Five Shiny Nuggets of Careers Gold

Hacking Your HOW

Hello!

It has been AGES, so thank you for sticking with me, and thank you and a big welcome to all the new folks who signed up over summer.  It’s wonderful to have you here.

This time of year often comes with a burst of career confusion.  We’ve had the summer to unhook from unhelpful defaults and get a new perspective on our work, and we have the end of the year ahead of us as a natural milestone by which we can measure progress toward our goals.  Add to that the uptick in recruitment in September and October and you have the perfect recipe for change.

But what if you don’t know what you want to do instead?  

Or if WHAT you do, or WHERE you do it isn’t the problem, it’s more about HOW you work?

You would not be alone.  

It’s easy to feel that change has to come in the form of revolution, that it has to be BIG to count - to rip it all up and start again.  But often big change comes from a series of smaller nudges, allowing us to maximise what is working for us, and manage out what isn’t without having to completely reinvent our wheel.

Exploring freelance or consulting, switching to part time or a more flexible mode with reduced or concentrated hours, prototyping a product or service based on your existing work, exploring how you could showcase your strengths in different sectors or types of organisation are all ways of hacking your how.

This could look like

• Crafting your current job spec to better fit your strengths instead of looking for something new

• Working on your boundaries to limit the amount of space work is able to take up, or the impact it has on you

• Switching up your work environment to meet new people, enable better focus, greater accountability, to help sign-post a switch in modes or create an energy shift

• Flexing your NOcabulary so you have more time and energy for the things you want to say YES to

HOW questions my clients have been asking recently include:

🙋🏿‍♀️ How do I find work I care about, but that allows me to switch off at the end of the day? That feels important, but not urgent?

🙋🏼‍♀️How embedded in an organisation do I need to be to thrive?

🙋🏻‍♀️ How can I create more variety within my work?

🙋🏿‍♀️ How can I experiment with my entrepreneurial side without introducing too much risk too soon?

Whatever the questions you’ve been asking yourself, this newsletter is all about getting happy with your how.

If you could do with some help with your how (or indeed your what, where or with who), drop me a line here and let’s talk.

Enjoy!

Penny.

💻 We Came, We Snacked, We Co-Worked

I’ve been having a think about my own HOW over the last few weeks, and one of the things I’ve realised is how much benefit I get from working alongside other people, and the positive impact it has on all other areas of what I do.

Having Claire, my amazing colleague (HIYA👋🏻) supporting me over the last year has been an absolute game changer in this regard.  I never thought I would miss team meetings, but my fortnightly catch up with Claire is a guaranteed energy booster for me and a great start to the week.

Involving others balances out the intensity of client work and the isolation of living and working on my own (my feline co-’workers’ not included), and helps me feel connected, grounded and much more well rounded.  It also helps me take myself WAY less seriously, which I think a lot of us could benefit from sometimes 🤪.

So I recently emailed some of the MSCC legend squad who live in my area to see if anyone fancied a fortnightly co-working session, where I could be a participant as well as a host.

The first one was today and I wrote most of this newsletter and ate a massive cake in great company.  Nothing not to like there!

Now when I plan my work, as well as thinking about what do I do myself, vs what can Claire take off my hands and almost certainly do better than I would, I can think about what will benefit from me being squirrelled away at home with my full attention, and what will be all the better for a blast of external energy and a few well placed words of wisdom from some fellow legends.

If you are Hackney adjacent and would be interested in joining a select crew of legends for a spot of co-working, drop me a line and I’ll add you to the list. I’ll be capping numbers each time at 5 max so it will be a nice intimate squad.

🙋🏻‍♀️ Work With Me

I am scarily close to fully booked til Christmas, so if, like Zoe, you could do with some help turning off your tunnel vision and finding what excites you NOW is the time to get in touch.  I would love to hear from you.

One well trodden path to hacking your how is to consider whether you could take the thing you do out of a full time or fixed context and ‘pivot to freelance’.

I am writing this newsletter sitting next to one of the MSCC Legend Squad (Hi Kate 👋), who until 4 months ago was convinced her future was full-time.

This week she sent her first self-employed invoice, and has spent the summer road testing her business idea, with an amazing response.

Again, it’s easy to think that full time or freelance is a hard binary, that we can never change lanes or go back from, but most of us can find ways to test whether we have an idea, a skill set or a sector expertise that could sustain our self-employed self well before we ever make a leap that would compromise our ability to pay the bills.  

Self-employment is as much about mindset as it is about the work we do - it’s the ultimate HOW rather than WHAT - but while it is a lot more accessible than we might think, it is also of course not a decision to take lightly, and for some people the trade offs required will not outweigh the gains.

So this month’s reading recommendations are my two must r-ads for anyone thinking about flying solo….

When we find ourselves questioning our how, we can often find our inner critic piping up to stop us taking authentic action.  Tara Mohr, author of the epic Playing Big came up with this list  of what Viv Groskop calls “The shitty, pointless, self-sabotaging statements that are the permanent mood music inside the heads of too many women”. 

If the only thing between you and a happier how is YOU, can you start to notice where and how you are holding yourself back, and ask yourself what you can do to gently step out of your own way?

This is an exercise I do with clients ALL THE TIME and it can be so illuminating when it comes to understanding what we need to thrive in our so-called careers, and whether the thing we need to change sits under WHAT, WHERE, or HOW.

I like to approach this as a series of brainstorms, but for you it might be journaling prompts, shower thoughts, or the internal soundtrack to a good walk.

You do you.

What is most important to you about:

❓The work you do?

❓The companies you work for?

❓The environments you work in?

❓The people you work with/are surrounded by?

❓How you are recognised/rewarded?

Once you’ve got a good sense of your criteria, think about the following:

• How close is your current work to providing what you need? You could use a simple score out of five here to give a sense of scale

• What is in your power to change?

• What could that change look like for you? What does the evolution version look like as well as the revolution version?

Karma Corner is taking a bit of a break while I make some changes to the format, but if there is someone you would like to shout about in a future edition you can nominate them here.

Send me your nominations by hitting the big pink button below.

💌 KEEP IN TOUCH 💌

If you enjoyed this email, please forward it to a friend or five for a quick hit of careers karma, and please drop me a line if you’d like to say hi. You can reply to this email straight to my inbox and it genuinely makes my day.

Or you can also connect on Instagram: @socalledcareer

If someone forwarded this to you and you’d like to receive more from me every month(ish), you can sign up below, or check out the archive.