Wise Wednesdays

Coaching case study: A bright young medical student comes to see you. He wants career advice because he’s in turmoil. He’s not sure he wants to complete his degree or become a doctor. He originally wanted to become a priest but his father encouraged him to enrol in medical school as an outlet for his altruistic motives. He tells you he’s discovered a passion for mathematics and the natural sciences and he wants to do research now. He also loves art and music. But his father wants him to focus on medicine because it’s a more secure profession and pays better. The family is indebted, two of his siblings died leaving a heavy burden on the family and he doesn’t want to let his father down. What do you do? On his way out you realise that you didn’t catch his name. You ask and he says: Galileo Galilei. History is replete with examples of people who transformed the world and who faced what we would call tough career decisions. They would have had to worry about the equivalent of...

OK, it’s a long one. A lifetime’s worth of exploration in a page. The first time I met a psychotic patient, I was a medical student. He’d been diagnosed years before and was in hospital after a relapse. With the risk of suicide and violence looming, he was admitted to adjust his treatment. The medication helped but he was burned out. Schizophrenia used to be seen as a behavioural disorder (the behaviour is the illness) then as a family disorder. By the time I was a student it was seen as a neurochemical disorder of the brain summarised as:  “a white-matter neurodevelopmental encephalopathy affecting the interconnections of the associated centres of the brain” . If that doesn’t mean anything to you, it’s because it doesn’t. It means: it’s in the brain but we can’t quite find it. What struck me was a sense that this man wasn’t quite present. I couldn’t connect with him in any way. It’s as though he were absent from the reality I was in, and our minds couldn’t meet anywhere. What co...

Approximately 100% of people I speak to are short on time. Work, business, partner, kids, health, friends, family, hobbies, travel, volunteering, etc. Most people think they just have to do better at managing their time. The truth is:  there’s no such thing as time management. It’s choice management . Also known as prioritisation. From that perspective, the reason you’ve got too many things to do is because you’ve chosen to do too many things! You haven’t committed fully to your priorities. Doubt and overwhelm feed off each other The people who tend to work with me have a singular vision – they want more freedom doing something they love that helps others and to be remunerated for it. That’s their priority. Sometimes they get off track and we work to find out what’s going on. It’s usually some form of doubt or an old habit of restlessness. The cycle looks something like this: you doubt your own judgment and worry that you might make the wrong decision, so you take on too much to ...

Can you be happy while chasing goals? It’s part of the high achiever paradox. I had a social conversation last week with the head of innovation of a company specialised in machine learning. He’d switched from being a big bank quantitative analyst not long ago. He felt he’d finally found the right career path for him and that if he could just get the perfect job and sort out his personal life, he’d be happy and feel free. I asked him what was stopping him from being happy and feeling free now. He said that he needed these things first. Then he asked me an unusual question: Freedom must have a cost - what’s the price of freedom? Great question. I asked him the question back. He didn’t have an answer but a sort of fever lit up in his eyes, something that looked like fear… In his book The Fear of Freedom, social psychologist and humanistic philosopher, Eric Fromm argues that the freedom to do what we want (positive freedom) necessitates a freedom from the ...