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Careers & workplace advice from Hays

If you are looking to advance your career in 2021’s job market, it’ll require a determined and strategic effort to stand out and a willingness to disrupt your pre-COVID-19 job searching model.

There’s no denying that COVID-19 has – and will continue to have – a hugely disruptive effect on everything to do with the world of work. We’re working differently, collaborating differently and prioritising differently than this time last year. Is it any wonder then that you need to approach your job search differently too?

After all, what worked well when job searching in the past now requires some adjustment. Those who can embrace the new trend to wilfully disrupt their traditional approach to job seeking will be the ones who stand out, land their next job and advance their career.

Here are our top tips to help you advance your career in 2021: 

Be proactive

Mindset is playing a huge part in a jobseeker’s ability to secure a new role right now. We’ve spoken to a significant number of candidates who think that because of COVID-19, they won’t be able to get a job. So, instead of quitting before you even start your next job search, think more positively and understand that when markets change, you must pitch yourself at the right point. 

Build relationships

This begins with being proactive in your job search. Rather than sending your CV and hoping for the best, reach out to the relevant employer and follow up every application. Relationship building is more important than ever to cut through and shine, so make a genuine effort to engage the recruiter or hiring manager when you follow up to ensure you are at the front of their mind. Don’t forget to also ask that all important question, “If you don’t think this role is right for me, what other roles might be suitable?” 

Avoid the scatter gun approach

Don’t use the same CV in every application. Every employer is different and therefore naturally values different skills and competencies. Take the time to research an organisation to understand their values and what they want, then tailor your application to engage them. Yes, personalising your CV for each application may seem like a lot of effort, but if you really want a particular job, you need to invest an hour or two to customise your CV for that role.

You may also think that you don’t have enough time to personalise each application because there are a lot of jobs you want to apply for. If this describes you, it’s time to be honest. Yes, you could apply for them all, but you won’t be applying for any of them very well. So, think objectively about your strengths and skills and identify the roles that suit you best. Then spend time personalising your CV for each one.  

Be brave

To advance your career in 2021, you may need to consider previously unchartered waters. Look at the industries where vacancy activity is highest, even if you haven’t previously worked in them before. For instance, IT, healthcare, logistics, infrastructure and professional services have strong job opportunities on offer, so be brave and consider searching outside your typical parameters. 

Sell yourself

The ability to sell yourself doesn’t come naturally to everyone. But today, if you want to stand out, it’s essential. So, identify and understand your unique selling points and how your key strengths can add value in the job you’re applying or interviewing for. Remember to share concrete evidence of your achievements for each selling point. Practice articulating your pitch to family, friends or trusted colleagues.

In addition, be aware of the first impression you make in an interview. One quick win here is to research or ask your recruiter about the dress code of the company, so that you can dress in line with this for your interview. You don’t want to start off on the wrong foot by wearing something casual like jeans, if their office has a formal dress code. 

Show you used 2020 as a year to grow

A recruiter or hiring manager doesn’t need to know all the details of how your career plans for 2020 went astray. Unfortunately, many people experienced a similar situation. Instead, spend the crucial time you have with a hiring manager or recruiter sharing what you learnt from your experiences during the past year and how you developed and upskilled yourself. For example, did you join an association, volunteer at a local charity, complete one or more short courses or listen to relevant podcasts or TED talks? For those who found themselves unemployed in 2020, showing how you used the time productively to upskill demonstrates an impressive commitment to your field. 

Prove your adaptability

If there’s one soft skill that will top all in 2021, it’ll be adaptability. This is a critical skill given how much change is occurring both within organisations and the wider world of work. So, in your CV and an interview, share examples that demonstrate your adaptability, such as how you were able to continue to add value to your employer and how this makes you a stronger candidate today. 

Don’t let the conversation end with the rejection letter

Persistence is an important trait when job hunting today and one that should not end when you find out your application was unsuccessful. Call or email the hiring manager to ask why your application was rejected and if they can suggest any areas to improve your continuing job search. You may not receive a reply, and you may not receive helpful feedback, but it only takes one hiring manager to give you the constructive advice you need to help you succeed next time. 

Use social media to show genuine interest in your field

Cleaning up your digital footprint may seem like job seeking 101, yet we continue to see countless candidates who fail to review their social media profiles before applying for a job. Those memes you think are funny or the scathing product reviews you posted may not present you in a professional light, so Google yourself and remove anything that doesn’t align with the professional reputation you wish to present. 

Then update your LinkedIn profile, follow industries and organisations of interest, keep up to date with your specific market and post on LinkedIn. Such demonstrated interest in the market will aid your application. 

Articulate how you are most productive

2020 marked a turning point in the way people work, with the acceptance of flexible working catapulted years ahead. With more employers, when relevant, using a hybrid working model, you need to be able to express the steps you’ve taken to ensure you remain productive in both a central office and remote model. Share any changes you made to adapt your working style to remain productive in both settings. 

Good luck. 

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2020 has been a year of disruption like no other. COVID-19 has been the worst pandemic in recent history, bringing with it tragedy and turmoil. But this crisis has also forced us to pivot, innovate and adopt solutions that may otherwise have taken years to achieve.   

In the world of work, the changes of 2020 have been so monumental that they’re signalling a new era of work. One where hybrid working, virtual communication and collaboration tools, and a focus on adaptability and resilience are the new ‘normal’ for most sectors and industries.

Throughout this year, it’s fair to say that there have been many lessons learnt – so much so that it’s difficult to narrow them down. However, here at Hays we’ve thought this over and selected the following as our top five takeaways from 2020.

1. Working from home has benefits beyond COVID-19

Topping our list is the enormous shift in attitudes we’ve seen this year as employers come to understand just how productive their workforces can be when working remotely. The widespread shift to a working from home model during the pandemic has encouraged many business leaders, who were previously unsure or against remote working, to design long-term flexible working strategies for their employees. 

No longer a benefit reserved for a trusted few, the result has been the rise of hybrid workplaces, where some team members are based at home while others are in the office. Such a model gives employees greater freedom to balance their personal and professional lives.

It’s also been shown to have a positive impact on productivity, with a recent survey of ours in Australia revealing that 61 per cent believe they are most productive in a hybrid working model. Just 21 per cent said the central office model is the most conducive to their productivity. The final 18 per cent nominated exclusive remote working. 

As part of the move towards hybrid working, employers have given staff more autonomy in their roles and learnt to trust their employees’ ability to deliver from afar. Therefore, we shouldn’t expect employees to easily adapt, or be comfortable with, any reversal to the level of pre-crisis oversight managers had over their working day, schedule or routine. Instead, this trust needs to be retained as we move into 2021, with the understanding that it forms the foundation of a successful working relationship with staff – regardless of whether they are working in the office or from home. 

For some employers, remote working has prompted them to consider employee monitoring – but again, even here trust needs to underpin your decisions, with most employees believing monitoring is only justified if it is transparent, they are given a say on what data is collected and that data is then used to help and improve their performance rather than identify and punish their mistakes.

2. The value of compassion 

Following the mass adoption of working from home, employers quickly shifted their focus to the mental health and wellbeing of employees. Throughout the pandemic, we’ve seen employers use various strategies, from video conferences for regular team meetings to more informal team communication, to minimise feelings of isolation and disconnectedness. They also encouraged staff to maintain regular hours, take breaks, exercise and eat well to help preserve their wellbeing. 

With this increase in mental health and wellbeing awareness has come greater compassion in our workplaces. Many managers lead teams of people who were, and continue to be, going through difficult challenges. Consequently, they’ve developed a more empathetic approach to their management style.

For example, in 2020 some employees suddenly found themselves with additional caring duties or home-schooling responsibilities while also balancing their work demands. To effectively support and guide employees facing such tests in their lives, it was quickly recognised that compassion was a key factor.

Not only that, but the remote way in which we’ve been working this year has forced us all to adopt a new level of empathy for our colleagues and their personal circumstances – after all, we’ve been given a virtual window into their personal lives. This has led us to become even more tolerant and compassionate than before. 

This is something that, we hope, will remain with us all in the new era of work. After all, even if we are already back in the office, we certainly have a new appreciation of our colleagues and their personal situations.

3. The vital role creativity plays

The challenges, changes and disruption we’ve faced in 2020 forced us to think and work more creatively, including when devising solutions to everyday problems in the workplace.

Your own organisation may have been forced to shift its entire business model, for example, or explore new or alternative products and services. Or perhaps individuals in your workplace took on new tasks and responsibilities.

Whatever the exact circumstances have been for you and your organisation, it’s clear that we’ve all had to employ greater creative thinking in 2020 than we needed to in our pre-crisis lives. For many, it’s this creative process that’s helped businesses remain afloat and chart their way to recovery and back to growth. 

We’ve certainly been pushed to devise new strategies and techniques relevant to the new situations and priorities we found ourselves in this year. Moving forward, we believe that continuing to embrace our creativity will help improve problem solving, innovation, productivity and morale.

4. The power of pulling together as one collective

During 2020, we’ve been brought together in new ways. Although lockdown restrictions and safety measures such as social distancing prevented us from physically seeing each other as frequently as we once did, our eyes have been opened to how powerful our efforts are when we come together – even if we’re doing so remotely. 

In fact, a recent survey in China revealed that there’s been a shift in attitudes, “with [people having] less tolerance of individualistic behaviour and a greater tendency to recognise the contributions of others.”

Various reports have shown people coming together virtually as one, even while the coronavirus crisis kept them physically apart. During this year, we’ve realised what we can all achieve if we work together. Therefore, in 2021, we believe it is important to maintain this collective thinking as we transition to the new era of work.

5. The importance of communication from the top

Throughout this year of intense disruption, leaders stepped up and communicated more regularly, transparently and visibly than ever before. They took every opportunity to talk to staff about what was going on in the organisation, reassure them that they were watching the situation carefully and share the reasons behind decisions. Crucially, they also sought to bolster confidence that the health and safety of staff would always come first. 

Even in the virtual sense, open-door policies were adopted, and leaders made themselves available to anyone who had questions. 

By communicating regularly, staff were kept in the loop and gained a clear idea of the bigger picture and the various cogs in motion to help the organisation and its people through the crisis. 

Reassuringly, leaders also took the time to really listen to what employees were saying. Then, they showed they had listened in the subsequent messages delivered. At a time of confusion and stress, this two-way communication to and from the top helped keep employees engaged and motivated. 

It also proved how important honesty and transparency are in developing trusting and supportive relationships and a sense of inclusion and togetherness in an organisation – even when working remotely. This understanding of the power of communication is a lesson we should never forget.

Within our own organisation, this approach not only meant that management teams were more transparent with staff, but we’ve seen the effect trickle down – our people are more open with one another and with their direct managers. There’s a lot more chatting happening online, a lot more emailing back and forth and a lot of conversations taking place over the telephone and during video conferences. 

It’s hard to see this level of communication ever going away now. In fact, it should be prioritised in the years ahead.

Taking forward the lessons into our new era of work

While these have been five important lessons, we should not downplay the serious personal and economic damage that the virus has caused. However, acknowledging the real positives of such sweeping change, where they exist, allows us to pause, press the ‘reset’ button and instigate useful change in our world of work, instead of slipping back into our old ways in 2021. 

We know now that by coming together, we can make a lot of good happen from a bad situation and shape a new positive reality for all of us, both in and out of work.

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Research indicates that non-permanent, or contingent, workers suffer from adverse mental health for a variety of reasons, many of them due to the working patterns and job insecurity inherent to temp work.

As a contingent worker, inconsistent and irregular work can impact negatively on your mental health. However, you can help to prioritise your mental health by owning your development, establishing a sound work-life balance and adopting a growth mindset.

Step 1: Recognise that independent contractor mental health challenges are unique  

Work in general can be challenging, but it may be even harder for contingent workers, who are constantly adjusting to new employers and work environments.

Before defining a solution, try to pinpoint the cause of any mental health issues. Freelancer mental health struggles may be due to any or more of the following factors:

  • Not feeling part of an organisation’s core team, leading to a sense of being ‘disposable’ or ‘replaceable’.
  • A perception of receiving different treatment to permanent employees.
  • Inconsistent working arrangements.
  • A general lack of security due to irregular work.
  • Constant change and the need to adapt quickly to new environments.
  • The possibility of a lack of stimulation or challenge.
  • Inadequate personal growth or career progression opportunities. 

Step 2: Define ways to look after your mental health at work as a contractor 

The below steps will help you to effectively look after your mental health in freelance work or as a temporary worker. 

Start each temporary assignment well and become part of the team  

Prepare in advance, to make a success of your assignment from day one. Treat temporary roles as if you were expecting to be working there for years:

  • Take the initiative to organise introductions with your team. Reach out to find out about the role of each team member and how your role fits with theirs. You can also get to know your new colleagues on a personal level. 
  • Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Asking questions will help you to be clear about your responsibilities from the outset.  
  • Allow time before your start date to adjust to any new technology you’ll be using. Doing so will enable you to avoid stress from tech ‘teething problems’. 
  • Strike up a good relationship with your boss. A respectful relationship with your manager is important for a temp worker as it is for a permanent employee. 
  • Maintain an open line of communication with your manager. You’re likely to need to communicate with your boss a lot in those first few days of your new temp role. It’s in both of your interests for your relationship to be good.

Establish a healthy work life balance 

Keep your habits and routines outside of work as consistent and healthy as possible. Good work life balance will help prevent the ups and downs of temporary work from causing you stress, and also build your resilience against any setbacks of temp work.

  • Only work your official hours and try not to check work emails outside these hours.
  • Set time aside for hobbies, interests and other things you enjoy.
  • Learn to say no to assignments if you feel you are working too much.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle will also have a positive impact both mentally and physically: 

  • Ensure you get enough sleep.
  • Maintain a healthy balanced diet.
  • Stay physically active and exercise regularly.
  • Minimise your alcohol intake.
  • Make plans for spending time with friends and family members. 

Keep your spirits up between each contract or freelance assignment 

There are a lot of things you can do to progress professionally even when you aren’t in a role

  • Be proactive about your future by working closely with a recruiter to establish a strong pipeline of roles.
  • Use your free time to update your CV with details of your latest position. You might restructure your CV, refresh your personal statement or evidence your achievements.
  • Reflect on what you liked and disliked about your previous role. Consider what implications this might have for your next temp job.
  • Reconnect with your broader network, including contacts from previous roles.

Above all else, see any periods of unemployment as projects themselves. These periods are not times of limbo, but times when you’ll be doing a different kind of work. 

Take responsibility for your own learning and progression 

If you feel that you aren’t growing on a personal or professional level, you can quickly become despondent. Be careful not to lose your sense of purpose and give in to self-limiting beliefs:

  • By doubting yourself you might fail to see the opportunities that are right in front of you. Instill a growth mindset that is about taking responsibility for your abilities.
  • Upskilling and reskilling will help to give you a feeling of greater control over your development.
  • Don’t be afraid to ask for training. Take on any learning opportunities available within the company. When you’re away from work, enrol in relevant seminars and listen to industry-related podcasts.

Treat every temp role or assignment as an opportunity to learn new skills 

Embrace opportunities for growth. Don’t presume that you can’t learn a lot simply because your role is a temporary one.

  • Don’t just see your current role as a source of short-term income. Try to get the maximum value from it as a learning experience.
  • Keep a lookout for opportunities to take on special projects or assignments. This proactivity will help you to feel like you’re moving forward, instead of bouncing from job to job.

Talk about your feelings with people you trust 

Talking about our mental health is still a taboo subject for some. But if you are struggling to cope with day-to-day stress, it’s important to speak up. While it may seem daunting at first, opening up can be a great way to look after your mental health in freelance work. Here’s how to discuss it with your current manager:

  • Ask to arrange a one-on-one meeting.
  • Prepare what you’ll say in that meeting. Try to be honest about how you feel.
  • Have proposed solutions ready but also be open-minded to their suggestions.
  • Talking will help you feel less alone and reassure you that you have support and help from those around you.

Speak to a specialist  

You can request to speak to a clinical psychologist or psychiatrist. You may not need such services but it’s always best to consult your doctor if you have concerns.

If you’re struggling with everyday challenges, a therapist may be able to help you to process your emotions.

You should never feel embarrassed to make changes to your professional life to manage your mental health. The more aware you are of your feelings and thoughts, the sooner you can take action. Increased awareness will enable you to more easily achieve your long term professional goals as a non-permanent worker.  

Learn more about mental health in freelance work and permanent roles: 

Recorded: Thursday 22nd October 2020

As the world of work continues to evolve amidst the pandemic, the demands and expectations placed on business leaders are arguably higher than ever before. As a result, some are experiencing burnout as they lead their teams and organisations through this difficult time.

So today we’re joined by Transformational Wellbeing Coach, Rosalyn Palmer, who is here to share her expert advice to help those leaders who are feeling burned out, establish some balance in their busy working lives.

1. To begin with, please could you introduce yourself to our listeners?

(01:05) So as you say, I’m Rosalyn Palmer and I’m a Transformational Therapist and Coach. I’m qualified as an advanced Rapid Transformational Therapist, which combines clinical hypnotherapy, CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy), NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and psychotherapy. I’m also a clinical hypnotherapist and I’m an NLP based coach, so I offer client therapy and coaching in a combination.

I’m also an emotional wellbeing expert on a local radio show and I have a newspaper column. I’m an author on my own of an award-winning self-help book Reset, and I’m also a contributing author to three number one, Amazon bestselling self-help books as well. So, I have a background in marketing and communications, and I use those skills to really communicate emotional wellbeing in a way that is accessible and understandable to people.

2. Now, why is burnout a topic you’re particularly passionate about?

(02:20) Well, I have been there myself and I like to call my go-to client ‘burnt out Barbara’ or ‘burnt out Bob’. That is my client avatar and I’m so good with those clients because it absolutely was the blueprint of my former existence.

So as I mentioned briefly, I have a background in PR and marketing and in the nineties I ran an award-winning PR company in London and in the year 2000, I sold it and I sold my eight bedroom house in London and I was a millionaire and I moved to the Bahamas. And I absolutely thought I’d got the icing on the cake and everything, and yet I hadn’t, I’d put so much effort in for many years and really not taken care of myself in the way that I now advocate and help my own clients that although I thought I got away with it, dodged a bullet, and just about hung on by my fingernails, my life effectively imploded in the following years. And cancer came along, divorce, breakdown in relationships and really a complete loss of me, myself, my identity, and pretty much everything I had.

And so, it was a catastrophic burnout. And once you’ve been in that place, you are absolutely determined that you will never ever go there again. And so I work with people now to really head them off at the pass because, it gives me no pleasure in seeing other high performing leaders, pay that price and go to that place, and burnout in our own uncertain difficult times is more prevalent than ever before.

Well, thank you for being so candid and sharing that with us Rosalyn. We’re definitely speaking to the right person today in discussing how leaders can go from feeling burnt out to establishing some balance in their lives.

3. Now it seems clear that leaders around the world are busier than ever before, which could be causing them to burn out. Before we really get into this topic, could you define what we mean by the term burnout and maybe expand upon the common signs that someone may be burnt out?

(04:44) We talk about burnout and I suppose a lot of people think, “Oh, it’s when I’m exhausted and I’m absolutely got nothing else left”, but really it goes to a much deeper physiological level than that, because of our wiring, because of our caveman brains, where we have parts of our brains, such as a limbic amygdala, we are wired in such a way that emotions, feelings, the chemicals that come from all the stress that we are constantly putting ourselves under, actually have a really incredibly detrimental physical and emotional effect on us.

So, it can lead to really serious dis-ease; disease. In my case, the cancer absolutely no doubt about it, that although there were other factors clearly mine was very much, I believe because of an unrelenting ten years of stress, which will not lead to a great physical state.

So, burnout in a proper medical term is the body as I said, we are ruled by the limbic amygdala, the part of our brain that means that we survive. It’s the caveman part; I’m going to survive, I can only do one of three things if I’m threatened, I’m going to fight, flight or freeze. And that was a phenomenal strategy for bringing us to where we are today and for the survival of our species over thousands of years. Oh, look, there’s a saber tooth tiger, I’m either going to fight it, I’m either going to run away or I’m going to freeze and bob down and hope it doesn’t notice me, and it’s a very effective strategy.

The trouble is when we get stressed, so when your boss calls you in and goes, “We need to have a chat”, or worse than that they go, “We need to have a chat on Friday” or one of your employees who you, as the leader are dependent on or stakeholders or shareholders, those things can put you under enormous stress. And that stress releases cortisol in the body just as if it really were a physical threat, like a saber tooth tiger, and the body gets flooded with it. And of course, that was effective for getting you to run away or do the other actions, but now you just flood your body with it, and it has a detrimental physical effect within your body. That stress, that cortisol, those coursing around your blood are terrible.

Also, we have, what’s called the vagal nerve. It’s the highway between the brain and the stomach and all those ancient people who said, “Oh, I’ve got a gut feeling. I feel it in my stomach.” The stomach effectively is the second brain, they’ve discovered the vagal nerve and it directly links the two. A good Vagal tone or having this healthy is absolutely key to the parasympathetic system within the body and having good vagal tone and having your parasympathetic system in a way that is really balanced, really measured, really good, affects every single organ in the body. And so when that’s out of kilter, when that’s in burnout or out of balance, that can have an effect not just on your mental wellbeing and how you feel when you get overwhelmed, potentially depressed, but it also can have a physiological effect on every single organ of the body. You can end up with terrible upset stomach, potentially stomach ulcers and even worse things such as I believe where I went myself. So, it’s important to understand that burnout can affect you both mentally and physically, and it will be very detrimental.

Thanks, that was a very clear definition of burnout and as you say, what it can really mean for people both mentally and physically.

4. Do you think that for some being busy is almost a badge of honour? That if they’re seen to be busy, then they will automatically be seen as valuable, and do you think that this might be even truer as we’ve progressed through the pandemic?

(09:08) I do, and I think that that’s always been the case really within a lot of industries and a lot of businesses, being seen to be busy, being seen to be on it. I’m the one who can juggle more plates than anybody else, it has been a badge of honour.

I do also happily see and believe and understand that in maybe the last twenty years, that people really understand the damage that can have, and that it can be counterproductive. It’s not about being busy or being seen to be busy, it’s about being effective. It’s about doing the right work rather than being seen to be the one who’s at the office and at the desk for the longest period of time.

And I think we have much improved attitudes towards mental wellbeing and wellness at work and all of those important areas that are being talked about and supported more than being saved and chained to your desk and being seen to be the one who can be busier than anybody else, I hope isn’t valued as much.

But I think there is a tendency, particularly when people are scared, particularly when we are in uncertain times, they may be uncertain about their future, the future of the company, they may be having to make unpalatable choices if they’re a leader about people being made redundant or changes to make in their business, these are all quite difficult things to do. There is a tendency to then to want to be seen to be the one that’s indestructible and leading it. So, I think it can be a badge or seen as a badge of honour. I don’t think it’s a good badge of honour, but I think there’s a tendency in times of stress and uncertainty that people might fall back into that behaviour, but I would absolutely advocate against it.

I think leaders must set the example that I will switch my laptop off at five o’clock or whenever it is acceptable to do. The example that weekends are for my family, weekends are for my well-being or whatever is right within the context of your work environment, but where you are showing that you have a life and that you respect your life, your wellbeing, the wellbeing of your family and everything else, that’s dear to you as much as that business, that sets the tone for the organisation. So, yes, I think there’s a tendency to have it as a badge of honour. And I would really advocate that people don’t.

5. So how can leaders establish a balanced level of busy-ness?

(11:52) I think that’s brilliant question because years ago I would go on courses and people would go, “So the antidote to all of this busy-ness is we’re going to go and be completely Zen and people opted out of what we call the rat race. And I myself, lived in The Bahamas for five years. So, I know what that felt like walking down the beach most days, and parts of it were glorious, but other parts of it, you take yourself with you.

So, I think the important thing is, leaders and really successful people tend to be highly driven individuals, they tend to be people who can really do wonderful things. And so, I don’t think it’s practical to say, “Stop being busy because you’re going to get burnt out and just be Zen.” So, you must be balanced busy, that’s the key. You can be busy, but with the balance that I’m talking about repeatedly. So, it’s about being busy, but it’s about being effective, it’s about being driven and it’s about creating balance that underpins that all the time, and that balance is both mental and physical.

6. And do you think that effective delegation is a key part of this?

(13:06) It is absolutely. I think, effective and fair delegation. So, you’re not just dumping, but also effective delegation is brilliant because you’re also bringing other people on, you’re sharing.

I spoke to a great management guru recently who uses all the analogy of the Peloton, of the Tour de France, that the Peloton are all there to support each other. Your individuals, but you come together as a team. And sometimes somebody is in the slipstream and somebody’s at the front a bit like when geese fly in formation, they keep swapping over and a different one goes to the front because that’s the hardest place to be and you’re the leader and the others come in the slipstream, but they’re constantly shuffle that around.

So, delegation is good, both up and both down. It’s good because, you don’t want to get overwhelmed with too much and if you do things will fall, things will not get done. You will not be an effective leader, an effective boss, you will not be adding value to your organisation, shareholders, and your employees. And delegation is a way of bringing other people on, so I think more than ever before, it’s crucial to have good delegation skills.

Well, I completely agree with you on those points. I think it’s so important for leaders to remember that they don’t have to do it all on their own and that they should utilise the resources of their teams.

7. Now, do you think imposter syndrome, which for the sake of clarity is when an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments in fear of being seen as a fraud, is playing a part in some leaders feeling that they need to be seen to be busy in order to prove their value to themselves and to others. And how might this be contributing to burnout?

(14:54) I think it’s contributing massively. And as I say, my go-to clients, tend to be six figure earning CEOs, and there’s very few of them that do not have some issues with imposter syndrome, even the ones who are in very elevated positions.

And as you say, imposter syndrome, the trouble with it is that even though you probably are incredibly highly functioning, you’re probably regarded as effective, and in fact, you probably are effective. You deep inside, feel you’re going to get caught out, you deep inside feel inadequate, you feel incompetent and the evidence around you, of how well you’re doing and how high regard you’re held in, doesn’t change that feeling within you.

So again, in times of uncertainty. And we are in a time of collective global uncertainty like never before, every time we think we’ve got a new normal, the new normal goes out the window, firms all took people to remote home working, they got used to it, and then they started to bring them all back again and then maybe you go into a local lockdown and everybody’s back again.

So, there’s massive uncertainty which is very bad for our physiological and psychological wellbeing, because it causes stress, because the brain likes to know what’s certain. One of the rules of the mind is that it likes to know what is certain and what is familiar because familiar equals safe. And so, if you’re already prone to feeling inadequate, if you’re already prone to feeling that you’re going to get caught out more than before, you’re going to up the ante on that. So, you’ll be trying even harder, perhaps the badge of honour that we’ve talked about and even more than that, you’ll probably be feeling bad about yourself, bad about who you really are.

Now I read a study by Dr. Valerie Young and she named some of the kinds of imposter syndrome because they’re really based around competence types. And so, you’ve got the one that we’re probably most familiar with, which is the perfectionist and the perfectionist is, if I don’t do it right, it’s not good enough. I must absolutely do it. And they can be very poor managers because they’ll tend to micromanage everybody around them. It’s like you’re not doing it like I do it. You know, I do it to this level. Don’t do it. So, it’s also stressful for them because they are constantly checking up on everybody. And it’s not much fun for the people working or reporting to them.

And then you have, the kind of Superman or Superwoman is the one who literally at the weekend, I’ve worked with people. I worked with a very high-ranking lawyer who told me that she would get up on a Saturday and cry because it felt so empty. She didn’t feel she had any purpose; she didn’t know who she was when it was the weekend. She hated the weekend, absolutely hated it. She had a stressful job, and there were all sorts of things that weren’t right about it, but she felt she had no identity outside of the work because she sort of was a self-appointed superwoman and gained her self-esteem by what she did within the job.

Sometimes you have people who are just actually super naturally gifted at things and they’re brilliant and they’re the one that you can always rely on and they’re really genius at something. But again, that maybe isn’t very flexible because maybe they’re used to excelling without much effort in certain ways. And then because of the changing world, we live in, that certain way isn’t available anymore or isn’t doable anymore.

You have people who maybe are very reliant on themselves, the buck stops with me. I think this was me, I think I was a bit of a perfectionist, but I also was a kind of a soloist. I never grew up really thinking there was a safety net, and so, everything was down to me, I’ve got to do it all. And they’re terrible at asking for help because they see asking for help as a sort of weakness or failure.

And then you have the expert and they’re just maybe people who perhaps come from a very academic family background where they’re held in high regard about being an expert. And of course, we need experts more than any time before, but they can often be very highly competitive with each other. So, all of these tend to be traits that lead to imposter syndrome. And what imposter syndrome does is that person gets a bigger dichotomy, a bigger gap between how they truly are regarded and how they feel about themselves. And it becomes more to the point where often people who really have imposter syndrome will effectively crash and burn.

8. We’ve already discussed how busy these times are for business leaders. So, how can they take time out of their schedules to look after their mental health? And why do you think this is important?

(20:16) So, if you look at coaches who work with elite performance athletes, they clearly develop mindset, their nutrition, their training schedule, but I’ve seen it where people are asked, “What do you think differentiates elite athletes from an ordinary person?” And people will always say, “Oh, it’s the mindset, the training, the physical ability they were born with”. No, the big thing that they have in their schedules is rest. All athletes, peak performance athletes, high performance athletes, footballers, you name it, they have rest and recovery literally written into their schedules because they know they can’t go all the time. They have bouts of it, and then they have recovery time.

And when we’re kids and we’re at school, most lessons are usually about forty minutes long. And that’s based on the fact that that’s probably about as much time as you can pay attention before you need a break. So, bearing in mind, kids at one end performance athletes at the other end, we get into jobs, particularly as leaders and we just go and go and go. And we do crazy things like now, we’re maybe not commuting, and we go, yes, I’ve got that two hours extra every day, I’m going to do more work. And that was me you know. You start looking at your emails on a Saturday, you eat into all those boundaries.

So, here’s how they can stay balanced and stay well:

  • Every hour, maybe they don’t work forty minutes and then take twenty minutes off, that’s maybe not feasible, but literally five or ten minutes every hour in between every meeting.
  • For every Zoom meeting, don’t schedule your diary so you’ve got one from three until four, and then the next one. Take a break, five minutes, ten minutes.
  • Weekends, sacrosanct unless absolutely, your company is firefighting. And of course, you’re the boss, the buck stops with you. You’ve got to do it if that’s the case, but don’t make it a habit, do it when it’s necessary, but don’t make it a habit. Treat the weekends as importantly, or whenever it is, you have your breaks.
  • Holidays, that’s been difficult this year to have a holiday. But take a holiday, take a week off. Absolutely spend time decompressing, having time for you, time in nature, time with your family, all the things that nourish you in all those ways.

Think of the performance athletes, rest, and recovery. And so every hour, a little bit of a rest and recovery, every evening, rest and recovery, every day, rest and recovery, and then the weekends and then the holidays and the best leaders, the most high performing ones are the ones who really get that right.

That makes sense. It may not always seem easy to carve out the time to look after your mental health, but clearly, it’s vital.

9. Now on the topic of mental health, in recent years something I’ve noticed is that the stigma around talking about mental health seems to be decreasing. How can leaders display vulnerability and open up to their team members if they are feeling burnt out or too busy. And what do you think are the benefits of doing so?

(23:44) It absolutely has to come from the top to foster and create a culture where people absolutely feel heard and that they are able to be supported in their mental wellbeing. Again, each leader is going to feel differently about how vulnerable they feel they want to be.

I myself, when I was high-performing in PR and then I was Head of Marketing for a charity, I didn’t really talk about my mental health issues even though there were times I’d been on antidepressants for years, and there were times that I barely thought I was hanging on by my fingernails. I just did not feel it would be very career enhancing and I came up through the eighties, nineties and noughties, times have changed, thank goodness.

So, I’m not saying that they have to do a massive revelation of the soul and tell everybody their innermost feelings but set the tone by showing the courage to be vulnerable. There’s a book by a woman called Benet Brown, which is called Daring Greatly and in it, she basically says that being vulnerable, open and transparent is the greatest courage of all time. And I know that because even when my own book came out two years ago, I spent the weekend before it was published, pretty much crying. And I rang my publisher up and asked them if they would please hold the production of it. Because I realised that for the first time in my life, I’d really laid myself bare. And I knew there were people who would have known me in agency life and all sorts of walks of life, who would be quite surprised to read that I’d been depressed and lots of other things, because I’d effectively hidden behind a really good mask.

And I suddenly felt super exposed and it wasn’t very comfortable, but very soon after it was published, I got feedback. Somebody on Twitter who I don’t even know, but she’s quite a high profile, sent me a direct message and went “I read your book, I’ve been bulimic for fifteen years, and I’ve just admitted it to my husband and I’m going to get help for it”. And I thought, “Wow, if me telling my story, if me being vulnerable has just helped that one person, I’m feeling pretty good about that.” And there’s almost not a week that goes by that that that doesn’t happen.

So, they do need to be vulnerable, they do need to set the time, but it doesn’t have to be the biggest revelation in life. It could be let’s all meet for virtual coffee. I was talking about this earlier today, it’s my new thing. Let’s have a time where we just come together, it’s not about work. We don’t get those chances to know what’s going on in each other’s lives. Let’s do that, at five o’clock, we’re going to have a happy hour and everybody turns up and we’re going to, we’re not talking about work at all, we’re just going to talk about our friends, families, and what makes us tick. And then the leader is going to obviously show some vulnerability like, “Well, I’ve been finding it really difficult these last few weeks.” There were days I was not sleeping as well as I normally do, and I discovered that switching all electronics off an hour before bed, that doing some exercise before bed and reading certain things or listening to this meditation or mindfulness or hypnotic tape has absolutely changed how I feel this last week. Now that’s being vulnerable and setting the tone, it’s also getting everybody their permission to then open up themselves.

I’m glad that as a society, we’re now starting to reframe vulnerable as brave.

10. And what about self-awareness and self-reflection, what would you say are the benefits of these? Do you have any practical tips for our listeners to help them weave this into their daily routines amongst their busy schedules?

(27:44) I think self-awareness is crucial, but often if again, you are one of these very high performers. Often what makes people successful is being driven in those ways, we highlighted some of them before. The perfectionists, they can be often catastrophic thinkers, “Oh, this is going to go wrong if I don’t do everything”. They can have all or nothing thinking, they can be very black and white, which doesn’t make for a very happy body, brain, and emotional place to be within your own skin but it often makes for a very effective and highly performing leader.

So, self-reflection, and self-awareness is important, but I think it can come gradually. I think self-acceptance is the first stage, and self-love and self-nurture is absolutely the starting point for that because a lot of even successful people don’t even entirely like themselves that much, so it really has to start with that. So, I think the self-acceptance is about, this is me, I do the best I can with the resources I have and the circumstances I have, and I have phenomenal coping skills and okay, I don’t always get it right, but I absolutely learn from it, I share with others, I build and I grow on that and, I nurture myself. I make myself a human being and not just a human doing by nurturing myself, cognitively how I think physically, what I do, I get out in nature, I eat well et cetera, and spiritually and psychologically. I listen to great uplifting Ted talks, motivational recordings, or I listen to something that’s harp music and very quieting, or I do a meditation, I’ve learned to meditate. So, I think the self-reflection is very much about self-acceptance, self-love, and self-nurturing.

Of course, we all need to have a degree of self-reflection but I think often when you’re in a difficult situation, you are a leader and you are the one who maybe is ironically galvanised by some of those not great things that make you a great leader often, that feeling of catastrophic thinking, all or nothing thinking, or I must get everything right. Being entirely self-reflective and really getting it right is probably tricky, but learning to be self-loving and loving yourself, learning to be self-nurturing, learning to value yourself, all of those will absolutely take you to a place where you can build upon it.

Those are some very practical examples, Rosalyn, thank you. And of course, burnout amongst leaders likely to also impact the team members that they manage. So, taking moments in the day just to reflect and be present is a healthy habit to start integrating both personally and professionally.

11. Now, as many of us continue to work remotely or in a hybrid way, some are finding it hard to distinguish between their work and personal lives. How do you think this is fuelling the risk of burnout in leaders in particular?

(31:01) I think whenever the boundary is blurred between your work and personal life, it invariably has a detrimental effect on both. Again, I deal with a lot of leaders and high-performing individuals and they are often incredibly successful at work and their personal lives are a car crash, and they really are paying a very big price personally in relationships, often their family because of that success. And obviously it can work the other way around as well.

I write in my book that I had a client; he ran one of the leading agencies in London, in the nineties. We had lunch and he was in tears and I’d never seen him in a state like that. And he was a very high performing well-regarded individual on the front cover of Campaign and Marketing Week a lot of the time. And he said that his son who I think was five or six had come home and he’d been asked to draw a picture saying “My Daddy” and he’d drawn a picture with his father with his back to him and his mobile phone to his ear. And he said in that moment, his heart broke and he thought, this is how my son sees me.

And again, I also mentioned in my book, that when I decided I really needed to sell my PR company was my own six-year-old son. On a Friday, I came home and realised I had not seen him awake since Monday. And that was what they call an AHA moment where this is not right. What is the point of being a mother if I don’t even see my child during the week? Because I was getting up at six and going out before he was awake, he had a nanny. I was getting home at eight, nine, ten and eleven and he was already in bed. It was like this is not what motherhood and relationships are supposed to be about.

So, you really can pay a price one way or the other and it’s too high a price to pay. So, the important thing again, I’m going to come back to the busy balance. It’s about the balance, it’s about getting those things, right so that work doesn’t absolutely dictate and mean that you have no decent private life. And so that your private life also you have the understanding, particularly if you’re the CEO again, and times are tough. There are times you’re going to have to take those calls. There are times you maybe going to have to work and push on through the week.

So, my philosophy for that, that I developed kind of the hard way and now share with everybody is what I call the five F’S. So again, it’s so easy to remember because I think things must be relatable and I think we can all get overwhelmed with too much good advice. And then when we’re feeling bad, we’re like, what was that good advice? What was that book that told me? So, this is a simple and practical way to remember the balance. And so, you think about your hand, you have five fingers and you have five f’s. And so, a balanced life is a life where you have a balance and every day check in and think, have I addressed one of these or all of these? And if you haven’t, because there are some days you’re going to have to push on through, you think, how soon am I going to address this? And the five F’s are:

  1. Faith
  2. Fitness
  3. Friends
  4. Family
  5. and finance.

And if you think about somebody like John Paul Getty, people thought he was wealthy and rich, but he didn’t have any faith, he had no friends and his family, none of them loved each other and they were fighting over the inheritance and everything. He was not a fit man, very unfair in those mind and body. Yes, he had lots of finance, but he did not have the other four, so, he had one out of five.

Mother Theresa arguably didn’t have the finance, although she was able to channel lots of money through her efforts to raise funds for people. Friends, she had a global commitment of friends, all the other sisters, all the nuns, everybody who loved her, she was a friend with princess Diana. Family, effectively, those sisters and her sisterhood was her family and the poor, she treated them like a family. Fitness, I think she lived to be a hundred and she was articulate and, on the ball, right to the end. And faith, I think they’re going to literally make her a Saint. So, there’s an incredibly wealthy woman.

And the way to keep that balance is every day I check in on that, I just get my hands out and I go, right, what have I done today?

  • Fitness? Right, good, I did Pilates, but maybe I need to relax. I might just read a book for half an hour.
  • Have I checked in with my friends, have I been a friend? I know I’m going to set a virtual coffee up with my friend, Julie and let’s jump on that.
  • Family, have I connected with my nearest and dearest and my loved ones? Not everybody loves their family, but that’s your actual tribe, that’s who’s important to you.
  • Finance, what have I done to enhance my career? What have I done to bring my finance in and how am I handling my finance? And as you get more finance and I’ve been in that position, how am I paying it forward, how am I doing good with this? Money is energy, how am I moving that?
  • And then faith, what have I done to really check in on my faith. For me, a walk-in nature, just sitting quietly and just watching things. You know, it’s a secret, but now everybody’s going to know occasionally I do hug the odd tree.

I find that incredibly grounding. And so, I think that for me is just a philosophy you can live by, you can be in the office and live by it. You can be at home and live by it.

The five F’s. That’s very simple, easy to remember and very practical. Thank you.

12. What are the signs that leaders can look out for to spot burnout within their teams? Presumably this is far more difficult for leaders to notice in this increasingly remote and hybrid working world.

(37:20) Yes. I’m trying to think of the word. Is it presenteeism or something? You know? So, when somebody is having that fear that if they’re not seen to be constantly present, they’re not doing their job.

Yes. Presenteeism, I think we’ve discussed it on some of our podcasts previously actually.

(37:35) Absolutely, I think that’s probably one of the big red flags. So back in the day when you were in the office and when you are in the office again, it’s the one who will still be there later than anybody else and is coming in at the weekend. But again, I suppose with all the monitoring of what’s going on, it’s the one who’s still on their computer, and sending, you can see when emails are sent. It’ll be the one who’s sending the email at five o’clock in the morning and then maybe eight o’clock in the evening. They’re clearly not setting healthy boundaries for themselves. So, I think that would be a very first one to spot.

I think obviously changes in behaviour. You know, if people are maybe coming on to Zoom or team conferences, and if you have a policy that you don’t have to put your camera on, but they seem to be constantly hiding behind their avatar. You know, why is that? They’re not wanting to be seen and wanting to be present, they’re not engaging any changes in that kind of behaviour. I mean, obviously not being able to be a socratic critical thinker, you want people within the organisation who are able to be balanced in that way to be asking good questions, to be making good decisions. Obviously, you want to head it off at the past before maybe they make a fundamentally big mistake that affects the bottom line of your organisation or your reputation.

And so, it is really spotting the clues along the way. I had members of staff who reached near burnout and I think, it would be things like not engaging in a normal way. Clearly the work would be suffering, maybe avoidance, a lot of avoidance. So again, it’s all behaviours that are trying to get them to help themselves, but not in a positive way.

13. And if leaders do recognise these signs of burnout within their teams? How should they go about addressing them?

(39:35) So I think we’ve covered quite a lot of them. I think they need to set the example first and foremost, they need to set the example that boundaries are good, boundaries are okay, we are an organisation that respects that you have a life outside of this business.

As a leader again, and I keep saying, unless it’s absolutely crucial, unless you’re kind of in a make or break, life or death scenario when of course you have to do it there and then, but don’t email that person on a Saturday and ask them a question, set a good example, create boundaries that you respect for yourself and you respect for other people. Set those boundaries again that’s showing their own vulnerability.

Turn up for that happy hour or that virtual coffee with everybody and talk about how you’ve been feeling. That could be maybe done if you don’t feel comfortable doing it in person, it can be done in the company newsletter or the company blog. It can be a blog about how I rediscovered the joy of baking. Again, I was talking to a very high performing client recently. She told me that she’s baking baguettes that are so good that her local deli wants to commission her, but she hasn’t got the time to make them, but she’s making them to such a standard. And she did that during lockdown as a kind of form of therapy and because at first, she had a little bit more time on her hands and now it’s a kind of a go-to mental wellbeing thing for her.

So, share that in the company intranet or blog or newsletter or whatever it is you do again. Set that example.

14. And building on this a little more. How can leaders incentivise as well as role model healthy behaviours to ensure that teams are also able to establish a good balance? And do you think this is becoming even more important in this new era of work?

(41:31) Absolutely, I think it must be seen as essential and it must be valued. So, you’re right, it must be incentivised, and obviously different companies will incentivise people in different ways. But I think being highly regarded and being rewarded for being an effective employee rather than, I’m here for the longer hours, but I get more done in short periods of time for being a good role model for others. I set boundaries, I stick by them, for doing what you say and saying what you do, for having integrity, values that people uphold, for being a team player if that’s indeed what you need to do and not tending to slip into one of those imposter syndrome or perfectionist syndromes, which you tend to come from the lone wolf or the perfectionist but actually being able to work within a team and support other people and support their work and actually forgive, even if it’s not perfect, as long as it clearly, isn’t detrimental to the type of business that you’re in.

All of these things can be incentivised and rewarded. So, you’re effectively incentivising and rewarding somebody for being an effective employee and for being a healthy employee for caring about their own mental and physical wellbeing. Clearly you can incentivise that by giving them – well it used to be reduced gym memberships, or maybe even gym facilities within your company – that might not be possible anymore. But I know somebody who runs a virtual choir and she’s running an actual choir and now it’s virtual choirs and companies are coming together or teams are coming together on Zoom and then having choir sessions, they’re having an hour of singing.

Now who would have thought it but we’re tribal people and we used to all get round campfires and sing together. Now I can just imagine there’s some leaders listening, going, no, it’s absolutely not happening within my organisation, we are not all getting together and singing, but these are community, connective team, tribal behaviours that actually now, more than ever are really important and again to show that that’s valued to incentivise people to do that. We’re incentivising you by something we’re going to give, but also incentivising and rewarding that you’re seeing within them, that they’re creating that balance.

The five F’s, how is your family? What do your friends think about this? Or we’re going to create a yoga class for everybody, why don’t you bring a family member or a friend along? Because we value your family members and your friends, we value our family members and our friends, so we want to value them in you. It’s taking all of this out and now, although it’s a difficult, challenging time, more than ever this is not only a necessity, but I think it’s a phenomenal opportunity for the more forward-thinking leaders to do.

15. And what impact will these kinds of behaviours have not only on the wellbeing, but also on the output of teams?

(44:44) Well, a healthy team is usually a very productive team. I know myself, if I’m not feeling great, if I’m below par, I probably don’t cognitively, think clearly and effectively and push on through as well. Physically, it absolutely affects your performance and whatever industry you’re in.

So, here’s why mental health has also been truly embraced in the last twenty years because a lot of mental health coaches and psychologists and people who go in and do organisational psychology and change and I myself do some of that, they were able to start demonstrating the effect that was having on the bottom line. In other words, we’ve done this, we’ve invested in this, but actually your sickness rates, your absentee rates have gone right down because people are happier, people are more motivated, people are healthier, both in body and mind.

And so good mental health and wellbeing in the workplace, actively and effectively improves your bottom line, and it’s the right thing to do. I’m in a place in my life now where I just think sometimes you just have to do what the right thing is and the truly great inspirational leaders I’ve met, the Ted Talks I watch and think, “Oh wow, I really wish I could meet that person or be in the room with them”, they have the integrity to do the right thing, to say what they’re going to do, to do what they’re going to say and to care about other people, and that starts with caring about themselves.

So, it’s a win-win because it will affect your bottom line positively because people will make better decisions, they’ll work better on their own, they’ll work more effectively in teams, less slip-ups will happen and less absenteeism will be experienced. But also, it’s just the right thing to do. And we’re in a very difficult world now with a lot of uncertainty, and if all the goodness will come from all the companies and the leaders, it will make the world a better place.

That’s a very positive note to nearly end on. Now, just before we do end, I wanted to say it’s been great having you on the podcast today and sharing your knowledge, your insights and your anecdotes. And I’m sure our listeners will find them both interesting and useful. So, thank you again for joining us.

16. I have one more question, and this is a question we ask all our podcast guests, what do you think are the three qualities that make a good leader? And do you think these qualities have changed since the beginning of the pandemic?

(47:31) I’m going to answer the second bit first, which I think, yes, they have changed from the pandemic because it isn’t business as usual or leadership as usual or anything as usual. And so, I think people are being seen and turning up in a different way.

I think the three qualities are:

  1. And as I say, you do what you say, you say what you do, and you’re being seen for it. You don’t hide behind either a self-imposed mask because you don’t feel good about yourself or you don’t feel authentic or you’ve got imposter syndrome, but also that you are transparent. I was the Head of Marketing for a charity and there used to be big debates about how transparent the end of year accounts should be in terms of where all the money went. And we just went for total transparency. It was like, if you’re going to give us your money and entrust us with your money and we’re going to help other people’s lives, we’re going to be completely transparent about that. So, I think transparency is key.
  2. I think tenacity. Of course, they are quite difficult times people need grit. I’ve met many people; I like to think I have a lot of grit. You know, sometimes you just have to say, I signed up for this and push on through.
  3. And I think the other thing is obviously creating that balance, having the five F’s. Really understanding that wealth and success isn’t just about money. That it’s about having that full balance and that will help not just yourself, but the world, your loved ones, your employees, and everybody.

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Recorded: Thursday 22nd October 2020

Due to the pandemic, professionals across the world have had to adapt quickly to a new way of working, including working remotely or as part of a hybrid team. As a result, it can be difficult to maintain visibility, leaving many unsure about how they can really shine and progress in this new world of work.

So in this podcast, we’re joined by Transformational Wellbeing Coach, Rosalyn Palmer, who is here to share her expert advice, to help those that are looking to increase their visibility and secure their long-term career progression in the new era of work.

1. To begin with, please could you quickly introduce yourself to our listeners?

(01:06) I’m Rosalyn Palmer, and I’m a Transformational Therapist and Coach, I bring the two together. I’m skilled in advanced, rapid transformational therapy, which combines clinical hypnotherapy, NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming), CBT (Cognitive behavioural therapy), and psychotherapy.

My own book is called Reset because I’ve had to reset my life and emotional wellbeing many times over. I have a background in PR and marketing at a very high level, so I know what it feels like to be on that career path of being in a busy agency life, trying to shine and really trying to get it all right by being happy and balanced as well.

Great, well that’s fantastic to hear, I’m really looking forward to listening to the advice that you’ve got for our podcast listeners.

2. We mentioned in the introduction that some of our listeners have been working remotely or as part of a hybrid team during the pandemic. What impact do you think this new way of working is having on career progression and development?

(02:21) 15% of our communications is verbal and 85% is body language. By being remote and by being put into positions now where we are connecting via Zoom, Teams or online and effectively spending lots of time remotely, we’re missing all that nuancing, all that non-verbal communication that gives context and depth to communications. And often they’re the ways in which somebody can shine, in which you get spotted and you can really enhance your career. Certainly, from my own point of view, that was very true. I was always that one who shined, turned up, had that energy around other people and would come with the ideas into the meetings which led to lots of promotions, and that’s very difficult when you’re behind a screen.

3. I’d imagine for younger employees; remote working will be more difficult by the fact that they’re unable to learn from colleagues without that face-to-face guidance. Is it possible that it’s impacting generations differently?

(03:38) Absolutely, you’re right because particularly for the younger generations, that is the time that you learn by osmosis. I’m old enough that I was put into the world of PR and marketing back in the days before it was even really understood to be a career. I went for an interview for a PR position and didn’t even know what PR meant. And so, I learned on the job by watching others through osmosis, by picking it up and running with the ball. And if you’re not around lots of other people in an actual team environment, all under the same roof, a lot of those clues, that learning on the job, absorbing and seeing what other people are doing is going to be so much harder.

So, they are going to potentially miss out, but there’s going to have to be new ways to bring in younger employees. People may be starting out more in their career, without having the benefit of literally being absorbed and surrounded by their peers.

4. I’d imagine it’s quite a unique problem that companies and individuals haven’t had to face before, the prospect of not being able to learn from people face-to-face.

(05:06) Absolutely, we’re all in a very new place in the world of remote teams, semi-remote teams and the world of working practices, companies and organisations who effectively are all disparate and everybody’s behind their computer in their own lounge, living room or kitchen. It’s a new place between presence and absence and it’s here to stay. And so, we’ve got to find the way to navigate that space.

5. With the reduction in face-to-face visibility, it can understandably be very difficult to prove your value in your role to your team and to the wider organisation. Do you have any tips to our listeners on how they can successfully prove their worth?

(06:01) So, if a lot of the interaction is going to be in remote team working and meetings, then you’ve obviously got to treat those meetings the same as you would if you were in an organisation and walking into a big boardroom, and you need to go in there, shine and have everything ready.

So, some of the tips and there’s many around, are about making that medium, making this new online presence work for you. Clearly taking a few minutes before you click on that start button to just settle yourself, get your attention and to arrive on time is important. Just because you’re all remote doesn’t mean you can’t connect, so take the same time and trouble to greet whoever’s in the room with your full attention as you would, if you were literally physically in the room with them, because people like people who are present and who engage with them.

And everybody worries about the impression they’re making and they’re so busy in their head worrying about that. That’s why many people go into meetings and they can’t remember the person’s name because they’re not present at that moment about when that person actually says, “Hello, I’m Roger”, and back in the olden days you’d actually shake their hand. It’s the same. So be present, turn up, settle yourself, and really take time to greet the person there.

Obviously, there are things about how you look, but one of the big issues, again, on Teams, Zoom, is resisting the urge to multitask. I network a lot and I go to a lot of networking meetings and I can just see everybody’s head starting to drop and they’re on their phone, they’re checking their emails, they’re doing something else. Now, I suppose, behave the way you would if you were sat around a board table, you arguably would not do that and it wouldn’t be very career-enhancing. Also multitasking in that way, particularly you’re having a lot of Zoom or team meetings is really draining, it really would lead to Zoom fatigue because you’re having to turn up in a new way. And if you’re then multitasking and not even concentrating on what’s being said, you’re just pulling yourself in so many different directions.

So really just behave in a way that you would, if you were walking physically into a boardroom, I know we only really have to look good from the waist up if we’re on Zoom, but, do make the effort and really turn up in that way. Don’t hide behind your avatar, be present and be visible.

That’s some great advice and good habits when we’re all back in the office. You don’t want to slip into any of these bad habits and take them with you once we’re working back in the office three days a week.

6. How can our listeners go about communicating success and progress on projects to maintain visibility whilst working remotely?

(09:17) So again, how you turn up is telling more than anything about who you are and your attitude. So, all those points that we’ve previously discussed, be present, be prepared, turn up, be engaged, be engaging.

So being engaging, bring ideas, don’t be afraid to have your voice. And if you don’t really feel that you’ve got something amazing to add then questions are the answer. If you’re asking a question that shows you’re engaging, it shows you’re thinking about it, it shows you’re wanting to learn more. So you don’t have to think that you have to turn up and be able to say something stunningly exciting because you maybe don’t truly understand what’s being discussed or you don’t have that much to add, but you can always help the person leading the meeting or the rest of the team by engaging them and being engaging. And questions are the way forward, and that is a way to shine, asking good questions.

7. Video calls and virtual meetings are our primary form of communication at the moment for a lot of people. How do you think this type of communication is impacting professional relationships and how is that affecting career development?

(10:48) Well, it’s a two-way street, isn’t it? I mean, leaders and managers need to be very aware of engaging their people in many different ways to bring out the best in them and if you’re somebody going up the career ladder, you need to be asking for all those points of interaction. So along with team meetings, have one-to-one meetings, have smaller groups have breakout meetings because different objectives within the business or within your own career path, aren’t always going to be met in the same way, just as within an organisation, you wouldn’t always go into the boardroom with thirty people to discuss a very specific, small part of a project or a small part of what your career enhancement is. You’d probably have a one-on-one meeting with your line manager or with a peer or with a mentor.

And so again, replicate all these good business practices, but find ways to do them, even if they must be done virtually. It doesn’t mean that all virtual meetings must be a great big overwhelming Zoom or Teams meeting with lots of people on them, set those one-to-ones up, set all those special mentoring sessions. And it’s a two-way street. If you’re the one who wants to progress, speak up and say, ” I really feel that because of our present situation, I’m not really learning through osmosis or learning through being around people. How about we meet for a virtual coffee every other day, and maybe we can just talk about some issues that turn up within the business or how you would tackle things if you’d have been at my stage in my career?” Perhaps something a little bit more informal like that. And again, for the manager or the leader, you need to be aware of bringing your people on in all these ways.

I like the idea of a virtual coffee and making it a little less formal. I like the idea of that and might incorporate that myself.

(12:52) Yes, I have a lot of virtual coffees with people and sometimes it’s about just turning up. Back in the office days when I worked in agencies in the nineties, we used to call it the photocopier moment or in America, they’d call it the water cooler moment. And it would be that time often that you’d come away with some gem, that a formal agenda or meeting wouldn’t do.

When I was running my PR company, I had a lot of clients who were other agencies. I was an agencies agency, and so there would be ad agencies, direct marketing agencies, sales promotion, you name it all the leading ones of the day. And I often found I wasn’t getting the information I wanted, or I’d go to meetings and people will be quite distracted.

So, I got in the habit of just turning up at their office. I used to just go unannounced. So, they’d let me in, obviously they knew that I was the PR person and I’d just literally wander around in the same way as if I was working there. And I’d walk past somebodies’ desk and I’d go, “Oh, that’s really interesting, what is that?”, and they’d go, “Oh, well, that’s the campaign we’re doing for Land Rover and we’re filming it, and it’s going to be ground-breaking because we’re using this new technology” and I’d be thinking in my head, nobody has told me this and I’d go, “Have you got 10 minutes. Could you just tell me about that?”, and so, it’s that if you can create these virtual coffees or these water-cooler moments, they’ll be really helpful.

That’s a great point, I’ve had this conversation with colleagues in the past few months about that water cooler moment. You find out information just by someone passing by the desk and going “Oh, actually, this might relate to you”, and that it’s something that they wouldn’t think about picking up the phone and speaking to you about, but because they’ve passed you in the hallway or they’ve passed your desk, they thought to mention it.

(15:07) And it’s about, consciously engineering these things that maybe we took for granted. The story I told you, I did engineer it and it had a great effect. So, it’s consciously engineering some of the less formal, more nuanced, learning through osmosis nonverbal communication. As I said, it’s missing lots of nonverbal communications in those moments that give context and depth to everything you learn and all of that is important for career enhancement.

Yes, so it’s about adapting to the new situation. And I really like that, I’ll definitely be adopting that myself going forward.

8. Now, video calls aren’t the only way to communicate. How important do you think strong written verbal communications is to succeed when working remotely. For example, is how you communicate via email and instant messaging platforms, just as important as verbal communications?

(16:12) Yes, I mean it is, but they can be a bit of a minefield. Email in particular, what email lacks is the tonality of voice because it’s just words and I’m sure that you have probably sent emails and it’s caused offence for somebody who’s taken it the wrong way, and you absolutely didn’t mean to do that, or you’ve received them.

You miss that nuance; you miss that context and it can be very easy to get offended or to cause offence on emails. So, you must be very careful about not trying to be nuanced in email, or you must literally spell it out. To literally say, “I am really delighted with what we’re doing” – and also never used the word ‘but’, it’s a ‘but’ free zone – “and I would just like to drill down a little bit more on the following five points. Why don’t we jump onto a virtual coffee and do that?” So, you can use that communication. Of course, emails are great, you’ve got a record of something and you keep on top of it because it’s written down. But more than any form of communication, email can be an absolute minefield.

Great, thanks for those insights. I’ve been guilty of that myself and I’d be surprised if anyone said that they hadn’t been guilty of sending a message that had been read the wrong way.

9. We’ve spoken about adapting to this new world. Do you think the way in which performance is measured is changing or do you think if it hasn’t or isn’t already, we can expect it to change with more employees now working remotely?

(18:10) Again, the needs and reasons of doing that are the same, and there’s good and bad practices within that. The medium, the way that it’s going to be done is maybe different because people have to social distance and they can’t get together, so you can’t be in the same room together, but all of the principles of it stay the same.

I heard somebody speak recently about the big little chat, which I quite like. And so, the big little chat is about when you turn up and you’re having quite a big chat, it’s about something very important, but you make it very little. So, you say, “Right, we’re going to have the big little chat and we’re going to just set three to four priorities and we’re going to talk about those”. So, chunking it down a bit more because of Zoom fatigue or Teams fatigue, and just being overwhelmed now with everything that’s going on is more endemic and more dangerous than ever before.

So, some of the things that within an office environment, you could go, “Okay, well, I’ll do this extra meeting” can seem really overwhelming when it’s just you at your kitchen table. So, chunk it down those big little chats, be clear we’re dealing with these three points:

  • I want you to progress in this way, do you see yourself progressing in this way?
  • Why do you think your progress is stalled? What could we do to help it?
  • What are the three turn points that we can do here?

So, chunking down more is going to be a helpful way.

10. What advice would you give to those who may have been on a promotion path before the pandemic and have perhaps found that progress has stalled?

(20:04) So there are ways that you can shine or ways that you can go, “What’s good about this?” Okay, I would have hoped that I was promoted to the next level by now, but all promotion is frozen for three months, six months, I can’t do that. Had I been at that level, what would I be wanting to do afterwards? I would actually like to add X,Y,Z skill to my portfolio, so I’m going to speak to my line manager, and I’m going to really act as if I’d already had that promotion and I’m already going up to the next level.

So, you might not be immediately getting that reward, but you can keep planning. There was a saying, when I worked in agency life, back in the nineties, dress to the level you want to be promoted to. Now, that’s really old-fashioned to be honest because you don’t have to look exactly that way, and we’re a lot more relaxed today thank goodness and we embrace individualism, but in a way, it’s really about behaving in that way. That’s what it’s saying, behave in that way as if you were already there.

So, if you’re a middle manager, but you want to be the top manager or higher, how do they behave? How do they turn up? What do I notice about them? Oh, they always turn up ten minutes early for every Zoom, they always come prepared, they always do these things. So treat any stall in your career path as a time to actually look and think about adding even more skills to your skill set, even more tools to your toolbox, because you could probably even jump frog and go up two promotional points next time when we hopefully go back to some sorts of normal. And people always want good people, so you want to be the best person you can be.

11. I imagine that advice applies to people who would like to be considered for a promotion as well, but maybe aren’t at the moment. For those people, how can they go about sharing their career goals with their manager? Because obviously the playing field is going through quite a bit of change, with economies across the world struggling and priorities possibly lying elsewhere for businesses and managers at the moment.

(22:28) You have to be realistic that you might be going to have a conversation with a line manager who literally is wanting to jump out the window themselves because of all the pressure on them, and that their hands are tied at the moment because of all of this uncertainty and difficulty.

So, go with the grace of saying, “Look, I realise at the moment, this probably isn’t possible or I realise that at the moment we are not in an environment where me being promoted and having a pay rise is even tenable, and I do want to say that when we do return to some normality or when things do change, or even if this becomes our new normal, I’m ready, I’m absolutely raring to go. I feel I have all of this to offer, and I’m actually going to use the time until we can have this conversation again. And I’d love to have this conversation again in two to three months’ time, please. I’m going to use that to even add more skills and make myself even more valuable to this organisation. Therefore, I was thinking could I be trained in x or could I be trained in y? Or could I have a virtual coffee with you? Or could I have a virtual coffee with your boss once a month?”

So again, it’s about showing that you are such an asset and you’re valuable, but you do understand the realities of the situation. So, you’re not putting more pressure on somebody who possibly has their hands tied.

The insights that you are sharing today are really valuable and I hope our listeners follow them to help with their career progression while we’re operating in this remotely or in a hybrid model, depending on where you are in the world.

12. For many a big part of feeling motivated and engaged at work is the positive reinforcements that you receive throughout the day, interacting with colleagues for example. Do you think this shift to remote working has led people to feeling like that they’re lacking their work mojo, and why do you think this is?

(24:27) Absolutely, a lot of people have felt that because it’s hard to always be totally self-motivated on your own. I mean, if you look at athletes, the Tour de France, and the Peloton, they look out for each other as a team.

I heard a very interesting anecdote about Michael Jordan, that he was a brilliant player, but he had to understand that he was part of a team and not every shot was his. And when he understood that he became more successful than pretty much anybody else in that sport. And the team won pretty much everything because he had to have a shift from it’s all about me or I’m that person to, I’m part of that team. Conversely, if you’ve been used to being around that team and take benefit and take support from that team and you’re on your own, it can be a hard struggle like the loneliness of the long-distance runner. Every day, it’s about me having to get up and do this.

Also, extroverts within an organisation, they get energy from being around others. Whereas introverts typically need that time alone to build energy, to face the group situation. And neither preference is right or wrong, it’s just that some of us function in some way, some of us function in another way. So, I know quite a few introverts, who are quite enjoying the new ways of working because they don’t have to go into those big meetings, which they used to find draining. But if you’re quite energetic and quite an extrovert, you can find it quite difficult because you lose that sense of connection. So, of course, that’s important.

So again, find all those ways to connect that you can, the virtual coffee, but here’s the most important connection – You. Your connection with yourself is the most important connection in the history of everything and that’s where I went wrong, that’s where I got burnt out and that’s where a lot of well-performing people get burnt out because they’re very busy being brilliant and connecting with everything, everybody and turning up, but there’s nothing left within them. They literally go home, and they feel like an empty vessel, they’re spent. And so, they fill themselves up often with all sorts of not terribly healthy things to just fill it up, that could be food, it could be a drink, who knows, but often they turn into quite destructive behaviours.

So, you must connect first and foremost for yourself. So, every day, more than ever, particularly because of the potentially draining nature of being in front of a screen or in online meetings repeatedly, how do I connect with me? What makes me feel good about me? How do I fill up from the inside out? For me, I live right by the river, I go for a walk on the river. I literally just look out the window sometimes and watch the swans and the ducks, or I walk along there. And a few months ago, I went Blackberrying one day, literally between two clients, I was like, I’m going to go blackberrying. I went out and got a load of blackberries and I thought later I’m going to make a blackberry and apple pie because I find cooking quite therapeutic. I find yoga therapeutic. At the end of the day, I find having a bath and reading a book therapeutic. I have good sleep habits, I switch off. Fill yourself up, connect with yourself first. This is your chance. This is your time to really connect with yourself.

I did a relationship counselling course and they said, the number one thing people want in relationships is intimacy. And intimacy means into-me-see. What we truly want is somebody else to say, I see you, I see into you, I love that. And that must start with you. Into-me-see, see into yourself and go, “Okay, I’m maybe not going to physically see anybody today, but how do I connect with myself? How do I nurture myself? How do I fill myself up?” And that is good advice, not just for a career but for life.

13. Talking about not being able to interact with colleagues and perhaps losing your work mojo. What impact do you think this could have on your career progression going back to that point?

(28:51) I wrote an article for a new hub, which is a redundancy hub. The sad reality is it could just be bad luck at the moment that you get a setback. Not because you’re not good, not because you’re not invaluable, not because you’re not bright and committed and all those things, but just because your company has maybe hit a bad financial situation. So, through no fault of your own, you might face yourself even facing a career change that you haven’t chosen or facing that stalling in your career.

So again, you’ve got to fill yourself up, you’ve got to keep your faith in yourself. You’ve got to keep those words, “This too shall pass”, because I’ve been through a couple of terrible downturns and redundancies. In my career, I’ve been made redundant three times believe it or not. The third time was the best because then I started my own PR company and I would never have probably done that otherwise. But if you’re in that situation, the first thing to always think about is what are my transferable skills.

Restrictions around what we can do due to the pandemic are constantly changing around the world, and it can impact someone’s motivation or engagement. For instance, we’re based in the UK and we’ve just had fresh restrictions put in place towards the end of 2020. Prior to that, we were starting to make our way back into the office and myself included, I’d started to go back in, and then these new restrictions were brought back in and I was a little deflated by that experience because I was reminded of the value of the workplace and seeing old colleagues again.

14. How can those suffering (from changing restrictions) combat that?

(30:54) Yes, because it would be easy to let it really get on top of you. So I did a big presentation this week on resilience and there’s many factors in resilience, but the thing you have to understand without spending ages now is that a lot of what affects you emotionally, affects you physically as well. Because I like to say we’re cavemen in posh clothes.

And a lot of our primaeval instincts, the way we survived and the way we got through things, because they are dictated by a part of the brain called the limbic amygdala, are still there and they’ll release cortisol into the body because I’m feeling threatened, I’m feeling stressed, I’m going to run away, survive. And of course, that happens repeatedly and when the body’s flooded with all these things, because it’s a stressful situation, you’re worried about your job, you’re worried about paying the mortgage, you’re worried about what the future’s going to bring. Unfortunately, it triggers the same physiological effects within the body as back in the day when we were literally running away from a sabre tooth tiger, it’s really draining.

And so, stress and overwhelm is emotional and physical and then it can lead to dis-ease, disease in other words. So, it’s important to just take care of yourself and some of them that you can improve your resilience are obviously mind hacks and mantras like “This too, shall pass” or what else could this mean? Ways of getting over overwhelm is by writing everything down and then deciding what’s important and what’s crucial. I’ve got lots of those exercises on my website and I’m sure lots of other good coaches and therapists do too, all free that people can avail themselves of.

And take care of yourself, eat even better than you normally would. Now is not the time to be having a Domino’s Pizza or any other pizza every night. Now is the time to be having more of the good stuff. And again, you can have like the 80/20 rule, you can have some of the bad stuff, but make sure you’re having more of the good stuff. Studies recently have shown that healthy people and longevity is from people who don’t necessarily always have the perfect diet and never go near, anything bad, but they just have a lot more of the good stuff. They eat a lot greener leafy vegetables, they have a lot more fruits, whole foods, grains and all the good things. So just be good about that.

Obviously, mindset, you need to relax, get sleep, make sure you get the right environment for sleep, relax, yoga, meditation, mindfulness, a walk along the river, lose yourself in a book. All these fantastic ways.

Breathing is important. If you’re starting to feel really overwhelmed, maybe you’re facing a difficult meeting or you’re really worried about your job and you don’t know how you can tell your partner, you can do, what’s called square breathing where you breathe in for four and then you hold it for four. You breathe out for four and you hold it for four and you imagine you’re drawing a square with your breath. And just that can bring the whole parasympathetic system of your body down a couple of pegs so that you just get over that anxiety.

There are other ways, there’s some that seemed like crazy ways that you can reset the vagal nerve, which really help again, your parasympathetic system. And you can do that by humming or having cold showers. There’s a great guy called Wim Hoff who suggests having an ice bath to trigger the body’s natural responses to get it back into balance. So, there’s lots and lots of ways.

Now, more than ever before, when I was pushing on through back in the days in agencies in the nineties, we didn’t talk about a lot of this stuff. And heaven forbid if you said, “I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed or depressed, or my mental health is threatened here.” It really was not a badge of honour. Whereas now we live in better times for that, so now more than ever is the time to be good to yourself.

Great advice, and personally speaking, prior to the pandemic my diet wasn’t the best and exercise was probably running for the tube. But since the pandemic began, I have been eating healthily. I’ve been exercising and the effect it’s had on my mental health. Honestly, I don’t know how I would have coped otherwise, it has worked wonders. So, any of our listeners that haven’t tried that yet, I really would recommend it. It really is effective.

Definitely, it’s proven science it absolutely is.

15. For those that feel their role has become redundant in the new era of work, what’s the best way to address this and find the value that they could bring to the organisation?

(36:11) If you’re worried about actual redundancy, there’s a couple of things. One is you tend to feel very angry when you get made redundant. Certainly, I’m speaking from personal experience here because it’s like, why me, this isn’t fair, or I’ve been cast aside. One thing to know is that anger is a secondary emotion, it’s like a shield of armour and anger always covers up hurt. So if you’re feeling angry, just sit with it and say to yourself, I am angry because I’m hurt and I’m hurting because, and then you can list it and look it might not be fair or right, but actually just getting it all out is often really helpful.

If you feel that you have no voice because nobody’s listening to you and they’re not going to listen to you because maybe you’ve already been made redundant or the stress is over you, or you don’t have a very empathetic or sympathetic line manager, you again can get it all out on paper, put it into a letter, but don’t send it, just get it all out. Again, it’s very cathartic to just get it all out.

If you’re within an organisation and you’re really worried that you are going to be side-lined or your job or your role is starting to be the one that if they’re going to have another round of cuts, it’s going to be the one that they don’t think is so essential. You’ve always got to think, what do they value within this organisation? Now, arguably every organisation values the bottom line, who brings us the money, but I’d like to think that there are enough organisations today and places of work and enough good work practices and good people to work for, that they maybe value other things.

So again, what could I bring to the table that could add that, that maybe I haven’t even been allowed to show in my current role, again, the questions or the, “Can I have a virtual coffee with you? I was thinking, and one thing we’re not doing in our company is X and Y. I noticed that other companies are doing that, and they’ve been effective. I noticed the other companies have got round restrictions and the pandemic that no longer can people come to our restaurant by setting up incredible takeaway services. And we haven’t fully explored that. Could I maybe do a project and investigate that?” So again, it’s what is going to add value to your organisation and that’s going to add value to how your organisation sees you.

15. The pandemic has opened the need for new skills and skills gaps have appeared in organisations or within Teams. And there’s been the need to plug those gaps. How important is it for our listeners to upskill to demonstrate their willingness to learn and how could they go about this? Do you have any advice around that?

(39:19) We touched on this already, treating even temporary setbacks or periods when your maybe not being able to do everything you normally do or see everybody you normally see is an opportunity. And using that time to learn and upskill, that’s a mindset thing.

The other thing is if you’re not commuting and you mentioned you’re not, don’t just switch your commute for more work, don’t go, “Oh, well, I’ve saved two hours today, therefore, I’ll just beaver away for two more hours”, use that two hours to work on you, to up-skill you. And again, what skills are going to take you to where you want to go. Now that might be within your organisation, or it might not be, it might be external to your organisation. Again, that depends on your ultimate career path, your goals, and maybe the way your organisation treats you.

I was talking to Wanda Goldwag, who was a former client of mine. She was the Managing Director of Air Miles, and I was reminded that I was quite shocked when I went to their offices in the nineties because they had a recruitment policy, which was, we’re going to recruit the best and we’re going to give you all the training you want. In fact, we want to train you out of your job. And if you’re still in your job in two years’ time, we’re going to ask you why, why are you still here? And I’ve not come across that in any company, that was quite radical for the nineties to think that way. And that was their philosophy that they trained people to go and have whatever career and future next step they wanted.

Obviously, some people remained within the organisation, but a lot didn’t, but they didn’t see that as a problem. They saw it as a win-win situation because they were giving people all those skills and upskilling all the time. They were there at an exciting, dynamic job and giving them a springboard to go and get a job that they couldn’t have even imagined before they’d had that one.

So again, make that your purpose again, if your company isn’t so forward-thinking, how can you upskill. There are so many great courses available. I mean, a lot of them are expensive, but a lot of them really aren’t and I’ve put three online courses together this year, and they’re inexpensive. And the market has never had so many. So, for anything arguably between thirty pounds and several hundred obviously they go higher, but you could learn some great skills. So again, treat it as your trajectory and an opportunity. The other side of what seems to be difficult is what’s my opportunity. I’m not commuting two hours a day, let’s spend those two hours learning some amazing skills.

Very true, there are lots of tools, webinars and training courses online that people can use, and they’ve increased during the pandemic as there has been a need to up-skill. I’ll take this opportunity to say that Hays has got stuff that people can listen to if they choose to, even this podcast to be precise. So, I’d encourage people to look through our pandemic episodes and learn about how they can upskill.

16. I’d imagine that now is a crucial time for our listeners to be building their personal brand too to maintain visibility. Do you have any tips on that which you can share about how listeners can effectively do this and build their personal brand out?

(43:10) I feel passionately about this. Very soon after qualifying as a Therapist myself, I became a trainer for therapists, and of course, I had this background in marketing and PR. And so, I would take breakout seminars on things like elevator pitches and how to get yourself across, and one of them was personal branding. And I always would say to people, you are your brand, you are your walking talking brand, it is you. Or if you think of the traditional seaside rock, the lettering in the rock, but you could get one and it would say the word all the way down. And so, you must have consistency about who you are because you are your brand. And the important thing about any brand is what does it stand for?

So, what do you stand for? So, it’s not just about how you look, be consistent, again with Zoom and Teams and all those things, consistently turn up, be professional. Again, we can be more relaxed, but still be professional because that’s the world we’re living in. And again, that dress or behave or look the way that you would like to be, maybe the level above where you are now.

Keep your word about the little things and the big things. So, if you say you’re going to do something, do it absolutely before and ahead of time, explain why not, turn up early, always let people know you’re the reliable one, be consistent in what you say and do. That’s important, that creates a brand. I like buying certain brands. I don’t expect to open a tin of beans of a certain brand because I expect it to taste and look in a certain way and it looks completely different. So, show up, lettering in the rock, you are your brand, be consistent, be good, and keep your word about the little things and the big things, and obviously present yourself in such a way as you wish to be known.

That’s great advice. And as we have discussed, effective communication is always a great way to be an expert in your field too, so thanks for sharing all those examples with us.

17. And we’re on to our final question now, which is a question we ask all our podcast guests. If you had one piece of advice to help our listeners navigate their careers through the pandemic and beyond what would that be?

(45:57) Always keep the balance. And if you’re always keeping the balance and you know that maybe today is a bad day, but it’s not a bad life, you can always go back. And to have balance, it’s more than just your work, it’s more than just your career. We’ve touched on all these things during our great chat, but I have this philosophy where I say that a life of balance is based on five ‘F’s’. So, if you stretch your hand out while you’re listening and then think of each of these fingers, and to have a balanced life, you need five ‘F’s’:

  • You need faith, you need faith in yourself or faith in something beyond yourself, it could be nature, it could be God, but really that faith in yourself.
  • You need fitness. We’ve talked about that. Both body and mind, the mind controls the body, the body controls the mind. Do things, meditate, hypnotherapy, eat well, sleep well.
  • You need friends. We are tribal people, and this is what’s been very difficult about remote working in the pandemic. We are connected beings, we used to sit around campfires and tell each other stories and be absolutely connected with the tribe. So, call in on your friends, make time for your friends, be a friend, even if it’s only virtually.
  • Family, again, it’s your tribe more than family. You might not have a family you particularly like, but these are about your very close tribe, your very close connections, the people who are around you, who support you, push you on.
  • And then finance, which is effectively your career in a way, because obviously you get remunerated and reciprocity as you turn up and give great stuff and you get remunerated and rewarded back. It’s give and take.

And so, a balanced life is all of those. So never lose sight of that because the people who crop up are the ones who really, overly focus on one of those or two of those. And they neglect the other ones and it doesn’t lead for a life of balance and joy.

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