PORTFOLIO PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published 2014
Copyright © Chris Baréz-Brown, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-0-670-92356-4

Contents

1 Head Stretching

2 True Essence

3 Stepping Up

4 Spacesuit

5 Loving Your Caveman

6 Go BE!

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

To those who remember that they have all they need to live the most extraordinary lives and that they are neither too fat nor too old, but just perfect.

Keep shining bright, and when you forget, giggle.

And to those who never forget and help me remember: Harvey and Louli and Sparky.

Without you I could so easily have been normal. Thank you.

OWN IT

No one makes you work. The choice is yours.

We are always free and have always been so. We just forget that, and become trapped by our own perceptions. Yes, we need to make money, but there are countless ways to do so. The job you do is the job you have chosen to do. There is no gun to your head. If you don’t like it, it’s your own fault. There is no sugaring this pill.

It’s your responsibility to make your job as good as it can be, so that you can be as good as you can be.

No one can do that for you.

The opportunity to craft an extraordinary future lies firmly in your hands. Take it.

There is no such thing as a perfect job. It does not exist.

Talk to any multibillionaire, Oscar-winning actor, fashion photographer or beer taster and you will soon realize that every career has its downside. We need to craft our vocations so they work best for us. But most importantly, we need to craft ourselves so that we fit our vocations.

Then we can be free once more.

WHY FREE?

Work is so much a part of what we do, that we sometimes mistakenly assume it determines who we are.

Our relationship with work is central to our happiness, our vitality and our ability to self-express – to be our true selves.

To feel fully alive we have to make work work for us.

Every day that I work, I grow to understand more about it. And I find that the forces behind it – the forces that drive us to work and shape our relationship with it – are not as they first seem.

For example, does work make us happy? Researchers for the London School of Economics attempted to answer this question by tracking and interviewing 50,000 people over three years using a smartphone technology called Mappiness.

The results were a little surprising. They found that work makes us more unhappy than anything else, apart from being ill in bed.

Alex Bryson, who ran the research for the LSE, observed that people were generally positive when reflecting on the meaning and value of their work in their lives. Yet actually doing their job elicited some personal cost in terms of the pressure and stress they experienced.

Such pressures not only influence our happiness but also can warp us into being somebody we are not – often into somebody we don’t want to be.

Getting the right job is not an exact science. Sometimes we miscalculate either what a role will involve or our ability to fulfil it, and sometimes we just don’t quite fit in with the company or, indeed, the culture we’ve joined.

I have had jobs that made my heart soar and let me unleash my own unique qualities in ways I could never have imagined. During those periods my experiences became richer; I had my most meaningful relationships, felt a greater sense of achievement and led a more fulfilled life both in and outside work.

Equally, I have had jobs where I’ve been counting down the minutes, wishing I was somewhere else and finding ways to make the time pass less painfully. It felt as if each day of my life was being squandered, and that my most valuable resources (time and talent) were ebbing away. Worse still, I knew my precious love of life was being leached from me. My life was becoming meaningless – therefore, so was I. There was no alternative but to head for the exit door.

Life and work are intrinsically linked. They are not separate; they are one.

If we want to live an extraordinary life, we have to make our work equally extraordinary.

When your work resonates with purpose, you jump out of bed every morning, excited by the possibilities the day holds for you. Everything else in your life seems to have a glow about it, and you exude much more personal shine.

My aim in writing this book is to help you feel like that every day. To help you make your work work for you. To feel truly free.

 

Life and work are intrinsically linked. They are not separate; they are one.

THE NATURE OF WORK

On average, we only have 27,350 days on this planet. And 10,575 of those are working days. Time is ticking.

If those days are spent doing something you don’t love with people you don’t like and/or in an environment that depresses you, it’s a terrible waste of life.

For most of us, work is a necessity. We need to earn money to provide shelter and sustenance (and huge HD TV screens, of course). Money makes the world go round, and without it we are stymied. No money means no choice. No choice means no fun. And no fun means a very dull life indeed.

The trap isn’t only about money. Our ambitions, our goals, our own sense of identity are also shackled by the chains of work. How can you become the hero of your own life when you’re renting yourself out for at least ten hours a day?

Work is like a drug to us. It feeds us little hits of success, friendship, growth, power, recognition. Those hits feel amazing and before we know it we want a bit more. We are all different in our susceptibility to work’s seductions, but none of us is immune.

Work is also good for us. It satisfies many of our basic needs. It gives us meaning and purpose. It helps us to live the lives that we choose. It helps us grow and connect with others. However, as with all drugs, consumption can easily turn to addiction.

The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index shows that Americans feel worse about their jobs and their work environment today than ever before. They estimate the cost of America’s ‘disengagement crisis’ at $300 billion a year: 71 per cent of Americans work during vacation. Only 38 per cent take their holiday allowance while 30 per cent don’t even take a lunch break and 48 per cent believe that their lives have become more stressful over the last five years. I’d expect to find a similar pattern in most developed nations.

Something is clearly out of balance.

Work is becoming less fun and more painful than it should be. Work can take away our shine, resulting in us living a little less brightly every day.

But our problems are not work’s fault: ‘work’ as an entity doesn’t exist. It has no consciousness. Work is what we do. It is what we are.

There is no point blaming work; we have to look at ourselves.

We need to change our relationship with work for us to be fulfilled, engaged and downright magnificent. And we therefore have to change our relationship with ourselves.

That’s what FREE is about.

 

We need to change our relationship with work for us to be fulfilled, engaged & downright magnificent

WE ALL HAVE CHOICE

Stuart Hogue is the general manager of the Girl Hub, a collaboration between the UK’s Department for International Development and the Nike Foundation to help teenage girls in three African countries. He wanted to get a clearer idea of what it is like to be a teenage girl in Africa. Girl Hub are clever at getting insights through real experiences, and this one has stayed with him:

Last year, I spent a day with Emebet, a girl in Ethiopia, learning about her life. She wakes at 3 a.m. to study by the light of her mobile phone so she can start her chores at 5 a.m. before going to school. Her chores include lugging forty-five pounds of water for 500 yards on her back to make breakfast for the family and to do the cleaning. I tried it myself; I had to stop every ten feet to complete the task. She also did the farming for the family because her father had died and her mum was ill.

She sold firewood at the market for about seventy cents a day. What amazed me was that from the seventy cents she earned, she’d spend ten to pay someone to charge her mobile phone so she could study in the dark every morning.

What struck me is that although she had in my view an incredibly tough life, throughout the whole day that I was with her, she never stopped smiling. She was a constant force of positive energy. I know if you put her in the right place, she’d be running the company in two years because she knew nothing other than how to succeed; despite every reason given her to fail.

It is not the circumstances that we find ourselves in that dictate our sense of freedom, it’s the way that we embrace them and make them work for us.

Countless privileged people have lived a miserable experience. Plenty of famous actors, musicians, artists and business people alike have had the world at their feet and yet could find no freedom or joy in it. Emebet, however, celebrated the choice that she had made to study by the light of a mobile phone at three in the morning. She worked with the circumstances that she had and loved the freedom to do so.

We all have choice.

WARNING SIGNS

Sit back now and ask yourself: is your work helping you access your own personal genius, and helping you to express what is unique and special about you?

There are plenty of clues about this. We should pay heed to them, but we usually ignore them.

If you wake up every morning in keen anticipation of your working day, then you might want to put this book back on your shelf until you need it.

If, however, something occasionally doesn’t feel right in the work you do – or who you do it with – then FREE is here to free you.

Read through these lines:

I WORK TOO HARD.

I CAN’T SWITCH OFF.

I HAVE BECOME MY WORK.

I’M OFTEN ANGRY OR FRUSTRATED BY MY WORK.

I FEEL STUCK.

I GET BORED.

SOMEBODY AT WORK REPEATEDLY ANNOYS ME.

I FEEL THAT MY JOB JUST ISN’T ‘ME’.

NOTHING NEW EVER HAPPENS AT WORK.

I LIVE FOR 5.30 P.M., FOR THE WEEKENDS, AND HALLELUJAH FOR THE HOLIDAYS.

I FEEL AS IF WORK IS SOMETHING TO BE ENDURED.

I’M NOT HAVING FUN.

I’VE BECOME SOMEBODY I NEVER INTENDED TO BE.

MY BOSSES ARE IDIOTS AND MAKE OUR LIVES HELL.

AT OUR PLACE, YOU JUST CAN’T WIN REGARDLESS OF HOW WELL YOU WORK.

If you find yourself nodding in agreement at more than a couple of these statements, it’s time to make some adjustments.

TRY A LITTLE HIPPINESS

If you can embrace the perspective that you always have choice, then you will always be free. It’s challenging, but the reward is the greatest liberation possible.

One of the traps we fall into is to believe we are all separate and individual and in some ways alone. We see each other as discrete entities with unique personalities and fixed pasts and futures, whose life paths may intersect at times only through the randomness of fate.

Our perception is that we are what we see in the mirror, a physical manifestation, and little more. I believe the truth is very different. So did Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.’

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, philosopher and Jesuit priest

De Chardin believed we all exist within a spectrum of consciousness. At one end of that spectrum, let’s say you are Jed Bowerman in sales. You’re thirty-one, living with your girlfriend, but not quite ready to commit. You’re still working through some professional challenges but your boss really likes you, and although you work a little too hard you feel as if you are getting somewhere on the corporate ladder, and that makes your hellish commute bearable. All those things are yours and yours alone.

At the other end of that spectrum, you are part of a single universal entity. Every atom in Creation is energetically connected and, although we may rarely get a sense of it, we have the ability to tap into infinite consciousness – a place where time does not exist, a place where worries and fears do not exist, a place where singular identity does not exist. When connected to that energy, everything is possible and none of our earthly concerns matter.

This is not a new concept.

For centuries, those seeking to raise their consciousness have described their experiences similarly, whether using meditation, shamanism, prayer, fasting, religion, stoicism, or healing.

Philosophers, gurus and psychologists from Carl Jung to Deepak Chopra have described our existence using similar language and a consistent frame of thinking.

This is our true essence.

Jed Bowerman represents what we experience by focusing on our physical lives and our physical bodies, as opposed to who we are in essence. The experience that you have at work is just one element of who you are. If we choose to perceive ourselves solely as Jed Bowerman, thirty-one, in sales, isn’t it likely that we will be forever trapped? By shifting our beliefs about who we really are, we will instantly gain liberation.

For some this perspective will be easy to hold, for others it will be more of a challenge. The point is not how far you can flex but that you do it regularly so you have more freedom to perceive and therefore to be. And that goes for all elements of your life but especially for your work.

Try to adopt a more flexible perspective about your job and how it relates to you. That means you have far more opportunity to make your job work for you – and to become truly free.

YIN AND YANG

My agency, Upping Your Elvis, specializes in helping organizations improve their creative leadership. We help people rediscover how fantastic they are, and how to use their individual talents to show up every day with more energy and more confidence to make their own unique impact.

I have spent years working with a wide array of people and organizations, and I’ve recently noticed clear signs that the business world is changing. And it is changing at a fundamental level.

Business has always been about using intellect and logic. We excel at examining things, and from robust data we extract conclusions about what we should do next. Every step builds towards an overall strategy, and if things can’t be explained we will keep searching for an explanation until we find one that fits. This is what I call the ‘Yang’ approach to business.

The Yang is essential for us to be smart and professional and measured in our actions. It saves us lots of time by applying past experience to today’s world. It looks for patterns and trends so we can make sense of what’s going on. When we can’t explain things, we worry that we are not in control.

This is the Machine-like part of business life.

This logic-based business paradigm has served us well, but it is now beginning to fail. As a sign in Albert Einstein’s office allegedly read, ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’

We are starting to realize the limitations of logic when it comes to business. Business is all about people. People are fascinating and unpredictable and exceptional. When we start to believe we can make sense of them through mapping and insight and data, we will often be surprised to be proved wrong.

There is so much of the universe that we must accept we don’t understand. There are things that can’t be explained and which don’t fit into a neat little intellectual model. That’s scary. Leaders are expected to have smart answers for everything, but that is no longer possible. (In truth, it never has been.) Yang is no longer sufficient.

‘Business Yin’ is my phrase for the unseen forces that are every bit as important as those which are more apparent. They include passion, excitement, belief, humanity and friendship, as well as intuition, energy, empathy, consciousness and connection. They are what make an organization, and indeed a leader, exceptional.

These are the Human aspects of business life.

At Upping Your Elvis we believe that everybody is perfect, but they often forget that fact and are unable to tap into it. Our job is to help organizations and the people within them to rediscover that potential, and love every minute of doing so. That may sound fluffy, but in terms of hard cash the return on investment that we help businesses achieve can be incredible. We wouldn’t be asked back again and again if we didn’t have a genuine impact and add real value to our clients’ businesses.

Such a human-centric focus almost always has a far greater effect than any rebrand, restructure, downsizing, strategy shift, process implementation or other initiative the board has sponsored. That’s why I have devoted my life to the Yin. Get people to be their true extraordinary selves, and everything else follows.