• Do you feel like you are tired of your current career?
• Do you worry that you don’t want to do your job for another 20 years?
• Do you worry that you may regret it later if you do something about it soon?

Why am I not enjoying my career anymore?

A career is a long time. And it’s getting longer.  What we found acceptable before, bores or frustrates us now. We look out the window and ask – is this it?

Research has shown that on average, we will live to be 100 years old. That means we are likely to work for more than 60 years. That changes how we need to think about our career.

The accepted three life stages of study, work, and retirement have become outdated and redundant.  The working phase of our lives has been extended with new patterns emerging.  Rather than study, work, retire… it could look like, study, work, travel, retrain, new career, freelance, travel, study, retrain, new career,  freelance then… semi-retire.

Some (lucky) people found the perfect career early in life that sustains them for many decades.  But many people didn’t get this clarity early on or the lifespan of interest in their career has waned.  This shows up in the statistics. Only 27% of people are working in the area that their degree subject is in and, on average, people change their careers 5-7 times during their life.

This is because, we either make the wrong decision earlier on or as we live longer, our values and passions change.  What we wanted in our early twenties will be very different to what we want in our thirties and forties.  In our twenties, we had more external pressures to make a good decision about a job – usually one that brought security and a good salary.

As we grow older, we become clearer about who we really are and what we care about.  This creates a gap between the work that we have built our career on compared to what we find meaningful as our passions and values evolve.  Sometimes we only wake up to this fact when we are 15-20 years into our career.

Use your long life as an opportunity to find a career you love

Living and working for longer is a great opportunity to find a career that is more meaningful for you.  If you didn’t find it the first time round, or the glow of your current career has worn off, you can carve out some time to work out what a more meaningful career looks like for you.

The good news is – you can find a new career that expresses your true essence, uses your strengths and is aligned to your values. You can decide who you want to work with.  You can make proactive choices for when and how you work.  You’ll be able to transfer many of your skills and experience from your current career so you are not starting from scratch again.

It’s giving you a second chance at a fulfilling career to sustain you for the next 20 years – it’s worth it.

Ok, this looks like something I need to seriously look at… So how do I look at what my options are and make the right decision?

Where can you start?

• Take my Are You Still in the Right Career? Test
• Book a discovery call with me to see if coaching could be a good fit for you

How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?

What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?

How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

If you are looking for immediate one-to-one support, contact me and we can have a chat.

If you are committed to making a change, join one of the My Wisdom programs.

• Do you lack energy at work?
• Are you finding that you are wasting time and energy being concerned about the balls you might drop?
• Do you feel that you have no choice but to respond to all the demands being made of you?

You feel that you don’t have enough reserves in your ‘energy’ tank anymore

As the seasons change, many of us feel the effects of the lack of natural daylight and waking up to dark mornings.  As we move into the last quarter of the year, work tends to pick up pace for a hectic few months before the holiday season.

We tend to work in ways that meet the needs of our employers – that means a high percentage of back to back calls – a friend of mine’s 8 year old son said to her…. “Mummy, hurry up, I only have 10 minutes before my next conf call”…our children see the reality of what this way of working is like for us.  Hybrid working often means earlier start times and later finishing times without the welcome break that the daily commute offered us.

Whilst there are huge advantages to hybrid working with many of us feeling that it offers the opportunity to do things that we weren’t able to do before, such as exercise or seeing more of our family, the lines between work and home are increasingly blurred and our families get to see the reality of our working life.  A work colleague shared recently how she was encouraging her daughter to join the consulting profession and her daughter replied “no thank you, I don’t want to create PowerPoint presentations all the time”.

How we try and juggle work with home and meeting all the demands on us, eats into our precious energy reserves.  Its now increasingly important to talk about energy reserve management rather than time management.  Unfortunately, many are still using time management technique to pack more which is creating a personal energy crisis.

Align your work with your energy with the My Wisdom Mind Formula™

Research into employees returning to work after burn out found that those employees who focused on energy management rather than time management were able to get back to work quickly and in a sustainable way.

To live a life with full engagement, energy management is the secret sauce.  Energy management involves identifying your natural peaks and flows during the day and designing your work around that.  It includes balancing your time aligned to your mind, emotions, body and spirituality to enable you to work in a sustainable way over the long term.

The most important things you can do for yourself is to design your work around our energy.

You might be wondering how you actually do that? How do you design your work around your energy? Isn’t that impossible given the challenging demands you face everyday at work?

• Take the… Living Life with Full Engagement test?
• Join the My Wisdom Mind™ Program
• Book a discovery call with me to see if coaching may be a good fit for you

How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?

What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?

How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

If you are looking for immediate one-to-one support, contact me and we can have a chat.

If you are committed to making a change, join one of the My Wisdom programs.

• Do you feel like your current career isn’t where you’re actually meant to be?
• Do you feel that you are living someone else’s career sometimes as it takes too much energy trying to do work that doesn’t make your heart sing?
• Do you dream of having a career that you truly love and find fulfilling?

You find yourself in a ‘Conditioned Career’ that’s sapping your soul
We can find ourselves in a career that isn’t what we want.  For some, when we were younger, that may be due to external pressures wanting the very best for us with a respectable and secure career. For others, we just weren’t 100% sure of what we wanted to do.

Whilst you have a good salary and status, you are not happy.  If that’s you, you’re stuck in a  Conditioned Career.

If you’re in a Conditioned Career:

1. You follow someone else’s dreams over your own
2. You conform to the rules to survive
3. You feel the need to look like everyone else, even if you don’t
4. You feel you’re not in control of your working life
5. You feel frustrated and disillusioned

As the years have passed, you feel that you can no longer carry on like this and that you want a career where you can actually thrive rather than just survive.

Discover and live your Wisdom Career

As we search for more meaning in our careers, we can create a career that suits our strengths, values and passions. This is called a Wisdom Career.

If you are in a Wisdom Career:

1. You express who you really are
2. You celebrates your uniqueness
3. You maximises your strengths
4. You fire up your passions
5. You have no regrets 

A Wisdom Career puts you in control of what you work on, where and how you work, and who you work with. You wake up every day loving the challenges of the day ahead knowing they are fully aligned to who you are and what you care about.

A Wisdom Career sounds amazing…..So how can I work out what my wisdom career is?

You can Discover and Live Your Wisdom Career

• Take the Am I living My Wisdom Career™? test to see how aligned your current career is to the Wisdom Career principles
• Join the My Wisdom Career™ Program
• Book a discovery call with me to see if coaching may be a good fit for you

How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?

What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?

How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

If you are looking for immediate one-to-one support, contact me and we can have a chat.

If you are committed to making a change, join one of the My Wisdom programs.

• Do you have a crippling pattern of negative self talk?
• Are you experiencing an ‘Inner Bully’ that undermines your hopes and dreams?
• Do you hold back from taking the next bold step in your career or life due to the internal critic inside you?

You feel like you are not on your own side

Practically every human being on the planet has an Inner Critic. The voice in your head that berates you for not being good enough.  The voice that tells you that luck got you to where you are today and one day everyone will find out that you aren’t that good really.

Many women in particular have a noisy Inner critic and suffer from imposter syndrome. That nagging doubt that there is something wrong with you. That others are better than you – smarter, more qualified, more….

Why is this?

Social conditioning has meant that women were brought up to be ‘nice’, sit quietly and wait to be asked to contribute.  We were thought of as too aggressive and too boisterous if we were enthusiastic or asked for what we really wanted.  Over time, the ‘norm’ of what were expected to be created a monstrous Inner critic.  The women that I’ve worked with have called this Inner Critic..  ‘Berating Beryl”….  “Bullying Betty”…. “Snarky Sandra”… you get the point.

From a workplace perspective, confidence has become a gendered issue and is even weaponised against women.  Often if women don’t achieve a career goal, leaders are prone to attributing it to a lack of self confidence.

In order to live our best life we need to befriend and conquer our noisy Inner critic. Or we risk not reaching our full potential and falling short of our hopes and dreams.

Befriend and conquer your Inner critic with the My Wisdom Mind Formula™

Did you know that we don’t just have one Inner critic inside us?  In fact we have ten!  Research has shown that we all have a dominant Inner Critic.  But not just that, the Inner Critic has a family of allies.  The allies are Perfectionism, Avoider, Pleaser, Victim, Restless, Stickler, Hyper-Achiever, Hyper-Vigilant, Controller, Hyper-Rational, .. These, along with your Inner Critic, make up your Saboteurs.  Can you guess who your top saboteurs are?

The method that works well befriend and conquer your sabtoeurs is:

• Step 1 – Get to know and befriend your Inner critic and allies
• Step 2 – Build mental muscles ‘in the moment’ to reduce the strength of your Inner critic and their allies
• Step 3 – Proactively shift to the wise ‘sage’ mindset that employees more constructive capacities to take positive action

This is a proven approach to increase your mental fitness and boost your performance.

You might be thinking… Ok, I get it Angela…. How do you build mental fitness so you an conquer these Saboteurs?

• Take the… Discover Your Saboteurs test?
• Join the My Wisdom Mind™ Program
• Book a discovery call with me to see if coaching may be a good fit for you

How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?

What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?

How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

If you are looking for immediate one-to-one support, contact me and we can have a chat.

If you are committed to making a change, join one of the My Wisdom programs.

• Do you feel you will never go back to how you were before the pandemic?
• Do you appreciate life and your relationships more since the pandemic?
• Did all of the challenges from the pandemic create a silver lining with the desire for change?

When growth comes from challenges

Following the pandemic, the term “post-traumatic growth” has been seen in mainstream press as a way of describing the psychological benefit of trauma.

We can all look back over our lives and find times when we’ve had immensely challenging situations which have ended up helping us grow. For example, some of us have lost a loved one, experienced a difficult break up or lost our job.

The pandemic created a new experience – the first time in a generation, in western societies, where we have experienced such an extended period of fear and uncertainty. This has created an even deeper connection to our global colleagues who have experienced such significant trauma through wars and natural disasters in their countries.  The global pandemic was the first time for many decades where we went through a crisis of this magnitude together.

As well as increasing our collective awareness and sister and brotherhood with each other, at a personal level it created an existential crisis where we questioned everything. What was the purpose of this life? What makes me happy? What am I here to do?

The benefits of post-traumatic growth

People who have experience post-traumatic growth talk about how they appreciate life so more than before. Their relationships have improved and they feel there are new possibilities in life.  New levels of personal strength and spirituality emerge.

There are four factors that you can cultivate that lead to post-traumatic growth:

• Honest optimism: optimism reduces our sense of helplessness whilst also facing the realities of the situation
• Perception of control: take control of the situation and/or change our perception of the situation
• Coping style – acceptance, problem solving and using humour to positively reinterpret situation
• Strong sense of self – knowing ourselves well and having a sense of purpose in life

I’ve worked with many women to look at how the pandemic has created post-traumatic growth for them.

Women are asking for new ways of working, finding new company’s and some have decided to change career completely. Some are not ready to change, yet. They want to continue in their current company or profession but in a way that delivers opportunities and balance for them.

Other women are completely redesigning their lives – from the country they live in, the relationship they are in to how they want to live their day to day lives.

If you want to change your career/life after the challenges of the pandemic, it is possible. It is worth it.

How to explore your post-traumatic growth

• Book a discovery call with me to see if coaching to support your growth journey may be a good fit for you
• Create a new playbook by signing up for the comprehensive My Wisdom Programs Package which includes Career, Life and Mind

How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?

What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?

How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

If you are looking for immediate one-to-one support, contact me and we can have a chat.

If you are committed to making a change, join one of the My Wisdom programs.

• Do you lack energy and purpose at work?
• Have you become less tolerant of corporate rhetoric and challenging stakeholder behaviour?
• Do you wonder what other work you could be doing that is more aligned to your passions?

You feel uninspired about your job

We spend an awful lot of time at work so it’s not great if you’re not enjoying it.  We spend at least one third of our lives at work – that’s a whopping 90,000 hours!  We actually spend more time with our colleagues than our loved ones on average.  So how you feel about work and who you work with is critically important. If you are not inspired or really enjoying what you do, it’s a waste of your talents.

Unfortunately, a lot of people aren’t feeling inspired in their jobs. ‘Quiet Quitting’ has become a thing. We do what the minimum of what the job requires.  We’re at work but not fully engaged or giving our best.  We don’t want to give the discretionary effort that our company expects from us. We are far less tolerant of company decisions and the more challenging people we work with.

Given we are only given one precious life, what a massive waste of time it is to feel uninspired in your role and working for company that does not align with your values.

Align your passions to your career with the My Wisdom Career Formula™

We all have a calling within us – a calling in our heart that is guiding us to what we are meant to be doing to have a true and authentic career filled with passion and purpose.

Due to our social conditioning, we may have decided on a career that is not our true calling because it offers us a profession and security.  We know that in our hearts that we need to change.

The most important passion project you can do for yourself is to find the career that you were meant to have.  Now is the time.

You might be wondering how you actually do that? How do you find a career that is aligned to your passions? Isn’t that like trying to find a needle in a haystack?

• Take the Are you living aligned to your true Purpose? test
• Join the My Wisdom Career™ Program
• Book a discovery call with me to see if coaching may be a good fit for you

How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?

What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?

How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

If you are looking for immediate one-to-one support, contact me and we can have a chat.

If you are committed to making a change, join one of the My Wisdom programs.

• Do you feel your mental health suffered during the pandemic and is still not great today?
• Does hybrid working exhaust you and make you feel like you are working in a call centre, with relentless back to back calls?
• Do you worry that if you don’t change something, your health will suffer in the long term?

Why is it that we are still feeling the ravages of the pandemic on our mental health at work?

There were two things that happened that have created the long tail of mental health issues that we suffer with today.

Firstly, the pandemic created an existential crisis – overnight what we used to entertain and amuse ourselves was taken away. Our biggest concerns shifted from our career and lifestyle to our health and the health of our loved ones.  After two years of worrying about job security, money and health, it’s taken its toll on how we feel today.

Secondly, for many, the pandemic was the last straw to break the camel’s back.  We’d already been working under excessive pressure to get ahead, stay relevant, and be well regarded by our peers.  We hid our mental health issues because revealing them might negatively impact our careers.

The problem is, lots of people worked even harder during the pandemic. Either at the request of management or due to their own drive for job security making their mental health worse.  We saw absence cases soar due to mental health over this time.

And what is the situation today? Whilst it feels like life’s gone back to normal, for the time being at least, the mental health crisis is still here.

So what can you do about it?

Change how you approach your role

Put your self care at work first.  Imagine you’re a Scuba Diver about to embark on a dive.  You’d make sure your tank was full of oxygen before your dive wouldn’t you? Create a timetable of self care activities which includes during your working day. Free up some time by working out the most critical 20% of your role and focus on those activities first.  Get support if you have several stakeholders making demands on your time at the same time – it’s time to start managing stakeholders differently.

Change your role

If your role is eroding your mental health, maybe it’s time to see if there is an alternative role in your company that you could do that wouldn’t impact your mental health as badly.   You can check out the job boards and also seek some informal advice from someone you trust within your organisation on how to approach this.

Get professional help

There is no need to suffer alone. There are a lot of resources including confidential employee assistance programs, psychotherapists and charities that can help.  In some cases, medication can help get through a particularly challenging period.

Take some time out

Sometimes having some distance between you and your job for a short period is just what you need to rebuild your mental health and gain perspective.

Change your career

Another option is to rethink your career completely.  You can work out what your strengths are, your values and what you really care about.  This could open up new avenues of possibilities that you haven’t considered so far.

The pandemic taught us that we only have one life.  If work is impacting your mental health, do something about it now.  It’s just not worth the risk you may pay later.

Ok Angela, I feel like I need to take action to take the pressure off at work.  So what can I do next?

You may be wondering:

• How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?
• What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?
• How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

Decide what you want to do

• You can download my free Are You Happy at Work?  test
• If you are looking for some immediate one-to-one support to work out how you can quickly take back control of your mental health, contact me.
• If you a looking to change your career, join the My Wisdom Career™ Program

How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?

What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?

How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

If you are looking for immediate one-to-one support, contact me and we can have a chat.

If you are committed to making a change, join one of the My Wisdom programs.

• Do you feel like your life is out of balance with “all work and no play”?
• Do you dream of a life that brings you more joy and contentment that you feel today?
• Do you feel like you are a mouse on a wheel?

Life is designing you rather than you are designing your life

As professional women with full lives, we have a lot going on.  Juggling work and personal commitments can feel like we like the mouse of the wheel… peddling hard but not getting what we really want.

Our ‘wheel of life’ looks more like a ‘half wheel of life’ overly dominated with work and family demands on our time.  Aspects of life like self care, friendship, creativity and spirituality easily fall of the ‘to-do-list’ as we juggle to perform all our roles – perfectly, or nearly perfectly.

As I’ve worked with women on their careers – to create a career that matters, how they design their career in a way that enhances their life becomes really important.  We focus on how to create a career that matters that allows them to work on their terms. Often this led to a more in-depth ‘life audit and redesign’.

When talking about how their career could enhance their life inevitably we turn to the degree of support they get from their family and in particular their partner. Too often I have head smart, capable women call their partner their second child. We have ended up with two jobs – our career and our ‘women’s work of childcare and housework’ job.  Sadly, the generations that have gone before us have created a legacy that just doesn’t work in a more equal society.  It has created the additional challenge of needing to negotiate the reduction in our ‘other job’ hours.

As we think about how long our lives are – 100 years on average now – it’s time to seriously re-think, , re-discover, re-imagine, re-invent and re-design our whole lives. To make it work for us, on our terms.

Re-invent your life with the My Wisdom Life Formula™

Medical research has show that a new wellness model is needed to ensure our longevity, happiness and fulfilment in life.  This is the Cairns Wellness Model approach.

Cairns are ‘stacked’ rocks. They fit together well and at the very top is our physical health – because that is the most precarious.

Implement in your own life through the three step process:

1. To create your own ‘Cairn’ is to explore the strengths, value and passions that you want to embody in your life, that are authentic to you. By aligning this combination to what you focus on, you create your ‘Power Zone’ which will increase your health, happiness, fulfilment and longevity.
2. You’ll create your new life design informed by each rock and underpinned by love, gratitude, pleasure and service.
3. You’ll create a plan, setting and maintaining boundaries with yourself and others.  Through tangible steps, you’ll build the confidence and skills to make it happen.

You can realise a happier and more sustainable way of living your life.
You might be thinking that you would love to do this but may get side-tracked by other people’s demands.  To help you focus on your Cairn life design, you can:

• Join the My Wisdom Life™ Program
• Book a discovery call with me to see if coaching may be a good fit for you

How can I best make a decision regarding what to do next?

What are some of the alternative options that I could explore?

How do I cope with managing my workload in the meantime?

If you are looking for immediate one-to-one support, contact me and we can have a chat.

If you are committed to making a change, join one of the My Wisdom programs.