According to recent research by McKinsey, 83% of leaders think they are unprepared for their new roles. That fully reflects my own observations. Organisations assume leaders are born, not made, and often make very little effort to help people understand what is required of them and how to shine in a new role.

All of the following mistakes come from not recognising that you need to adapt your tactics - either with yourself or others -  when you take on more responsibility:

1. Being too controlling - this comes from a fear that no one can do as good a job as you can, so you tend to just take on the work and not worry about the impact it's having on you or the team. The long term outcome from following this strategy is you feeling resentful and disappointment with your colleagues and them also feeling judged and much less likely to offer to take on anything that has the potential to disappoint you in the future.
   
   Whats the answer? The message you are sending loud and clear to the team is that you don’t think they are up to it. I get that they may not be your dream team but you may surprise yourself by trusting them more and seeing how it goes. People are different when they feel heard and trusted. Start by giving them easy tasks and build both your and their confidence in what they are capable of.
   
   
2. Pushing too hard - As its retirement looms, stories about staff at Microsoft working so hard to produce the Internet Explorer browser that they sacrificed their lives to achieve that seem to be circulating at the moment. There must be millions of identical stories from millions of less famous projects because our culture values short term success over long term outcomes. I once worked somewhere that had “whatever it takes” as the office hours in my contract. I was young enough to not think that was pretty outrageous!
   
   My suggestions? To start with, never ask someone to do something or put in the hours that you wouldn’t have liked to be asked to do when you were in their position. And as a follow up, think about your motivation vs their motivation. Are you asking them to burn the midnight oil so that you look good and get the promotion? Is that really OK with you?
   
   
3. Shiny object syndrome - I think it’s tempting for leaders to believe that a new tool or strategy or even a new team structure will shake out all the old problems and let the organisation (and the leader, of course) ride the easy path to glory. Sadly it never happens. I recently worked somewhere that thought that robots were the answer. I think they got sold some and are still trying to work out where to put the batteries in.
   
   My advice here? Don’t forget that, while the ‘how’ changes with technological progress, the ‘what’ rarely does. Humans evolve very slowly and not all at the same time. Jumping to the new flashy thing seems fun but, unless its a medical breakthrough, its rarely going to be as effective as putting in the hard yards to iron out the fundamental problems that need addressing.
   
   
4. Being too pernickety - Winston Churchill got it right when he said "Perfection is the enemy of progress.”. It’s super easy to get so caught up inhaling everything perfect, that nothing is ever ready. Perfectionists drive everyone, themselves included, totally mad.
   
   You might like to take a tip from the tradition of Persian carpet weavers who make sure there is a flaw in the carpet pattern in recognition that only Allah/God is capable of making something perfect. Another suggestion would be to define the must-haves (spelling, branding, etc) and don’t sweat the rest because no one is looking at it as critically as you are.
   
   
5. Saying yes too much - This one is a killer! Saying ‘yes’ is often what helps us make progress, and over time, we learn to do it as a default. As you make progress in your career, and take on more and more responsibility, this turns out to be less of an effective strategy because, at some point, you will not be able to deliver on all of your commitments. And if you continue to say ‘yes’ and not deliver, you will appear to be less and less capable which is exactly the opposite of what you were trying to achieve, right?
   
   To get on top of saying 'yes' by default, you need to take a moment to think through the impact of either taking the work on - OR - not taking it on. Asking for more detail about what the work might entail is a good way to buy a few moments to chew it over. You might find that saying yes is not automatically the best answer for you - or for them. 
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I hope you have found this helpful. I’d love to hear which of these or other things are getting in the way of your success. Share in the comments or, if you want to talk about it, get in touch!

3. Reframe it
Is there another way to tell the story that you’ve been telling yourself? Let's say you feel that you don’t share the same background or went to a less prestigious university than your peers, you might benefit from reminding yourself that you bring fresh and diverse thinking that they can not offer. Same with not being the same age - your lack or abundance of life experience again offers a new perspective that your competitors lack. Getting in the habit of challenging yourself to tell a negative story in a positive light is a great habit to get into . It may help to make it into a game: how could you retell it so that it sounds like an absolute win? Celebrities and politicians do it all the time. So can you!

Its time to banish impostor syndrome from our lives. If any of these approaches work for you, please let us know in the comments - so that others get inspired to try them!

There are many points in a persons career where finding a job seems absolutely impossible: at the beginning, it feels like you are trapped in the can’t-get-a-job-until-you’ve-had-a-job catch-22 cycle, whenever you want to do something different like change career or refocus, and then at around 50 when it seems no one wants to hire an”older person”. Essentially, we live in a world that makes a lot of assumptions about people formed around basic demographics that really need to be exposed and refuted!

Hiring managers often believe that

1. Past performance (school grades) are an indicator of future (work) performance.
   It turns out, none of this is actually true. Google had to review its strategy of only hiring people from certain educational backgrounds when they realised that sometimes graduates from elite universities actually lacked the skills that were needed in the workplace, like the ability to learn from past mistakes and knowing when to step up when needed. And that approach seems to catching on across Silicone Valley.
2. Younger is faster, more flexible and all around “better” and older is slower, more rigid and “less good”.
   In his book, Late Bloomers, Rich Karlgaard collects all the facts and research and shows us that this is not the case at all. It’s true to say that mental processing power declines with age, but that is often counterbalanced by an improved capability to process complex data, like other peoples emotions, which peaks in our 40’s and 50’s. And we are still gathering and utilising facts and information well into our 70’s. A study of air traffic controllers exposed the fact that while processing speed and short term memory do decline, this is balanced by calmness and reasoning capabilities that only come later in life.
3. Hiring graduates with no experience is risky, so it’s best to avoid that altogether.
   True there are some risks, but they are enthusiastic, don’t expect the pay that their more experience peers will want, are very up to date on the latest tools and techniques of their particular specialism and don’t come with any pre-installed bad habits and expectations.

Here are three suggestions for persuading potential employers to see your potential:

1. Take stock by conducting a personal SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats). Consider what you are really great at now (Strengths), what you are less good at these days that your competitors excel at (Weaknesses). Then look at whether there are trends or market opportunities you could exploit (Opportunities) and what new threats might leave you vulnerable, such as trends or your own weaknesses (Threats). Be open minded and honest and you will have a good sense of the lie of the land and how you fit into it. You will see changes you may need to make, maybe to your own outlook or how you position yourself, in order to make progress.
2. Remember that everyone is acting in their best interests, not yours. So make sure you communicate with a WIIFM (whats in it for me?) approach, structuring your messaging around the contribution your skills and experience offer the hiring manager and their company.  Their biggest fear will be making a mistake so focus on reassure them by letting them see how you are the best hire they are going to make this year.
3. Tap into your network. Research suggests that up to 70% of all jobs are not formally advertised its estimated that as many as  85% of jobs are filled through networking. This applies at all career levels, so it’s time to get out more, and reconnect with old colleagues and friends. You never know who knows about that perfect job you are looking for and a personal recommendation carrels a lot fo weight and cuts through many of the preconceptions.

Tried any of these suggestions? Please share how it went for you!

Some people seem to have a very clear vision of where they are going and where they want to get to in life. Whether or not they make it seems to be less important than having an end point to aim for. In contrast, many people don’t have a clear set of goals and find the idea of creating them quite daunting. For the people in the second camp, they often slowly get a sense that they are failing to achieve their potential. And, I find, this can lead to a negative spiral, a catch-22, where you never know if you are on track if you have no clear destination.

Richard Boyatzis, an expert on intentional change says that “we become what we dream” and that in order to do that, we need to be clear about who we wish to be and what we want to achieve in our lives. He is fully aware of how overwhelming it is to allow ourselves to dream and has come up with a series of tools that shift out out of the negative spiral and open up the creative side of our mind. There is one thing I'd recommend doing - one of Boyatzis' “Dreams of the Ideal Future” exercises - that can be very effective at helping with this. It’s also very simple. You just need to list 27 or more things you’d like to do or experience before you die.

I would encourage everyone to have a go. You may not get to 27, and that’s OK. Its less about specifics (e.g. places you’d like to visit) and more about experiences (e.g. go for a walk with a future grandchild or give a speech at your child’s wedding). It may help to explore what you would have liked to have achieved at different future life milestones, like having gone skydiving by your 75th birthday or climbed Mount Everest by the time you are 50.

I really encourage you to play with this. Time is a curious quality and most people don’t have a good sense of how quickly it passes, especially when you are focussed on other things. My vision for the future is to help people find their happy path in life and at work because being unhappy is just a sign that something needs to change! And if you want some help with seeing your future more clearly, give me a shout. 











McKee, Boyatzis and Johnston, Becoming a Resonant Leader: Develop Your Emotional Intelligence, Renew Your Relationships, and Sustain Your Effectiveness, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass. 2008

There are a lot of myths and legends about work, how it works and how do survive and thrive while you are there. Some of them seem more true than others but, to be honest, they are all contextual because it depends on the culture of the place you are in. What goes in one office is totally taboo in another. Whats incredible is how much these “rules” guide us and often make us very unhappy in the process. Over the years, I have encountered plenty of them, but here are 5 particularly damaging ones:

Success means having to climb the career ladder
This is something society pushes at us quite hard. It is also reinforced by going to school where we are rewarded for doing well and at the end of each year, we take a step up the ladder. By the time people get to work, this pattern is very established in our minds. The truth is, not everyone wants to or is a position to get to the “top” and sometimes it is hard admit to - either just to ourselves or in public. I often coach people who have very mixed feelings about where to go next in their careers because of this type of belief.

I need to make an amazing impression all the time.
This is a really dangerous one. Yes, avoiding mistakes, from terrible career bloopers to typos, is 100% recommended, but the fear of making mistakes can be so inhibiting, it can lead to nothing getting done at all. I talk to people who lose sleep, family and holiday time because they feel the need to make every output, every email, every presentation into a work of art.
Whats needed here is some perspective: how much does it matter? Is the extra effort worth it? For this second question, I’d challenge you to find evidence to back your answer. I know people who spend days scouring the internet for perfect images for presentations, which is lovely of course, but makes no difference to anyone in the big scheme of things. The big question for this situation is “is it really worth it?” And if it isn’t a resounding Yes” then its time to make your peace with good enough!

Saying “no” is a career killer!
This is a myth I certainly bought into in the past. I would say “yes” to anything because I thought saying “no” would totally scupper my career. I eventually learned that if you say “yes” to too many things, you just get asked to do more and more until you are so overwhelmed you start malfunctioning. And, it turns out that saying yes to something you later are unable to deliver on is the career killer, not saying no! It took me a long time to learn that one! A great way of managing your workload is to be open abut your other commitments and get feedback on priorities before you make a decision about picking up or dropping tasks.   

Asking for help makes you look stupid/incompetent
This, to be honest, can be a cultural issue. I have worked in places where it was obvious that if you admitted you could do with a bit of support somehow indelibly marred your track record forevermore. Ugh! The worst thing is that not getting help when you need it can be more damaging - for the person and for the organisation. The individual gets discouraged and is likely to start to be less effective and that impacts on the organisation because its needs are being served less optimally.

Sometimes, its just easiest to do it myself
This is a killer.Learning to trust others, to give guidance when needed and then stand back and let them get on with it can feel very exhausting and scary. The big fear is that they won’t do a great job and it will reflect badly on everyone. Which leads us to think that we’ll only have to re-work their efforts later, so why not do it now? That may make sense in the sort term but it’s also a terrible trap. Because you are not letting them learn how to help you, you set up a scenario where you can never step away from the tasks you always do in order to take on new challenges and grow new skills yourself. Over time, you will start to feel weighed down by the burden of all the tasks you are responsible for and maybe you will notice that your less encumbered colleagues are making better career progress than you are!

So, it’s very well worth challenging ourselves about what we believe to be true about how work works because it may help us see what is getting in the way of enjoying our time at work. Like fish having no sense of the fact that they are swimming in water, many of these beliefs are invisible to us at first. Coaching can help you explore your thoughts in a way that you may not be able to do alone. Give me a call if you want to find out more!

Self sabotage: when we do (or don’t do) things that stop us achieving our goals. It’s when we overeat when we want to be dieting, when we don’t study when we know the qualification will open doors for us, or when we don’t write that blog post or call that recruiter even though we know it’s exactly what we need to do next. It looks crazy from the outside but somehow our minds are able to contort around the contradiction and get comfortable with it. There are lots of reasons why we self-sabotage, but here are three popular types and some suggestions on how to break the cycle:

There is something about it that scares you
This is such a funny one and hard to catch in action as its happening. Much easier to spot when you reflect back on things, especially if its more of a pattern than a one-off. Examples would be: spending so long on job applications, you miss the submission date or setting such a high bar for what you do that nothing quite gets to it - so you end up not doing anything.

If this feels familiar, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Whats going on here? What am I really scared of? Get the fear out into the open. It may be fear of bad outcomes (rejection, public humiliation) or fear of the repercussions of what might be considered good outcomes, like getting the job!
2. Is that really true?
3. Are there any examples you can think of where it’s not true?
4. What could happen if I don’t do this thing? Often there is some kind of fallout from not doing something and thinking about that can be quite motivating.

Out of alignment with your values or beliefs
I find this comes up a lot with people I work with. There is a part of them that actually doesn’t want what they say they want. An example of this is someone who is unwilling to put themselves forward for a promotion because they have a belief that their boss will recognise and reward them for the great work they have been doing. This may also be fuelled by having values like “respect” and “fairness” that they assume  drives other people’s thinking.

What I find helps is to explore those values and beliefs and see how they could map better to the person’s hopes and dreams. For example, helping them recognise that their boss is unable to be fair and respect them if they continue to keep their ambitions a secret or forget to remind their boss of their underused skills or unobserved achievements. I worked with someone who was totally unable to complete a task they declared was really important to them because somewhere in their minds was the thought that they would give up something else they thought was important. When we exposed this thinking, it turns out that there was a way to keep this important element in their lives and they completed the task in record time.

Waiting for the muse to strike
When I decide I want to do something like write a blog post, lose a couple of pounds or go to the gym after a long (multi-year!) break, I often get lost in preparing. My best avoider technique is “researching”, which I insist on, however trivial the topic. That can allow days to slip by and even weeks if I’m not careful. The danger here is that there is always some reason why ‘today’ and ‘now’ are never the right time.

If any of this sounds familiar, you, like me, need to get underneath this kind of procrastination if you want to get around it. You will have more success with yourself if you stop letting your inner spoiled child take the upper hand. Tell yourself that no one dies from lack of cake and, equally, all writers say the best way to write is to start writing. Enough with the fooling around. You need to push through by channeling your Victorian grandmother. This approach works for the times when we know what to do but just need a bit of self discipline.
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Stopping self sabotage can be challenging. It can help to get some support with breaking old habits and behaviours. I can help. I work with a tool that has an incredible track record to help people recognise their saboteur thinking and introduce new, lifelong thought patterns. Want to know more? Book some time with me and I can answer any questions you might have.

There are many times over the course of a career where we need to present ourselves differently to how we have always been. That kind of change is often triggered by a change in role or a promotion but it can also be triggered by our wanting to be seen differently. This can be very uncomfortable as it changes our relationship with our once-peers and colleagues.

For anyone who is going through this, I have some tips:

1. Get really clear in your own mind how you want to be from now on, based on your new role and your own personal style. This is most critical, especially if you have been promoted and are now managing or leading people who you worked alongside in the past. It’s you who needs to define and project your new role so that they can adapt to you, rather than playing the office version of the “sidewalk shuffle” where you both second guess each other and end up in an unwelcome, endless dance.
2. Building on point one, you need to be consistent. You are in effect training them to see you differently so that you need to make sure you don’t confuse them by being your old self one day and your new self another.
3. Be open to a wide variety of reactions: some will quickly adapt to the new you and others may comment on or even challenge that change. Consider what is driving their response and what they need from you in terms of reassurance - are they worried that your old relationship won’t survive, for example?
4. Remember that most transformations are not sudden and immediate. Allow yourself and your colleagues time to process the change.
5. Enjoy the process! Evolving and growing is one of the great joys in life. You are becoming a new version of you. Thats something to celebrate and, while you need to be aware of the impact that may have on others, don’t forget to acknowledge the transformation and celebrate all of the hard work that you put in to make it happen.

​It's not always easy to reinvent yourself. Message me if this is something you need support with. 

We’ve all had at least one: the terrible boss, the one you dreaded spending time with, who never saw you in a good light, no matter what you did. Some of them yell and scream, some pile on the tasks and some of them just ignore you. What they all have in common is that they have created a bad experience that can be very scarring.

There are lots of great tips on the internet on how to deal with this, mostly focussing on what you can do to manage them or the situation but I want to focus on the opportunities having a bad manager offers you. “Opportunities?” you say? Yes, opportunities. You may learn more from a bad boss than from a good one. Lets go through a few possibilities:

• First off is that you learn some bad boss behaviours that you know to avoid in the future. Most people don’t get much in the way of management training or guidance so they are totally unaware of what they should be doing or what it feels like to be on the receiving end of their behaviour. By experiencing it first hand, you know to eliminate it from your own leadership style and your future colleagues will be grateful.
• Recognise which saboteurs are driving them - and you! When we are little, we develop guidelines that help us feel safe and some of them don’t translate well into adult life because the follow a child’s simplistic logic.  Take the saboteur test and see if you can spot what drives you and how that may be interacting with what drives your manager.
• Learn not to take things personally. This is a really great perspective to tune into. Your manager is unlikely to want to destroy your life. He/she probably has a lot going on and isn’t managing it as well as you might wish. They also may have formed an impression of you that isn’t entirely correct. It’s a lot easier to step back and think about how to change the situation if you don’t think it’s targeted at you, personally.

• Learn useful conflict resolution tactics. Conflict arises when expectations are mismatched. Is there something you can do differently that will change the dynamic? It may sound cliche to say it but the only thing we have full control of is ourselves and when we change what we do and how we are, it has the potential to change everything.
• Get better at asking for what you need. Many of us hesitate to ask for what we need or give the whole story because we think it will make us more vulnerable, but telling a boss about the impact they are having on you can be exactly what is needed to get things to change. Your boss isn’t psychic and may not realise they are not explaining things well or asking you to do more than you have time for.

In short, sometimes a bad boss can teach us more than a good one. Remembering that, and using it as a learning opportunity can help transform how we feel about a situation. If you see it as a gift, you can even get excited and curious about dealing with the situation - and that will help you at the time and forever afterwards.

Something a lot of my clients mention when we first meet is that they never really had a career plan and that this something I can definitely relate to. Many of us follow subjects we enjoy or are good at in high school and that tends to set the direction we take for the rest of our time in formal education. Once we hit the job market we often find ourself following our guts, taking up options because they sound interesting or are better paid but rarely because they are laying a foundation for our big life plan.

Over the years many of us manage our careers with the precision of “hunt the thimble”, a party game where a blindfolded  searcher has to find a hidden object being guided by temperature hints to let them know if they are getting ‘warmer’ or ‘colder’ in their pursuit. And, to be honest, this approach can take people a long way. The only time it becomes a problem is when we have to take stock and make some challenging decisions. Thats when people remember that they did have something they wanted to do and somehow they got totally sidetracked. Lockdown has had a silver lining where its unlocked peoples career hopes and dreams and allows them to wake up from the career trance they have been in.

Part of the problem is that we find it hard to conceive of the future and of ourselves in that future. FMRI studies now show that we think about our future selves in the same way as we think of other people, strangers who we are, let’s be honest, less likely to go out on a limb for. So, at a primitive, unspoken level, we totally deprioritise our future selves for whatever is temptingly on offer today. Studies in the US show that 53% of the population say they rarely or never think about the “far future” and 36% rarely or never think about something they might do in 10 years.

That said, the studies do find that some people do think about the future: from the same research in the US, 17% say they think about the world 30 years out at least once a week and 29 percent, consider a 10 year horizon at least once a week.

In my experience, both approaches have their pro’s and cons: non-planners surf the opportunities and are at the mercy of the wind and the waves in terms of where they end up. They are more likely to have trouble resisting temptations generally and may have poorer retirement plans, be less physically heathy, etc. They do build great resilience though and can adapt to change very quickly. On the other hand, people who believe it’s possible to plan ahead with any kind of certainty can struggle when their plans don’t materialise as expected. So, as ever, there is a happy middle ground we should all aspire to. 
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A great exercise to help the non-planners think about the future is to imagine its your 75th birthday and everyone who is important to you is there. Who is there? Someone you are close to gives a speech about all of your life’s accomplishments. What are they saying? Interestingly, you, at the age you are today, are also there. You can ask your future self for advice. What do they tell you?

From time to time, all of us hit a bumpy patch on our career journeys. It could be a new boss who you just can’t seem to gel with, taking on a new role and realising the culture it totally toxic, a restructure that doesn’t have a place for you or just a creeping sense of dissatisfaction that there MUST be more to life than whatever you spend your waking hours doing. For anyone who is going through that, I offer you both my support and my best tips for getting back on track:

1. You need to remember that this happens to everyone at some point or other. Even to the people who seem to have the most amazing, perfectly manicured careers. You just don’t always notice because some people are very adept at hiding what is going on in their lives.
2. Be careful of getting trapped in a downward spiral in this unsettling period. If you feel in any way threatened, your survival brain will take over which means you will genuinely be less creative, less collaborative, less smart than you are when things are going well. Can you think of ways to check in with yourself (or possibly trusted allies) to make sure that your responses to the situation still reflect well on you?
3. Practice mindfulness multiple ties a day. You can keep it short, just a couple of minutes at a time. This will put your survival brain on pause and let your better self represent you and keep you from doing and saying things you may regret.
4. Be objective. If you were counselling yourself, what would you say? Are there things you can do to improve things or is getting out as quickly as possible the right thing to do?  Get into a calm state of mind and ask your wisest self for advice.
5. Can you see the positives? My experience of being in a role or organisation that I had fallen out of love with was a strong sense that getting out was a very positive step that would get me back on the right track for me. What can help is to get curious. A rough patch is a good indicator that something isn’t working. If you treat it as a symptom rather than a disease, you can do the detective work to find the root cause and correct it.

You may be going through “interesting times” but being in the right frame of mind about it allows you to see it as a blessing rather than a curse.