The month of August is a funny one - fun and funny. Disrupted schedules with long weekends away, client holidays and kids back from college. I find it harder to have the clear focus that I’m sure September will bring. And some days it’s easy to produce nothing. Which is when the question creeps in, ‘if I'm not making something happen, what am I actually worth?’ That question takes up the space which could be taken up with multiple more positive things. That's what’s taken me

I had forgotten some of the person I enjoyed being and didn’t even realise till I got back in touch with a number of old friends during lockdown. Talking to them over the months, a version of me resurfaced that hadn't been much around for years. Curious. Playful. Irreverent. The one I’d been more of before I felt I had to prove myself. I assumed I had to choose between that person and the one I'd become, driven, wanting real impact, good at getting things done. Give up one to

When you start, following the culture around you is the smart thing to do. You don't know what’s gone into making good yet, so you watch, absorb, and do things the way they've been done before. It's how to learn the job. But there's a point when that stops being learning and starts being hiding. When you could set the direction yourself, and instead you're waiting for a cue that had been coming from someone else. And it’s up to you to notice when that moment has come. There's

You reach the thing you've been aiming at for years. And the next morning, the world looks exactly the same. Not that you’re ungrateful or disappointed. It’s just a flatness that makes no sense given you got what you wanted. I remember when I acted that the sweetest part of any job was hearing I’d got the role. I think the meaning was never really in the summit. It was in the climbing. The striving gives the days a shape, and reaching the top takes that away. It’s too easy to

I’m not who I used to be. Sometimes, our identity can be updated without conscious effort. You marry, and you're someone's partner now. A child arrives, and you're a parent, ready or not. A parent dies, and there’s a gap. The world shifts and you can’t avoid the new shape. Work rarely does you that favour. Your title changes. But it doesn’t necessarily force you to update who you think you are. You can be promoted three times and still be operating as the person you were in y

I was never one to avoid a hard conversation. If anything, I was the opposite. I ran towards it, often too soon, and didn’t go back to certain companies because the level of transparency I wanted didn't fit the culture. I thought that meant I was direct. The person willing to say the thing others were tiptoeing around. It has taken a while to see that wanting the conversation before the ground was ready meant avoiding the slower work. The work that built the conditions where

“When I get to that level.” “When I hit that number.” “When things calm down.” Something always off in the distance. Most of us carry some version of this, a point on the horizon that's supposed to bring satisfaction. And then you reach it, and the achievement just gets absorbed. No pause, no moment where it registers as real. It becomes the new baseline almost instantly, and you're already looking at the next point on the horizon before the last one has barely landed. The pr

As I've written about before, I'm comfortable having the answer. Give me a problem, a gap that needs filling, and I'll step in, happy to help. Not because I have to but because I want to. It comes easily. It feels like me. Being on the other side of it doesn't. When someone offers me help, something in me tightens before I've even decided how to respond. Not because the offer isn't kind. Because receiving it means there's a gap I couldn't fill myself, and for those of us who

It's not necessarily about the job, or the money, or the next move. It's about whether any of it matters. The thought that can turn up on a good day as much as a bad one. Things may be going well by all the visible measures, and it comes anyway. The instinct is to push it down because it’s hard to be with. I worked with someone a few years ago who'd helped build a company that was sold. They were in their work-out period before they could walk away with a lump sum and they as

I was taught that saying ‘no’ was rude. Not in so many words. But the message was clear enough. You accommodate people. You make it work. ‘No’ was impolite, a bit selfish. So I said yes to a lot of things I might have otherwise declined, and I did it automatically, before I'd worked out what the cost was to me. It took me a long time to see that ‘no' isn't rude. It's a boundary. And a boundary isn't a wall to keep people out. It protects the space for the work only you can do

For years, ‘busy’ was my go-to answer. How are you? “Busy.” I said it the way some people say "fine". Automatically, but there was some pride too. Being busy meant being needed. Being needed meant it was all working. Then I had a head injury, and I had to stop being busy for a while. I didn’t take the pause gracefully. Not being busy felt unnatural, because if I wasn’t busy then who was I? That's the thing about busyness. Sometimes it's a place to hide. As long as you have no

If I’d been treating a colleague the way I treated myself, HR would have had me up for a disciplinary. I would make up strange rules when I was working hard. I’m not even sure I consciously chose them. I would tell myself that I could stop only when I'd got to a certain point… finished the section or cleared the list. So I'd push on, past the point of being any use. And I could feel the work getting slower, more laboured with each passing hour. A part of me knew that if I was

When did someone last tell you something hard about yourself, to your face? Not a review with the edges softened. Something genuinely uncomfortable about how you come across, or where you're getting it wrong. If you have to think back a while, that's worth noticing. As careers develop and you have more responsibility people get more careful about what they tell you. Not because you're hard to talk to. Because you're more powerful and honest feedback to powerful people carries

I was quite tough when I first ran teams. Focused, driven. Hard on myself and hard on the people around me, and I’m sorry for that. I thought that was how things got done. People were surprised how I could be outside work. Fun, curious, relaxed. I could be good company away from work because I wasn’t responsible for it all. Looking back, that behaviour didn't make the work any better and I see now that it came from fear. Fear of getting it wrong. Fear of the job being less th

What forced me to take stock was a death in my family. Before that I saw myself as the ‘strong one’ and pushed myself hard. I liked taking responsibility and driving things forward. When I worked, I ran at capacity and when you run at capacity, there’s nowhere to go when something happens. Look at the NHS. When my brother died, I had year-old twins and knew only one way to operate. So I kept being the strong one, because I didn't know how to be anything else. Except I didn’t

At some point on the way up, praise thins out. And when it does come, it rarely has the same impact that it used to. The easy explanation is that things are more complex now. Early in your career you fixed the thing, delivered the result, and the praise came quickly with specifics. At senior levels what you deliver is more subtle. It’s more influence than action. The outcomes are months down the line, and the credit, when it comes, is for work half forgotten. So the praise la

If dentistry had a Turner prize I know who I’d nominate. I’m lucky enough to have some exceptional practitioners in my life. One is my dentist, Mr Gaffapur. I’m endlessly impressed that his injections, fillings even the crown he’s given me are done with such care that there is never any pain or discomfort. My memory of dentists before him was that, invariably, there would be some pain, some discomfort. No more. He is an artist and teeth are his canvas. Another is Gary, he’s a

I once told a friend I wouldn't go to their wedding. Not because of anything unmissable, because of work. My mother was an immigrant and my dad was a grafter who worked from the age of 15. I learned to be grateful to have work and fermented that into making every job a vocation. I didn't let life get in the way of the work, and a wedding, to the version of me back then, was life getting in the way. What saved me from myself was an Exec. Someone you'd expect to applaud that ki

I have two children, now young adults, and I learned very quickly that "Do as I say, not as I do" didn’t work. What they actually take on board is the behaviour they witness. Your patience or your snapping. The time you spend looking at your phone. How easily you acknowledge fault. They're absorbing the behaviour. Then they repeat the behaviour. I’d see the things I least liked in myself coming back to me in miniature. And what noticing this helped me realise was that this is

Do you know Questlove? You may have seen him on Jimmy Fallon’s show where he’s the drummer/front man of the house band. He’s also a music producer and latterly a documentary maker. He was on 6 Music at the weekend talking about his latest film on ‘Earth Wind and Fire’. Discussing their impact he said, ‘the lyrics tricked you into positive affirmation’. ‘...you start singing the lyrics and there’s an osmosis effect of positivity that gets you...’ I used to be skeptical about p