Why it’s never too late to embark on your true calling

By Neil Patrick

It’s a strange thing. As we age, we often see our opportunities narrowing not widening.

I say strange because as we go through life, we acquire more and more experience and skills, and logically therefore should see our options expanding not shrinking.

But so many of us are conditioned into thinking ourselves into a box. And if the box you are in just really isn't YOUR box, it gets kind of uncomfortable. And if you’re uncomfortable, you’ll never be capable of achieving your best work.

Here are some examples of well-known people who rejected those ideas and instead went after their true calling.

Some had found their path but hadn't attained any success... some were in a completely different career... some were on the verge of giving up or had given up. But as they matured, they found their true calling and never looked back.

Sylvester Stallone, deli counter attendant. After getting no career traction as an actor in his 20s, Stallone attacked his 30s like any 5'3 man should: He wrote a movie where he was an all-American hero who triumphed over every obstacle.

That movie was "Rocky"... he banged out the "Rocky" screenplay in three days, in between working at a deli counter and as a movie theater usher... and it launched his career with an Academy Award for Best Picture. 

Andrea Bocelli, lawyer. He'd loved music and singing his whole life... but didn't really see it as a career possibility. So, after school, he got a law degree at the University of Pisa. At age 30 he was working as a lawyer and moonlighting in a piano bar for fun and extra cash. He didn't catch a break as a singer until 1992, at age 34. 

Martha Stewart, stockbroker. When she was 30,Martha Stewart was a stockbroker, no doubt learning all about finance and the ‘ethics’ involved therein. Two years later she and her husband purchased a beat-down farmhouse in Connecticut... she led the restoration... transitioned into a domestic lifestyle... and grew that most innocent of things into her evil, evil career. 

Mao Tse-Tung, elementary school principal. In his 30’s, Mao was already involved in communism... he was a young star of the Chinese Communist Party... but didn't realize it could be a career. (Probably didn't see communism as being very lucrative...?)

Instead, he was working as the principal of an elementary school. Where, no doubt, hall passes were decadent. Four years later he started a communist group that eventually became the Red Army and put him in power.

JK Rowling, unemployed single mum. Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew". Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:

“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy to finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life”.

During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide. Rowling signed up for welfare benefits, describing her economic status as being "as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless" 

Barack Obama, university lecturer. Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years, as a Lecturer for four years (1992–1996), and as a Senior Lecturer for eight years (1996–2004).In 2004, he was 43 years old. I’m not entirely sure what happened after that.

James Joyce, alcoholic. By 30, Joyce was writing... just not getting published. So to make ends meet he reviewed books, taught and, weirdly, made a lot of money thanks to his gorgeous tenor singing voice. He was also a raging alcoholic, which isn't financially lucrative until you become an author and can parlay those drunken antics into stories. Just ask Hemingway. Or James Frey.

Joyce finally got his first book, "Dubliners", published at age 32, which launched his career as, arguably, one of the most successful authors of all time. 

 
Colonel Sanders, tons of blue collar jobs. Well into his 40’s Harland Sanders was still switching from one random career choice to another: Steamboat pilot, insurance salesman, farmer, railroad fireman. He didn’t start cooking chicken until he was 40 and didn't start franchising until he was 65. 

Rodney Dangerfield, aluminium siding salesman. He started doing stand-up at age 19... then gave up on it in his mid-20s.. He started working as an acrobatic diver ... and then as an aluminium siding salesman. He didn't start getting back into comedy until he was 40. 

Harrison Ford, carpenter. When Ford was 30, he starred in "American Graffiti"... which was a huge hit. But he got paid a pittance for acting in it, decided he was never going to make it as an actor, and quit the business to get back into the more financially dependable world of construction.

Four years later, he met up with George Lucas again (Lucas had directed "Graffiti") and Lucas cast him as Han Solo in a movie called Star Wars.

So there you have it. A more or less random list of people who have shown us that by refusing to be kept in your box and allowing your innermost talents to come to the fore, that it’s never too late to start on your own path to greatness.

I guess the message for us all is, never let anyone tell you what you can or cannot do. Especially yourself.

How employers are wrecking lives

By Linda McSweeny

Spring is upon us, Australia's collective well-being is booming, and our economy is the envy of the world. Yet far from enjoying the fruits of their labours, many workers - even those in well-paying professional jobs - are living in fear that their livelihoods may disappear.

Whether it be the post-Global Financial Crisis unemployment horror stories filtering through from overseas; the rapid rate of technological change that has meant workers can be "on tap" 24 hours a day, or the rapid pursuit of material benefits, many workers fear that the only way they can stay afloat is to work harder and longer - often at the expense of their health.

Psychologist Dr Tim Sharp says work-related angst in Australia is very real. He says the GFC has shaken the confidence of many workers, particularly in industries such as banking, but he also says the modernisation of the workplace means we no longer have "jobs for life" and people are struggling to adjust to this new reality.

Edward* is 40. He has two university degrees, a loving family, and what appears to be the textbook life he craved as a young boy. But beneath the rosy surface lies a man sweating about job security. The operations manager for a global company rarely switches off from work, toiling from home at night and on weekends, juggling his smartphone and laptop and waking in the small hours to answer phone calls from clients. He often can't sleep because work issues pull him from his slumber.

Edward rarely engages in social activities or sport but tries to spend any spare time interacting with his two young children and partner, who works part time. He contemplates scrambling out of his work-heavy hole but can't fathom an exit plan. He says he has already made one career switch and doesn't fancy another.

"I know it's not sustainable for myself or my family to keep working around the clock and fixating on the fear that I could lose my job, but if I say no to my boss when he needs me, he'll find somebody who will do it," Edward says. He admits his fears were heightened after he watched three of his close work colleagues made to move on from their jobs in recent months.

The fear of job loss is real, even in Australia's reasonable economic climate, and researchers say there's mounting evidence of mental health issues arising from organisational downsizing and global economic crises.

Tony*, a 30-something finance worker, says he works about 70 hours a week to ensure he maintains his "high performer" status. He's also responsible for implementing downsizing operations and sees firsthand scores of colleagues increasing their work hours and input and/or turning to alcohol to cope with the fear of being the next worker asked to leave.

"I know that if I overperform and stay ahead of the pack, I'll be reasonably safe, though you can never really be sure of these things," Tony says.

But he feels battered by the consistently long hours, work-related travel and reliance on alcohol to alleviate stress. "I'm in my mid-30s but I feel like I'm 50 actually, I honestly do."

Those employees left standing in organisations or industries facing cuts often start to show signs of mental and physical stress as they fear being the next one to find themselves unemployed, according to studies cited by University of NSW psychiatrist and Black Dog Institute researcher Dr Samuel Harvey. Some push themselves into productivity overdrive simply out of fear of job loss.

Downsizing may increase sick leave and the risk of death from cardiovascular disease in employees who keep their job, according to a paper in BMJ (the former British Medical Journal). The results of the study, conducted in four towns in Finland during a severe economic decline from 1991 to 1996, were so stark, the authors called on policymakers, employers and occupational health professionals to recognise that downsizing may pose a "severe risk to health".

There was a clear rise in suicides after the GFC of 2008, with almost 5000 more suicides - primarily men - across 54 countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia in 2009, according to a new study published in the British Medical Journal.

"We know that just being in fear of losing your job is also associated with poorer mental health. Those people who feel less secure in their job have higher rates of mental health symptoms and lower rates of mental well-being," Harvey says.

Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein recently highlighted what he saw as a mismatch between Australia's economic status and the attitude of its workforce.

"I've been coming here for a long, long time and during the past two decades of growth, growth, growth, people are always distraught, overwrought, wringing their hands about how horrible things are and, to my observation, they don't look that bad."

Real or imagined, a perception of job losses affects productivity, stress levels and family life, and researchers are trying to find evidence on which tools are best to help people deal with their fears, such as e-health and resilience programs supported by employers.

"What drives that perception is sometimes reality, but it's sometimes more about that individual and their way of viewing the world and their place within it. Some people are just worriers and we know that's a risk for mental health problems. But there's a lot of work going on now about whether you can help people build their levels of resilience and teach them techniques to alter the way they view some of these risks and the extent to which they ruminate on them," Harvey says.

Employers are being urged to help with the mental health of workers via the Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance partnership between business, community and government. One of its aims is to find out what works and what doesn't when it comes to a mentally healthy workplace.

"Sometimes [job losses] have to happen, but certainly if people pause and think about the way they happen and the support given to individuals, we might be able to prevent some of these problems," Harvey says.

Sharp says the first step for workers is to seek information from their employer if they fear job loss to ensure they know what they're dealing with. Sometimes they can improve their performance, but other times, it may be beyond their control while an organisation seeks to downsize. For employers, they should reassure their workforce as best they can, to give employees a sense of security and stability.

Job loss was real for Sydneysider Nigel Marsh, who found himself "fat, 40 and fired" in 2003 and was so affected by the upheaval, he wrote a book about his experience, which is poised to become a TV series.

"For me, it was absolutely devastating," Marsh says. "I was a 40-year-old man with four children under the age of five and a wife who didn't have a job, so I thought my life was over. I thought I may never work again. It was totally devastating."

Marsh says he had an inkling of impending doom when talk of a merger involving the company that employed him began. Since the release of his book, he has received harrowing emails about people's job-loss stories in a society that he says glorifies overwork.

"You get this thing where people say, for example, 'Oh Amanda, she's so wonderful, she's always the first in, she's always the last to leave, she works every weekend, and she never takes any of her holidays', and you go, 'Well why are we holding that up as heroic when it's moronic or tragic?' It shouldn't be held up as, 'Oh yippee!', it should be seen as sad. Let's give her some help," Marsh says.

While his situation felt disastrous when it happened, the job loss gave him time to change his life. He took a redundancy package, wrote his book, lost weight, got fit, gave up alcohol and became more present in his family's life. He says any anxiety he has about job loss is now manageable.

"I've embraced the fear. I've tried to turn anxiety into anticipation. Until 40, I was taking a conventional approach to work; since then, I've been trying a different route," says Marsh, who now works in the corporate world, as well as being the author of three books, founder of the Sydney Skinny swim event, and a public speaker.

The key for employers to help in the mental health of their workers is to share information and ensure there are no surprises, says the University of Sydney's Workplace Research Centre director, Professor John Buchanan.

"If people get advanced notice, it makes a huge difference to their capacity to adjust and minimise the negative impact," he says.

*Names withheld

Read more: http://www.canberratimes.com.au/lifestyle/life/when-the-work-day-never-ends-20130920-2u42c.html#ixzz2fi3gI2Kf

Why management teams are making their employees sick

By Neil Patrick

A great deal of this blog has focussed lately on the recession and its impact on jobs. This has led me to post a lot about how mature professionals can find work in these difficult conditions.

All the while though, I have been conscious that I've written very little about the experiences and needs of those people who are in jobs.

The annual survey of Job Satisfaction was released in June by The Conference Board. A survey of  5,000 US households conducted by The Nielsen Company in the fall of 2012 indicates that 47.3 percent of currently employed Americans are satisfied with their position. This is a negligible change (less than 0.1 percentage points) from 2011 to 2012.

Critically however, the 47.3 percent of satisfied respondents this year is very low compared to the observed levels in 1987 - the first year the survey was run - when 61.1 percent of respondents indicated satisfaction with their jobs. Since that survey, overall satisfaction had steadily declined before levelling off in recent years. Specifically, since 2006, results remain consistently below the halfway mark, indicating the majority of U.S. workers are not satisfied with their jobs.

But these statistics reveal little about the real misery of millions who are suffering every day because of their experiences at work.

Ridea Richardson has a great blog entitled, Just Quiting http://www.justquitthing.com/. This year, she ran a poll which had 278 responses. One question was ‘Why do you want to quit?’ Here’s a fairly typical sample of the responses:

I don’t feel valued. I don’t trust my own team. I don’t feel like I can maximize my value to the firm. The stress is making me physically and mentally ill. I’m not doing the work I love. The company’s values are inconsistent with my own.


I have been working hard with very few breaks since I was 15. In the last several years, I have been trying to shoe-horn my life into my job rather than the other way around. All the travel and long hours are making it impossible to focus on things that are more important to me. My health is suffering. Physically, I am unable to consistently make time to work out; I eat out for almost every meal; do not get enough sleep; have an inconsistent schedule; and I haven’t been to the doctor in years. Mentally, I am affected by the sleep, schedule, and stress. I have difficulty focusing on my job and have lost most of my passion for it. I do not feel that I am learning or that I am in charge of my life inside or outside of work. I am constantly near the boiling point and get angry very easily when I feel that my company has done anything to negatively impact my life again. My work has become boring and repetitive, and it forces me to skip many activities that I enjoy, even when they are after normal business hours and all my friends can make it. The job is significantly hindering all my relationships. It is difficult to maintain existing friendships, let alone make new ones, and I am not able to spend time with family anywhere near as often as I’d like. The relationship with my girlfriend is also suffering from undue stress due to all the travel and time spent forced apart. On top of all this, I am paid less than employees at other companies with comparable skills and experience that work fewer hours with little to no travel.

In addition to providing no challenge, or fulfilment - my current job is completely unrelated to my personal interests and values. I fell into the position because it paid very well and came with a certain degree of prestige, but I’ve never truly been interested in the work, or the industry and I’ve been looking for a way out since I hit the 3 month mark (I’m currently a week shy of 2 years). I’m not able to use my natural strengths, and I am 100% confident that this job is in no way related to my true purpose. I can also no longer tolerate working with my manager or as part of a “corporate” culture.


I studied very hard thinking that I would live a good life after I graduate but I think I’m the unhappy person. I hate this place. I don’t care about my job anymore. I feel like this is punishment for something terrible that I did. I am a lot happier when I’m at home, with my family, with my friends, with my boyfriend. I’m happy even when I’m in class and doing everything else outside my job. My job is tiring and makes me feel sick and the worst thing is the night shift. I feel like crying like a baby when I have to come to work at night. I want to start a business outside my career. I want to do something that will make me feel good. I want to study further. I am not proud to tell people about my job because I feel that it is stupid. I complain to everyone and they seem to think that I don’t know what I want. I want to relax and have fun for a while, take a holiday. I’m just tired, so tired that I can’t even take care of myself anymore. I can’t dress up to look good anymore. I don’t even do my hair anymore. My body is always tired and I’m gaining weight because of the stress making me eat and sleep.



Burnt out, bad management with no hope of changing. Bad team.

I am physically sick. I have anxiety every day when I enter work. I have even gone to the bathroom because I thought I was going to puke from the amount of anxiety I have. I also got vertigo while there in April, and it hasn’t gone away completely since – it is now August. I work with manipulative people, they act like they are in high school – they expect you to know things that you were never taught, they try to keep you at the lowest possible rung with no way of getting out of it, and they dump all of their work on you and don’t help.



I dread going to work. I don’t like the direction the company is going. I feel very unfulfilled in my job and there are no opportunities for advancement in the company. My health is suffering and I believe it is the stress of the job.



Because being at a job for over 19 months that I didn’t go to school for is more than enough. I need to gain experience and have an interest in what I am doing. I don’t enjoy the majority of the people I work with. My boss is an ogre who leaves at hours at a time only to give me minimal instruction or support. I don’t have any benefits and the only thing that keeps me there is the pay which is higher than most jobs at my age.



If this was a romantic relationship, my friends and family would be begging me to run.



Repetition at work, bosses are speaking down to me yet I am one of the top 5 employees (by survey metrics / completed assignments) out of my team.



I can’t take it anymore! I’ve been working in the advertising field for 9 years, and I have been working in my current agency for almost 7 years. The idea of quitting had been haunting me for the past 3 years, but I always tried to oppress it by trying to highlight the positive side of my job which is mainly the working environment and how lucky I am to have a sweetheart boss, and how I am being appreciated at this job regardless of the stress, late nights, my boss’s swinging mood, crappy clients…and lately the feeling that I don’t fit anymore with the crowd in the agency. I hate Sunday nights, I drag myself out of bed every day to go to work, I get stomach cramps when I get a phone call from my boss on my mobile. I don’t feel motivated anymore! When a new client calls in, I wish and pray that they don’t proceed with us as I don’t want any more extra work! Nothing excites me anymore in this job. And last but not least, I don’t see myself in this career in the future. However, I feel so lost, I want to quit but I don’t know what will I do next, I don’t want to stay home doing nothing, I know I can go crazy! As well as everybody thinks I am crazy to take this step!



My current job and boss is making me feel so miserable and useless. It is a small company (3 people), and having just moved countries it’s important to have human contact and meet new people - I can literally go 8 hours having only spoken to just my boss. He puts me down, asks me inappropriate questions or makes comments which are unethical. He’s totally under paying me, does not know how to manage people or work and thinks that everyone he works with or for are useless. Most nights I come home and cry, which is obviously effecting my relationship with my partner and my unhappiness is stopping me from going out there and meeting new people and having fun.



My job is taking its toll on my physically and emotionally. Every day is like a never ending marathon of things that you never enjoyed doing.



I know you can question the validity of this sample – it’s fair to say that people who love their jobs are not likely to respond to a survey on a blog called Just Quit. But this is the qualitative side of the situation and the Conference Board data pretty much conclusively spells out the quantitative situation.

You could also argue that businesses exist primarily for the purpose of making money, not making their workers happy. But this misses the point. If we accept that happy employees do a much better job, how much money is being wasted by firms that don’t properly look after their people?

I have lost count of how many times I have heard CEOs say things like, ’Our people are our greatest asset’. Great, so if that is the case, why are so many of them so miserable in their work? And what are you doing about it?

I’d go further too. If the organisation had a non-human asset, like say a building or a capital deposit, I’d venture that most organisations would be taking better care of those assets than their human capital.

Some will point to failures in HR teams as the root of the problem. While I think many HR teams are merely administrators, when they really should be acting like asset managers, the prime responsibility isn’t theirs. They do what the Exec team tells them to do.

In my view to quote the old leadership cliché, ‘the buck stops here’ and that’s with leadership teams.

So next time you are considering joining a firm, I’d suggest that you take some time to try and check out the attitudes and beliefs of your likely line of management all the way up to the CEO. By my reckoning around half of them are going to disappoint you and quite possibly make you ill in the process.

How to perform brilliantly at interviews AND every single day

By Neil Patrick

I was going to title this post, ‘How to think about your thinking’, but decided that title didn’t even begin to explain the great insights this talk contains.

When we feel under pressure, humans perform sub-optimally. We are all walking around with a 200,000 year-old release of our brain software. Our brains were designed to perform so that we can avoid being eaten by bears.

And that’s the origin of the pre-programming that leads to our instinctive ‘fight or flight’ instincts and many other behaviours which are completely unhelpful in tackling our challenges in the modern world.

No doubt, you’ve heard all sorts of advice on how to overcome this. And a good deal of this is half-baked ‘new age’ nonsense.

So I was thrilled to be sent this TEDX talk by Dr Alan Watkins. The video not only explains how you can actively control your brain power, it also includes a live demonstration of how something as simple as breathing has huge effects on the performance of our brains and hence how well we perform.

If you want to know how to perform brilliantly at your next interview, presentation or meeting, this film will give you simple and really effective ways you can do this.

So grab your beverage of choice, relax and discover how in 2 minutes you can learn how to enhance your brain power and performance to put yourself in ‘the zone’ any time you want to.




Alan is the founder and CEO of Complete Coherence Ltd. He is recognised as an international expert on leadership and human performance. He has researched and published widely on both subjects for over 18 years. He is currently an Honorary Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience and Psychological Medicine at Imperial College, London as well as an Affiliate Professor of Leadership at the European School of Management, London. He originally qualified as a physician, has a first class degree in psychology and a PhD in immunology.
Website: http://www.complete-coherence.com