock performances, meeting deadlines on financial deals, in the certain knowledge that it was for “something”.

I ask him what has driven him to want that “something” so badly. He tells me about his working class family and the relative poverty in which he grew up, and how he has wanted to ensure he never returns to that place. He shares how his father, looking back, may have had some kind of personality disorder and how he could be loving one moment and punishing the next and how there was no way of controlling or predicting his mood. Joe admits how unloved and self-doubing he could often feel as a child.

Through our conversations, he comes to see that he has used his brightness as a way both of escaping his father and of trying to get what his father could not give him. He shares with me that, although he often did not particularly enjoy his school studies, his excellent grades were a way of him proving to himself that he was okay.

I reflect to him the brilliance of this strategy. How I can see that whilst he could not predict his father, he had relatively more control over his own performance.

“Yes,” he says, “but crazy as it might sound, despite being top in everything, my achievements have always felt hollow to me. I’ve really never felt good enough.”

I tell him how sad it makes me feel to hear that, and I wonder aloud whether he can begin to give himself permission to be good enough now.

Letting go of an old identity

He begins to confront the prospect that his identity is shifting, but for a while he is so caught up in the picture of himself as an eminently successful lawyer, that this is difficult.

“I’ve been offered Partnership with a smaller firm,” he tells me proudly during one session.

“Partnership?” I say. I’m surprised that anyone is hiring at that level anywhere, let alone in the midst of a recession.

For a few moments he tries to impress me with how glamorous and important it is. He talks of how he can give two fingers to his existing company and let them know that, although they may not want to give him a Partner role, somebody else does. But as he keeps talking I notice that his chest falls, and say so. He admits that this is not an equity role – so he doesn’t get the elusive share of a business for which he’s been yearning. What he gets is a glorified associate role, with a bigger job title, more responsibility on probationary terms and with none of the benefits of a fully-fledged Partner. I reflect to him his continuing need for external things to validate him. He agrees, but goes on to tell me just how brain-numbing it is for him to live with such uncertainty.

Uncertainty and struggle

We talk about this and I share with him my own perspective that life is intrinsically uncertain. When I ask him to tell me more about the affect uncertainty has on him, he shares how deeply uncomfortable and anxiety provoking it is not to be in control of things. I say that I wonder what he is choosing to believe about uncertainty and he tells me that he sees it as bad; as something that has to be fought against and overcome. I suggest to him that he think of reframing it as a creative space: as something that offers potential and possibility. I see this idea provoke a bit of a shift in him. I go on to tell him that, in the midst of uncertainty, there are things of which we can be more certain. I challenge him to put his focus on what he feels as being true and alive in his life right now. I ask him what these might be. He tells me: his wife, child and existing client work. He acknowledges that he can regain some energy for himself by switching his focus.

He turns the alternative job offer down, yet goes through a period where he wrestles an emerging knowing about himself, with a desire for things to be fixed and sorted. He talks about how exhausting it’s starting to feel to him to be putting in 18 hour days; how part of him wants to, yet part of him just can’t muster the energy. I encourage him to start boundarying his time better, so that 18 hour days become less of a norm. He starts to spend more time with his family and to appreciate them more for who they are and what they mean to him. He begins to send me photographs of his daughter and to tell me stories of cute things she has done. He has the insight that, part of his erstwhile drive to work 24/7 has been a way of not having to relate to them so closely. That relationships have until now been scary for him. I tell him I’m not surprised given what he’s told me about his father. “But,” I say, “your past does not have to define your present.” And I challenge him to find the courage within himself to trust that that is so.

Experimenting with new possibilities

One session he says that he doesn’t know if he really wants to do law in the long term. But, his problem is, he says, that if he isn’t a lawyer, he doesn’t know who he is? Or how he will pay his way in life. I reflect to him how I feel him putting pressure on himself to be clear and make a decision. And whether he might not think of his questioning rather as a process. Not, “who am I?” but “who am I becoming?”.

He asks me if I have any advice for him in supporting himself through this period of self-discovery. I ask him what it was he did as a child that he needs to rediscover. He smiles, and tells me that he’d loved both reading and creative writing, but that in the quest to be a top lawyer, both of these had been put aside. I encourage him to reconnect with them; that whilst they of themselves may not be the answer, they give voice to a part of him with which he has lost touch, and which may in turn allow its own creative answers to emerge. He commits both to finding some books that he’ll enjoy reading, and to creating fun writing time for himself in a cafe one late afternoon a week. Next time I see him he’s beginning to look and feel like a different person.

External push-back

Him starting to work more on his terms and to put some life back into his work has the knock-on of upsetting his bosses who have got used to his indispensability. They begin to challenge his loyalty and professionalism, and in our coaching work we look at how this unsettles him and how he can confront them positively and constructively. I encourage him to focus his conversations with his superiors on his delivery of his objectives and to stay clear of needing to get into extraneous stuff about culturally required, but personally damaging behaviours.

He finds that, the more he commits to his personal interests, especially his writing, the stronger he becomes in standing strong against his doubters.

A deeper sense of identity and purpose

By the end of our work he has come to a big understanding of himself: he intrinsically loves law, but he wants to work with consciousness, and therefore continue to work more on his terms. Crucially, he decides that, although for now he’s happy to work for a top name firm, he does not want to be a partner for any law firm. He has recognised for himself the ball and chain that that would mean for him and how it would now take him away from himself and what he is beginning to create in his life. He has even told his firm that they need to take him off any promotion lists they’re still keeping. The sense of peace and internal space he’s created for himself, he tells me, is immense. He’s even toying with the idea of asking if he can do a four-day rather than five-day week.

He’s loving his writing and imagines that he may write a novel whilst still in employment and see if it goes anywhere. He also starts to consider how he may play a bigger role in the world, and he gets involved in a community outreach project in some of London’s Inner City schools, educating the poorest children on what it means to work in the City, but from his new perspective.

Has he met his coaching goal of feeling energised about work again? “Absolutely,” he says. “Although not in the way I’d imagined. I’d wanted things to go back to how they were and I was a bit disappointed at first that you would not play that game with me! Now I realise that there could never be a going back. It has been a magical journey and one that doesn’t stop here.”

And I wonder, as a reader, what you take from that story? And how it might apply to your life?

Related posts:

1. The Silent Rise of the New Work Pioneer
2. 10+1 steps to make coaching work for you
3. Unhappy at work? An alternative look at this week’s job satisfaction statistics

Many of you know that I spent a few days in bed during the early part of this week with what was either flu, or the cold from hell. Yes, I did a little blog reading and emailing, but by and large I didn’t work and was away from social media. In fact, I set aside my normal blogging goals for the week, figuring my first priority was simply to get well.

One of the surprising takeaways from this experience is the insight I’ve had into the nature of the relationships I’m building online. I was blown away by the good wishes I received both on Twitter and by email when I tweeted that I was going to be out of action. And then, when I started back yesterday, the welcome was incredible. It really was like walking into an office of people I love working with; people who are not just my colleagues, but are good friends too. I don’t know if you’ve ever known anything like this in a real office? I certainly hadn’t done so in years, and to have co-created it online is simply amazing.

This in turn caused me to reflect further on a conversation I’d had with Julie Walraven a couple of weeks ago about Twitter. Accepted  social media wisdom for small businesses is that you strive to build massive networks in order to leverage their viral power. But being ill made me realise that there are individuals in my network whose unique lights shine out for me more greatly than others: whose blogs I particularly enjoy reading and contributing to; whose tweets I especially look out for because they’re normally interesting or engaging; whose comments I love reading here. It was these people I both heard from when I was ill and/or missed because I wasn’t around to see them. Big numbers are important for many, but relationships, I’m realising, are important for me. How you turn that into profitable online business, I haven’t yet cracked, and if anyone has any golden nuggets on this, I’d love to hear them.

Meantime, during one of my more active hours this week, I installed the commentluv plug-in. I’d decided that, even though my site is currently being redesigned, I wanted to add it now. Enabling all of you who hang out here to promote your own excellent content is the tiniest thing I can do to show you how much I value my connection with you. Use and enjoy!

Related posts:

1. 3 lessons on work and life from walking 10 miles in the snow

It was Cali Williams Yost across at Work+Life Fit who inspired me to go see Up in the Air recently. Even so, I hadn’t expected there to have been quite so much rich material for my New Work Pioneer thinking as I found.

I hope you’ve seen the film – if not, you must! Meantime, what I’d like to do is give the headlines of the story, share some of the key themes that emerged for me, and leave you with a few pertinent coaching questions to mull over.

The story

It’s the tale of the suave and charismatic Ryan Bingham. Impeccably played by George Clooney – but let me not mess up my post by drooling over him too much! His character is a stereotypical road-runner, who works 24/7, firing people for a living and delivering motivational seminars advocating his own commitment-free lifestyle.

“Make no mistake your relationships are the heaviest components in your life. All those negotiations and arguments and secrets, the compromises. The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.”

But he is about to be grounded. Having taken the advice of a young MBA, his company is re-designing his job to enable Termination Engineers (another strategic HR initiative, perhaps?) to sack people remotely. This, just at a time when he has begun a romantic alliance with Alex Goran, a high-achieving woman who crosses the map just as regularly as he does. Together, they compare travel schedules and polish their badges of success: frequent flyer mile counts; collections of premiere credit cards; priority customer service entitlements.

As they spend more time together, including at his sister’s wedding, Goran clearly pierces Bingham’s once invincible shield. We see him, captured by a burst of spontaneity, fly to Chicago. His intention is to surprise Alex, but he ends up being the surprised one. For there he finds her, complete with husband and children, and struggles to comprehend that her picture of their relationship has not been his.

The scenario provokes a call to action in him, but the film ends without us knowing how he’s going to respond.

Food for thought

Work as an escape

At the beginning of the film Bingham’s lifestyle is portrayed as one to which we all might aspire. He’s sleek, he’s polished, he wants materially for nothing. Who wouldn’t be him?

It’s only as the film unravels that we get a glimpse of the challenges that exist in his personal life, that his full-on identification with work allows him to avoid.

Work as a relationship over which we have some control

Bingham is arrogantly single. The most intimate we see him being initially is when he’s feigning concern for the people he’s firing. We might even covet his calmness.

But the sterility of his life unfolds with the film. He talks of feeling at home in the recycled air, artificial lighting, digital juice dispensers and cheap sushi that define his nomadic existence. Somehow we understand that he feels safer in accepting these impersonal, even toxic, forms of nourishment, than he would risking a real, human connection.

Work gives him a sense of competence and mastery that perhaps relationships don’t. And I wondered how true that might be of us?

The importance of external validation

Bingham’s sense of his importance is, at least to begin with, driven by stuff outside of him, the most significant being his goal of attaining 10 million frequent flyer miles. And I wondered how many of us use arbitrary measures beyond ourselves, both to drive us and to give us some sense of our worth? Job grades, cubicle sizes, our peers and others’ evaluation of us.

By the end of the film, we see him achieve his ambition, but already doubt its value. Indeed, he’s calling the airline, to arrange for points to be transferred, allowing his sister and her new husband the round the world honeymoon trip of which they can only dream.

The challenge of accepting the call to action

As I said, at the end of the film, Ryan is clearly left pondering the question of what he’s going to do with his life. The jury is clearly out. Meantime, the film revisits people whose lives Bingham earlier wrecked by making them redundant. It’s clear that they have used their crisis as a turning point, and have transformed their attitudes to both work and life.

How many of us too hear the deep down question, “Is this it?” but choose not to listen or to take some kind of half-hearted action?

Coaching questions

• What call to action is your working life currently presenting? How are you planning to respond to it?
• Have you ever glamorized work for yourself in any way? If so, how and for what purpose?
• Has work ever been a hiding place for you? If so how? Who and what were you hiding from?
• How would you define your relationship with work? Is work a substitute for, competitor of, or healthy and necessary companion to other vital relationships in your life?
• What and who outside of yourself give you a sense of meaning and identity? How happy are your that this is so?

As you will have guessed, I loved this film and hope it gets an Oscar. How about you? What did you take from it, and how did you relate it to your own work and life style?

Related posts:

1. The Silent Rise of the New Work Pioneer
2. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer
3. What do you do when your life doesn’t go according to plan?

The Silent Rise of The New Work Pioneer spoke of the characteristics shared by the people who, whilst organisations gnash their teeth about better ways to manage, are getting on and reinventing work for themselves anyway. This post talks in more detail about how New Work Pioneers reframe what at first appear to be times of crisis, as experiences that enable deep change.

I’ve seen lots of upheaval in my coaching practice recently. Even before the economic slowdown, things were happening that were taking people to the edge of themselves career-wise, but it has been more marked these last eighteen months.

People being made redundant, or fearing that it’s about to happen. Glamourous and exciting careers losing their sparkle, taking people’s motivation and sense of meaning with them. Promised career paths evaporating, leaving nowhere to go. Beyond stressful environments causing burn-out or breakdown. These are frightening scenarios to live through.

And, society still tends to understand them as things that need fixing. We all know the attitude: take even tighter control of your situation and things will soon be back to “normal”. Whatever “normal” is.

It can be difficult to hear, let alone trust the small voice inside, but the New Work Pioneer knows it’s the only one that counts. They know that common wisdom isn’t going to crack it. Not in the long term. They can see that things they once took for granted have changed beyond recognition. Besides which, they’ve spent years trying to fit in one way or another and that last kick in the teeth means they’re pretty much done with putting themselves to one side.

With courage they understand that what’s happening to them is a bit like an earthquake. The seismic plates of their own being are shifting and their sense of identity has mobilised with them.

It’s a process that can take time. Sometimes years. New Work Pioneers find the courage to stay with their fears and move beyond them. In the middle of what is a big sorting out process, they ask themselves some questions:

What’s true of me personally that’s going to remain?

In my own case, following a near nervous breakdown, which for a period of time made me feel lost and unconfident, I could eventually recognise some qualities as being intrinsically me. Fun, warmth, love, determination, brightness, thought-leadership, a passion for helping people grow and develop, the enjoyment of doing good work, a respect for other people and their lives.

They were going to stay.

What’s run its course for me and now needs to go?

For me, I’d spent years living on other people’s terms, and needing more approval from others than was healthy. I was also addicted to perfection, and had a harsh, driven quality about me.

These things had served me to a point but were now exhausting me and had to be ditched.

What new in me now needs to emerge?

I needed to own a softness and femininity that I hadn’t felt safe in expressing in the male-dominated environments I worked in. I also had to give myself permission, both to be OK just as I was, and to believe I was worthy of a liveable working life.

New Work Pioneers emerge from the rubble clearer and more determined to find a way to work on their own terms. Whether they work within or outside of the traditional corporation is not the point: the point is that whatever they do works for them. They may not have all the answers, but they know they’re on a journey, one that’s uniquely theirs. In time, they may thank whatever crisis got them to that point, because they’ve now got a feel for the treasure in themselves and their lives and they’re not going to let that go.

So, what do you think? Do you resonate with this? What personal awakening have you had or are you having, courtesy of your working life? How has it changed or is it changing you?

Related posts:

1. Lost heart with your current job? Don’t rush to escape

So, last week I took myself off to do a review of my blog business. Any excuse for another trip to Costa, right?!

As you might remember from my Upping the ante in 2010 post, I’ve set myself some pretty ambitious targets and I thought I’d share with you how things are going.

Posts

One of my key ambitions this year was to increase the amount of stuff I was posting, so I set myself what felt like an achievable goal of writing 2 posts per week; 100 posts during the year. Although I haven’t published two posts a week on this site, I have achieved my target by doing some guest posting. This was quite tough at first to fit into my schedule, but with a review of my productivity and better time planning, it has started to become a whole lot easier.

In terms of the content, I decided to experiment with being a bit more daring with what I was writing. I even gave myself permission to share my sense of humour with my How to make sure you never get ahead post, which led to the most comments I’ve ever had, so clearly struck a nerve somewhere. The same was true of posts that said something a little more controversial. For example, I saw real traffic spikes with Lost heart with your current job? Don’t rush to escape, and with Unhappy at work? An alternative look at this week’s job satisfaction statistics. So I’ve definitely got some food for thought from all of that.

Analytics

My numbers for the end of January were significantly up on the previous month, which was when I started really tracking things. Perhaps driven by the increased number of posts, I doubled my number of visitors, and page views; my bounce rate dropped by more than 10%, and my RSS subscribers increased by 50%. I was pretty pleased with all of that.

Critical milestones

I’ve also now been able to tick off some of the first critical milestones I’d set myself as indicating my blog was moving in the right direction. They are:

• Getting links from other bloggers: I had 6 at the point of the review
• Writing a guest post: I wrote 7 things (and 3 questions) professional coaches must know before starting to blog for Remarkablogger that appeared last week. I also have posts pending with Jen Smith at Reach Our Dreams, and Ben Lumley at 6 Aliens.
• Have the blog make money: I’ve now attracted one paying coaching client via the blog. Whilst I’ve always had my traditional sources of referral and hopefully they’ll continue, it was important for me in this venture that I not rely on them and that over time the blog start to become more of an income stream for me. It has now indeed broken into the realms of being a business in it’s own right, which I’m delighted about.

So, what’s next?

Well, that’s where you come in.

I want to make this a place where smart, professional people who want to shake up the old rules of work in some way, come for inspiration, information, conversation – and maybe some entertainment too.

As I move forward I’d love to know what you think is or isn’t working. What you’d like to see more or less of.

Meanwhile, thank YOU for helping me get the thing to this point in its development.

Related posts:

1. Upping the ante in 2010
2. What you ought to know about working for yourself
3. What do you do when your life doesn’t go according to plan?

Did you see Get Ready to be a Change Maker by Bill Drayton and Valeria Budinich over at the Harvard Business Review this week? The article talks about recent economic history, how we’ve cycled through agricultural, industrial and technological revolutions and are now on the cusp of another change again. In their words:

“We are transitioning from a world in which a small elite runs everything to a world in which everyone needs to be a player.”

Whilst it’s good to see this being recognised and articulated, and thought given to what leadership needs to look like now, I think that academics and business leaders alike are vastly underestimating the effects of a movement that’s been afoot for years already.

For, whilst they’ve been clinging to their status quo world, a not so small tribe of people has been making things different for themselves, without any need for institutional guidance or direction.

I call this tribe The New Work Pioneers.

They may not yet recognise themselves by this term, but, just as surely as the disenchanted Europeans set sail for the New World all these centuries ago, this group of individuals have already left the old world of work for real or metaphoric pastures new.

The tribe’s membership includes those who have ditched traditional workplaces to create their own lifestyles; those – including freelancers and artists – who saw early on that work as we currently know it wasn’t for them; and those who are taking a different kind of consciousness into employment with the aim of giving themselves a more liveable corporate experience.

The thing that has prompted each individual’s initiation to the tribe has been different. Sometimes it has been a personal change, like the loss of a relationship; the birth of a child; a serious physical illness, either of one’s own or of a close relation; or a mental breakdown.

Sometimes it has been a change prompted by an employer: an experience of harassment or bullying; a redundancy or its threat.

Whatever the catalyst, tribe members get to a point where they ask themselves serious questions about their work and its role in their lives. “Does life really have to be like this?” is not an uncommon one. Once voiced, New Work Pioneers accept the challenge of creating a different kind of work for themselves. In this they set themselves apart from the millions who might hear the questions, but be unable or unwilling to answer them.

New Work Pioneers have much in common:

• They value themselves as people and have a real sense of the choices in their lives. They’ve stopped to think about whose lives they’re living: their own or their families and friends. They’ve chosen the former.
• They appreciate the fundamental role work plays in their lives, not only as a source of income, but also as a way of bringing who they uniquely are to the world. They take their own talents, beliefs and values seriously.
• They’re committed to find the way to do what they love and to love what they do.
• Their value of themselves extends to their partners, families and people around them, and to experiences beyond work that enriches them. They know that work and life are not opposing forces, but part of the whole picture of who they are.
• They see the importance of relationship in their lives and take the time to nurture positive connections with people around them.
• They have a readiness to challenge the status quo of work and to rewrite some of the bizarre rules that are in play around it.
• They are committed to their personal growth and development and they see work as a vital aspect within that. They know that as they change, their work changes too, and vice versa.

So, some questions for you: do you recognise yourself in this description? What kick-started your journey into doing and looking at work differently? And what other things do you think New Work Pioneers have in common?

Related posts:

1. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer
2. Up in the Air: food for thought for New Work Pioneers?
3. 10+1 steps to make coaching work for you

If you’ve been surfing the web you’ll have seen there are a number of blogs and bloggers around that want to make you believe you can be successful on your own terms at work. Here’s how to avoid their pernicious influence:

• Remember what your parents told you about work being a necessary evil. They were right. And life’s about suffering, isn’t it?
• When you share your wildest dreams for a different kind of work with your partner and friends and they say, “You must be kidding”, agree with them.
• Know that it’s nigh-on impossible to change direction once you’re in an established career. Some people have done it, but they’re the exception, and clearly money wasn’t an issue for them.
• Keep applying for more of the same jobs. The next one’s bound to be better.
• Write your CV exactly like the job sites tell you. There’s a formula for what good looks like. Might not be how you’d write it. But remember this isn’t about you.
• Stick to the traditional job search methods. At least you know they work, which is more than can be said for social and other networking. And, for what it’s worth,LinkedIn and BrazenCareerist are completely off the wall fads.
• Learn the rules of interviewing. Particularly the ones about misrepresenting your experience. After all, you do want to make out you’re a good fit, don’t you?
• Figure the work wear uniform for your profession, level and location. You know there is one. Black suit? High heels? Chinos and polo shirts? Get with the programme, buddy!
• Be permanently attached to your BlackBerry, iPhone or laptop. Oh, and that includes when you’re on holiday. Your family will just have to understand. Too bad for them if they don’t.
• Attend every meeting you’re invited to. Even if the subject has nothing to do with you and bores you rigid, you can’t take the risk of not being there.
• Stay in the office longer than you really need to if you want to show your loyalty. It’ll reap benefits come pay review time.
• Engage in heroic activities in the name of work. Walk for miles in transport strikes. Drive your car in the snow and ice when the road authorities advise staying at home. Always remember how indispensable you are.
• Learn the rules of office politics and play them. Game playing at work is just one of those things, and you want to be a winner, yeah?
• Shut up and put up. Learn your place in the hierarchy and defer to those above you. If you see anything unethical going on, turn a blind eye. You don’t want to risk your next bonus.
• If you ever find yourself saying, “there’s got to be more to life,” understand that disillusion is a natural part of adult life. Accept it.
• If the stress of work makes you feel ill, see a doctor. There’s some pretty good medication they can give you these days. Your company might even have an occupational health department that can teach you some ways to cope with your workload better.
• Do whatever training you’re sent on. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’s a load of old bollocks. Your company is paying a lot of money for it on your behalf, and you’ll want to make sure to please the trainer so they give HR good feedback about you.
• If something goes wrong, find someone to blame. You played no part in it and if you’re smart, you’ll avoid any shit landing in your direction.
• Oh, and finally, stop reading this blog. And blogs by people who are really kicking the status quo of work in the ass. In particular avoid Chris Guillebeau, Jonathan Fields, and Pam Slim. There’s a lot of insanity out there. You don’t want it to brush off on you!

I know there’s more – what advice would you add to help people ensure they achieve the status quo?

Related posts:

1. The Silent Rise of the New Work Pioneer

I spent some time this weekend revamping my coaching page. It made me think that it’s all very well for me to write about what coaching is from my perspective. But if you’re someone who’s forking out for coaching, how do you make sure that it does what it says on the tin?

1. Make sure there’s good chemistry. The relationship you form with your coach is fundamental to its success. So, your coach needs to be someone that you feel you’re going to get along with. A good coach will make sure they give you both support and challenge. They’ll be someone that you feel both “gets” you and your issues, and is also capable of asking you the right kind of questions and offering you the right kind of insights to move you along. Take time to check people out, either by subscribing to their blog and engaging with their comments to begin with, or by asking to have an initial brief telephone conversation. If your company is sponsoring your coaching, be sceptical if HR offers you no choice as to who will coach you. And check out the contract between you, your firm, and the coach on confidentiality. You want to be sure that what you discuss with your coach remains between you and your coach. There are some unscrupulous coaches who abuse their power and give inappropriate feedback to the person who’s paying if it’s not you. Don’t leave it to chance.
2. Own the process. It’s YOUR life, not your coach’s. Take charge of the work you’re doing with your coach and don’t hand them the responsibility for it. Good coaches won’t, in any case, let you. And avoid the kind of coach who wants to hold the reigns.
3. Expect to pay. Signing up with a coach should be an important decision in your life, requiring an significant investment of time, effort and money. The money you spend on coaching should be sizeable enough to make you think about whether you’re going to pay it or not. Deciding that you’re going to go for it and spend the money should make you feel good and that the money you’re spending on yourself is worthwhile. That’s true whether you, or a company, is funding your coaching.
4. Make a commitment. As a coach, I make a commitment to do my best in the service of the people I work with. In other words, I put my heart into it. When that energy is met by a client bringing themselves wholly to the process, the alchemy of coaching comes alive. If you are ambivalent about coaching, you’re wasting not just your own time but your coach’s. Think about it.
5. Have clear goals. Unlike therapy and counselling, which can be more ongoing and less tangible, good coaching works towards results. Before you even begin coaching, think about what you want to be different as a result of your investment in the process. What do you see yourself doing at the end? What are you going to be thinking? How are you going to be feeling? A good coach will make goal setting a vital part of the coaching process, but if that’s something they’re woolly about, be sure to articulate your own right at the outset.
6. Schedule sessions regularly. If you want to see real movement and traction from your work with your coach, get sessions booked in the diary at regular intervals. What “regular” means will vary from person to person and depend on what you’re working on. Might be weekly or monthly. In fact the frequency might change over the course of a coaching programme. The point is always to know when you’re going to be next checking in with your coach.
7. Make coaching a priority. For the time that you are doing coaching, make it the most important thing in your life. This means that, if you have scheduled a session with your coach and a work or social thing comes along, you should postpone the work or social thing, not the coaching. Cancelling coaching means you are not taking yourself or it as seriously as you need to, and so its ability to work for you is diminished.
8. Work between sessions. If you’re really motoring in your coaching sessions, you’ll notice all kind of inner shifts going on. This is great! And, you need to be taking what you’re learning from coaching and putting it into practice in your work and life. It’s that inner-outer dynamic that makes real change happen and allows you to see movement in your life.
9. Be yourself with your coach. Interact with your coach like you would anyone else in the world. Don’t put your coach on a pedestal. If they require to be on a pedestal, move on.
10. Stick with tough stuff. Sometimes the going will get tough in coaching. You might find you’re struggling with something, or that something your coach has said has struck a nerve. Don’t swallow it or back out of your next session. Good coaches know how to engage with you at such times in a way that can lead to the most amazing breakthroughs.
11. Know when you’re done. Coaching support is brilliant when you’re working with the right person who’s helping you navigate significant change or growth. But when you’ve achieved that, move on. By all means, keep up the relationship so that you can call upon your coach to help you with a specific challenge you’ve encountered. But don’t make the mistake of dragging something past its sell-by, or by becoming overly dependent on your coach. In any case, good coaches have the inner confidence and grace to be able to tell you when you are flying very well, all by yourself.

What about you? Have you been a client of coaching and what has and hasn’t worked for you? It’d be great to have you share your experiences with other readers.

Related posts:

1. The Birth of a New Work Pioneer
2. The Silent Rise of the New Work Pioneer

Even if you live outside the UK you cannot have missed us Brits Twittering on about the clobbering our little island took recently from the snow. It’s been a bit of a shock to city-turned-country girl here to wake up to the fact that outside of London snow is not some slushy thing that lasts five minutes.

It was kind of fun for a couple of days. So long as it melted quickly and let us all get back to life as usual. Except, it didn’t. And my food supplies started to dwindle. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been one for hunger at the best of times and the prospect of having it imposed on me was pretty scary.

So, last Friday, Steve and I decided to put on our winter walking gear, take a couple of backpacks, and walk five miles to our nearest Tesco. I set off resenting the shit out of it. But it turned out to be a magical experience and I wanted to share my reflections with you.

What you imagine is not what IS

About five minutes into the walk and warming up in all my layers, I began to enjoy the crunch of thick snow under my feet. We began to see spectacular wildlife sights: red kites circling around some prey, a sparrow hawk hovering over its, rabbits scrabbling through the snow for sodden grass, fox trails weaving their way into the distance, tiny field mice scuttling around in the snowy bracken, partridges rushing away from their hedgy hiding holes.

It made me think about how often I put off a big task, thinking I’m going to hate it, only to find that, when I’m in it, I’m absorbed and loving it. There was a real lesson for me here in being present and allowing that to inform my experience.

At tough points: dig in and push through

About forty five minutes in it started snowing. Heavily. We kept walking for a minute or two before stopping and asking ourselves, “should we turn back?” Part of me really wanted to. But by that stage my appetite for the challenge had been engaged and I began to wonder how it might be to keep going.

“Let’s take the risk and keep walking,” I eventually said. And so we did.

For about twenty minutes in the midst of a blizzard, I felt like we were in no-man’s land and had completely lost the plot. But the snow eventually eased off, leaving us no worse for wear, and we made it to Tesco in just over an hour and forty minutes.

And I wondered how often in life and work, we avoid a challenge at the first sign of difficulty. I must admit that I drew the parallel between this experience and where I am in my blogging journey: sufficiently well into it, but with miles to go. I have vision of what I want to do, but can sometimes see the terrain as difficult. Can I push through in order to achieve what I want? Amazingly, life gave me an answer to my question.

See things through to the end

Ten minutes from home a 4×4 passed us and its driver offered us a lift. We thanked him for his generosity, but by that point we were so close to doing what we’d imagined was impossible that, without even conferring, we knew that we had to finish the journey under our own steam. The sense of achievement was immense. I rewarded myself by sitting in a hot bath for half an hour and then making some fabulous food.

It’s all too easy, in my experience, to see the finishing post ahead and to cop out without making it through the tape. Getting home that day made me understand how important it is to see something right through, and to take the satisfaction and pleasure that comes from an ending.

Who’d have thought the snow could have held such gifts?! Have you had any similar experiences, snowy or not, you can share?

Related posts:

1. The Virtual Office of Self-Selected Colleagues