Live each day on purpose

Today is our best day

Remember what we control

Nurture our energy

Prepare to sleep

If you’ve worked with me you will be well aware of my belief that our ability to deal with change is the biggest determining factor to personal happiness and professional success. Hardly anything in our lives will go exactly as we planned. How we deal with the gap between our expectations and the reality, determines our well-being.

This has always been true, probably. What elevates the importance of our change comfort zone, is that technology, automation, AI, the world of work and the internet retail models and commercial impact, are increasing the rate of change to a level that we have not experienced ever before. In addition, in the developed world, many of us face an infinity of choice: we will never be able to read, watch or consume everything that is pushed at us. This is new. Choice has been very finite historically. And we haven’t worked out, culturally, how to deal with this either.

I am coming to the end of a review, analysis and reflection on my consulting practice over the past two years. It had felt to me that, whatever the sector, seniority or the current financial success of the business, the challenges that individuals in people/knowledge businesses are raising with me are more similar than ever before. As I reviewed the issues that I had tackled with my clients, whether in 1:1 exec level coaching, team building and business development workshops with senior leaders, strategy and recruitment consulting or pro bono coaching with milennials and charities, I could see five underlying issues affecting the functioning of the team or the leader.

The result of my review and analysis are these five keys to thriving, to create personal happiness and professional success, in the world we live today. Click on the highlighted text of each key to take you to the key in full:

1. Live each day on purpose: we have choice over how we spend each of hour of each day // Exercise it.

2. Today is our best day: however we feel, however it is, it’s our best day, today // Live it.

3. Remember what we control: far more, and far less, than we might think // Own it.  

4. Nurture our energy: managing your own battery life, as carefully as your phone’s // Charge it.

5. Prepare to sleep: plan for going to sleep as much as for waking up // Revel in it.

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