So we looked at the inner critic and your inner beauty. Now its time to leap. To get real. So come on, do stuff you love. Use your strengths and courage and follow your calling!
Enjoy this video!
Category: Crafting your career
The art of being yourself
This is a wonderful video about self identity and authentic self expression, by Caroline McHugh. The topic is discussed through a well crafted framework in a form of a story. A story told by the side of the fire on a winters night. I don’t think I can do this video justice through my description – it just has to be experienced.
Caroline will inspire you!
Enjoy!
Inspiring Events, Part 2
This is the second of three instalments of my inspiring events series this month. It was a coaching network event by London Coaches. I was pleasantly surprised and wanted to share some of the ideas in the hope you would find it useful.
The trainer asked us to think about the stories we play out on our lives, the:
- Characters
- Location
- Genres
- Plot lines
He asked one powerful question: Would changing one of the above elements get you
better outcome/story?
For example, do you play the warrior at work but nothing works, everyone is screaming -a horror story. The trainer suggested instead using the character of jester to see if this changes up the energy and gets better outcomes, the story you want. That is slaying the dragon/reaching work goal via humour.
My take away was to be mindful of the narratives we have about ourselves and situations and not to get locked into stories that don’t service you- be flexible. You are the director.
Try it!
Enjoy!
No, really, lean in
I went to this talk by Lazlo Block in May, quite some time ago (sorry, I tweeted but forgot to blog). It was a close call between seeing Lazlo and going to a gender lecture. In the end, I decided to go to the talk where I knew least about the speaker- to learn new ideas.
I wasn’t disappointed. Lazzlo was full of ideas about work. He is the VP for People Operations at google, so Human Resources. He had a lot to say about his own journey, getting to google and where google is going next. All chronicled in his book Work Rules.
A hugely likeable and charismatic speaker, (he once worked as an actor), but don’t let that fool you, he had some hard hitting messages. My favourites were:
- work really hard. not hard, but super hard. that will cover most things
- work with the best and learn all you can, so you can work hard some more
- leadership is about others not you
- but know why you want to lead, what contribution you want to make and be authentic.
Enjoy!
Gloria Larson- Women in Corprate America
Wow, what a talk! Gloria Larson is a former politician and lawyer and in 2007, she was the first woman to be selected President of Bentley University – an american business school. I went to an inspiring event she held a few weeks ago in London . In fact, I got caught in rush hour and missed the first bit, but it was well worth persevering.
Gloria talked about her own very impressive leadership journey as well as wove in lessons from academic research. My take aways were:
- Go for the tough assignments- stretch yourself
- Make your partner a real partner at home
- Breadth of experience is an important as depth
- Do things you love- that passion is needed to go the extra mile.
What have been your leadership lessons? Leave comments in the box bellow.
Navigating Major Career Transitions
Harvard University Prof. Michael Watkins outlines some great advise on career transitions.
Michael tells us that understanding successful transitions is relevant to all and not just when you get promoted. Michael says that due to the impact of economic cycles restructuring and job shifting can be the norm.
What stood out for me was these three gems:
- Understand what you need to do personally to adapt
- Understand what you need to let go of
- Understand that the ability to adapt is a source of advantage.
Enjoy!
Cultivate the leader in you with Gabrielle Bernstein
This is a great 90 minute video training about authentic leadership. Gabriel looks at leadership through the lens of spirituality. This may be, or may not be ‘your thing’- that said, I feel you could swap out the lexicon of spirituality with that of your own and the message will be the same: if you’re called to lead – lead. There are also some practical tips for those who are action oriented. The ‘take homes’ for me in this very engaging video are:
- Lead yourself first, inspire you
- Be authentic
- Deal with your own challenges
- Trust your intuition
- Be grateful for what you have now
- Be specific in your messages
- Cultivate your core audiences
- Lead from where you are
Enjoy!
Carrie Green – The Confident Mindset
What is it about:
In this video Carrie Green the founder and owner of the Female Entrepreneur Association gives an energetic talk on achievement. Broadly, from Carrie’s point of view, success is achieved by design, by (re)programming your mind.
How is this different?
Carrie is an inspiring and award winning Entrepreneur that offers lessons from her own life. She started her first successful businesses at 19 and went on to found the Female Entrepreneur Association. So she has walked the talk. As Carrie describes her entrepreneurial journey, we get some insight into the challenges she faced. Important for us, Carrie also talks about the strategies she used to achieve her own success, on her own terms.
How it can help
There are some great every day tips for ‘getting out of your own way’ in this video. In this talk Carries takes you through what I would call as self mastery or self leadership strategies. To use Carrie’s own words, you will lean about the ‘power of your mind’ to empower you to achieve your goals. Her top tips are:
• The importance of getting clear about what you want. Crystal clear.
• Challenge your self limiting beliefs as they happen.
• Daily positive visualisation
For more info check out her website here: www.femaleentrepreneurassociation.com
Enjoy!
Women in Tech: Lessons from Silicon Valley- a leadership event and reflections on serendipity
What is it:
This last post of 2014 is about the power of serendipity. I went to an event in November titled Women in Tech: Lessons from Silicon Valley. The event brings together a range of executives to the UK to talk about their experiences in the work place. The speakers were:
• Megan Smith, U.S. Chief Technology Officer and Assistant to the President
• Margaret Gould-Stewart, Director of Product Design, Facebook
• Angela Lin, Head of YouTube Education, Google
• Catherine Mohr, VP of Medical Research, Intuitive Surgical
• Crystal Hutter, Founder & CEO, Edmodo
• Liz Dickinson, Founder & CEO, MIO
How is it different?:
It was an inspiring event, as it gave you access to people you don’t normally get to meet every day. All on the panel were very candid. The panel spoke about insights they had learnt on their career journey, their lessons as well as advice they wish they had known early on.
How can it help?:
I said this post was about the power of serendipity and I’m going to tell you about that now. When I went to the talk the speakers on the panel shared lots of interesting lessons and even more so in the after drinks session where you could talk to them one on one. For instance one of the speakers recommended a book on the growth mind-set (I did a review here). This isn’t a book I had come across before and I have done a lot of reading on the topics of personal development! Even though these individuals may feel superhuman, through power of networking, I myself learnt lots of new ideas. Very helpful. Even powerful. Its an endorsement of placing networking high on your to do list for 2015.
Enjoy networking and serendipity in 2015!
The Women in Tech: Lessons from Silicon Valley, was a Leadership event. The talk was part of a series called Silicon Valley comes to the UK. More details can be found here.
Workforce trends of 2030
What is this about
In this video we zoom out to look at the macro level: global workforce trends. The speaker is a Human Resources specialist called Rainer Strack. Rainer’s speciality is to help business to think about emerging trends.
How is this different
I have chosen this video because we often think about work at the individual level. We focus on CVs, our appraisals and job hunting skills. We often forget about larger scale developments, so much so it could be called a blind spot. While these big trends may feel invisible, they have a real and lasting impact on what happens in our day to day work. They are worth considering in more depth.
How it can help
Rainer is talking from a HR perspective and therefore looks at what business can do to attract employees, but there is plenty of insight for employees themselves. Rainer helps us as employees to keep an eye on workforce trends as we are developing our one, three, five or even ten year plan. As we are thinking about where we want to be, Rainer helps us to see how trends may impact positively or negatively on our ability to achieve these goals. What I see as Reiner’s top trends are highlighted below. Draw your own conclusions.
1. Labour shortages in specific sectors
2. Labour surpluses in specific sectors
3. Distribution of shortages/surpluses across countries
4. Skills missmatch -especially for high skilled workers
5. Impact of automation- replacing and creating jobs
Enjoy!
